What's sadder, a tragedy for a small group of people or one for a large group of people?
Joseph Stalin is said (by some) to have remarked, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." And the logic of his statement is why displays at the National Holocaust Museum try to personalize the suffering as much as possible. When you're told that millions of Jews died, it doesn't mean as much as when you develop a connection to a single victim and then extrapolate the human suffering borne by the entire group.
At the same time, public reaction to tragic events follows a "more is more" reasoning; as death tolls mount, so does media coverage. The mass-murder events of our time are ranked in importance largely on the basis of numbers killed. To some extent we feel the more people victimized the greater the tragedy.
This week I became aware (via Marginal Revolution) of a paper by Lamar Pierce, Todd Rogers, and Jason A. Snyder entitled "The Intense Well-Being Consequences of Partisan Identity." From the abstract:
...we show that partisans are affected two times more intensely by their party losing the U.S. Presidential Election than both respondents with children were to the Newtown Shootings and respondents living in Boston were to the Boston Marathon Bombings.
In looking through this paper, I feel it will resonate with those who have an ax to grind. "Republicans are worse losers than bombing victims!" But I think a less-hostile interpretation is possible: partisans view losing an election as a large-scale tragedy. The number of victims is massive, so the suffering dwarfs that of other localized incidents.
I'm not saying they are right in this; after all, it ends up an unsolvable utilitarian equation (What's worse, cutting off 500 million right pinkies or 25,000 left hands?). [NOTE: I added a zero to the number of pinkies because the original comparison was a no-brainer. So I guess some utilitarian equations aren't THAT unsolvable.] But I think this points us towards a non-nefarious explanation. I routinely tell my students, "Look for non-nefarious explanations. Your answer shouldn't come down to, 'Because the other guys are jerks!'" I think a paper that many will read as "the other guys are jerks" doesn't need to be read that way.
via oneofthebest
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