Life
The scale and speed of the modern news cycle — from up-to-the-second crisis updates, to multiple feeds on international incidents, to horrifying push notifications every couple of minutes — is formidable. And in the wake of huge quantities of tragedy, we're often told to tune out, chill out, cease engaging — because too much exposure, it's thought, might damage us. There are multiple reasons behind this advice, but one theory stands out: that humans, who evolved as pack animals in human groups of 10-100, simply can't cope neurologically with the demands of empathy with billions of other people.
A study in 2016 looking at the Syrian refugee crisis found that a phenomenon called the "identified victim effect" has a big impact on how much you empathize with strangers who are impacted by disaster. Simply put, we empathize much more with individual people — as depicted in photographs, for example — than with a large group of people, even though both are experiencing the same hardship. The science behind these findings suggests that our brains simply haven't evolved to take on the human cost of the crisis in Puerto Rico, in Myanmar, the ongoing waves of sexual assault allegations against men in media, or any of the many other crises happening across the world at once — and why it's really, truly OK to tune out of the news cycle.
Can We Get Past Our Empathy Limits?
Another demonstration of the limits of empathy? Even those of us who are primed to care in great quantities by profession, from nurses to peacekeepers, are prone to a condition called exhausted empathy, or compassion fatigue. Research has consistently shown that empathy can be drained, reducing our ability to connect with one person after we've connected with another; a study of high-empathy workers, such as hairstylists, has shown that the more empathetic they have to be at work, the less they can spare for those at home.
The problem with the news cycle, from this perspective, is that it treats empathy as an infinite resource, but humans themselves don't appear to follow that pattern past a certain point. We seem to have finite social and empathetic energy. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar invented the idea of the Dunbar Number, which is the number of people with whom any one person can have a meaningful relationship — and he believes it to be 150, though others think it could go as high as 200. The identified victim effect is an attempt to add to our human connections, and it seems we may not have enough to go around.
So can we push past this? Not without a careful consideration of the difficulties. Ethicist Peter Singer has argued that human history has been characterized by expanding circles of empathy, from families to clans to political groups and so on; it's an idea touted by evolutionary thinkers like Steven Pinker, though not everybody's totally on board with the concept. In this perspective, as our communications and networks expand, gradually our empathy may grow alongside. But there's another idea: a collection of scientists from the U.S. and Canada wrote in HuffPost early in 2017 that their research indicates that empathy may not be as limited as it seems, and that humans can be trained to empathize more — when they're convinced that it won't be costly. We can be more empathetic, they believe, when we decide to feel it.
Whatever the reality, it seems that humans may not have infinite ability to connect to people on the other side of the world — or at least may not be culturally trained to. So if you're finding constant tragic news on CNN exhausting and miserable, there's a scientific reason behind it — which is why you should feel comfortable turning off your push notifications, at least for a little while.