Profile of Paul Slovic

On September 2, 2015, the image of three-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lying face down on a Turkish beach sparked an international effort to aid refugees. Donations to charitable organizations surged, dwarfing the assistance to refugees since the violence in Syria began in 2011. Kurdi, however, was not the only person to drown that day in the Aegean Sea: Both his five-year-old brother and his mother died, as did several others. Paul Slovic. Image courtesy of Paul Slovic. According to research by psychologist Paul Slovic, the international response would have been less charitable had the public seen the other drowned refugees. “If we had seen just one more individual, our compassion toward them all might have faded,” he explains. “Several psychological phenomena, including psychic numbing, would have made us care less about their plight.” Slovic, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, studies human decision making and motivation. His Inaugural Article dissects the response to Kurdi’s death, enumerating the psychological obstacles to the human ability to care about mass atrocities. The article by Slovic et al. (1) also outlines techniques that can help face humanitarian crises without having to rely solely on compassion. A professor of psychology at the University of Oregon since 1986, Slovic also serves as the president of Decision Research, an institute that he helped found. Born in Chicago in 1938, Slovic had a peripatetic childhood. His family traveled across the Midwest (Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) with his salesman father. Slovic was drawn to basketball, and he received a scholarship to attend Chicago’s Depaul University. College basketball, however, proved challenging, and soon Slovic transferred to Stanford University. He credits psychologists Quinn McNemar and Lewis Goldberg with introducing him to psychological research methods and encouraging him to further his studies. Slovic received an undergraduate …