Documented: Paul Slovic's program at Decision Research, Oregon. The core paper, 'If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic Numbing and Genocide' (Judgment and Decision Making, 2007), lays out three mechanisms: the identifiable victim effect, psychophysical numbing (feeling follows a logarithmic curve, zero to one is massive, one to many is flat), and pseudoinefficacy. In the Rokia experiments (Small, Loewenstein, Slovic, 2007), a photo and story of one starving Malian girl drew strong donations; adding famine statistics alongside her photo reduced donations to her.
The saying that frames the field: one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, attributed to Stalin, with no verified source; the sentiment traces to a 1932 column by journalist Kurt Tucholsky and a 1925 French satire. The misattribution itself is the archive's exhibit: even the observation about statistics had to be pinned to one identifiable villain to be remembered.
The takeaway the field itself draws, and the summary's core: this is neural architecture, not moral failure, a local-network brain on a global feed. Slovic's prescription is engineering, not exhortation: build systems, imagery, and institutions that route around the numbing, because asking people to feel logarithmically harder has never worked.
If caring is logarithmic, is mass compassion physically impossible, or just unbuilt?