Cultural Relevance: A Moderator of Psychic Numbing?

The term “psychic numbing” describes a paradoxical observation in human behaviour research: as the number of victims in a tragedy rises, people’s emotional response to that tragedy diminishes. Correspondingly, research has demonstrated the presence of the “singularity effect,” whereby our concern for a tragic event or social issue is increased when focus is narrowed onto fewer victims and more vivid victim information is made available. While these phenomena are supported by ample research, studies on the subject repeatedly overlook the impact that the cultural relevance of a particular tragic event or issue has on an individual’s degree of psychic numbing. To address this caveat, the present study proposes an online survey method to gather information from a diverse sample on individuals’ concern for the issue of police brutality (known to disproportionately affect Black Americans), based on both the level of victim information presented and participants’ ethnocultural identification with Black American cultures. Participants will be randomly assigned to either the one-victim (vivid victim information) or multiple-victims (low victim information) condition. We predict that for less (or non) ethno-culturally identifying individuals in particular, concern for police brutality, which is measured by willingness to donate and affective response, will be significantly higher in the one-victim condition versus the multiple-victims condition. Conversely, we predict that for strongly ethno- culturally identifying individuals, the psychic numbing effect will be diminished and concern will be similarly high regardless of the number of victims shown. This alludes to the importance of cultural relevance on an individual’s degree of psychic numbing.