On January 7, 2015, two terrorists broke into the building of the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. They killed 12 people including the offices and the guard on their way out. The world goes into outrage mode.

4 days later, 2 million people flood the street of France. 40 of the world leaders join them to show support for the French newspaper and the French people. The entire world interacts with these events. But there is still one question asked on the side.

Why Don't We See This Kind Of Outrage In Events Outside Europe?

A few months earlier to the Charlie Hebdo attack, there was an attack on the Spieker military camp in Iraq where up to 1700 people died. The number of dead people in Syria is in the hundreds of thousands.

It may seem like a one-off event but later in the same year, another attack occurred where 130 people died. Facebook had 70 million people change their profile pictures. World leaders once again showed support. 400 million interactions on social media with the hashtag #PrayForParis.

The same week, 41 people died in Iraq while attending a funeral. 43 die in Beirut. Different deaths around the world and no one even glanced at them. That also applies to people from those regions who didn't care about stuff happening in their own countries as much as the attacks in France.

Why Do We Care More About Europeans?

Why do we rarely, if ever, see hashtags like #PrayForIraq or Beirut, or Syria? Why do fewer people care about the areas where most deaths happen?

This is nothing new. Bush didn't react as hundreds of thousands died in Darfour. Clinton was barely present as 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda.

To put this in perspective: Look at yourself and the people around you. How devastating it would be to lose one of those ones you care dearly about. Now multiply that by 800,000. Do you understand now?

You Most Likely Don't Understand

That's because you can't comprehend it. This is not a new problem and scientists have been aware of it for a long time. Different experiments showed that if you cared about one person's death, you wouldn't care twice as much if it were two people. In fact, you might care less about the death of two people than you would care about the death of one. Those things were also noticed in the Weber–Fechner Law, which is the psychophysics hypothesis.

How Does This Relate To What I Am Talking About?

It might not matter at all if I tell you that there was a huge hostage situation and 99 people were saved instead of 96. Even though those are 3 lives.

Other experiments showed that people would rather save 9,000 out of 15,000 more than they would save 100,000 out of 290,000. A person's life among 290,000 is cheaper than a person's life among 15,000 thousand. Focus on the word "cheaper.

The Scarcity Principle

The difference between deaths in the west as opposed to the Middle East or Africa is that fewer people die. Therefore, the life of people there is worth more.

It's a silly analogy when everything is considered. But, it's like a currency, the more you print of it, the less it is worth.

The idea is that death in my part of the world occurs a lot and therefore people are used to it. People care about stuff that is rare. So, if I tell you that 220 people died in Iraq last week, it wouldn't matter, however, if I say there was a shooting in France that killed 8, you would go and google it to see what happened.

It's A Worldwide Phenomena

This is not something that is related to a specific type of people. It's in everyone. Charities actually focus on that aspect upon asking for donations.

You might have seen ads where charities and human rights organizations ask for donations by showing one person or one family rather than showing you everyone affected. That way you're more likely to sympathize and donate. One person can get your sympathy, while humans simply can't comprehend sympathizing with hundreds of thousands of people.

Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation

That's a foundation for heart research and treatment, especially for children. For every dollar, the foundation spent to spread the word, they made 28 back.

The ad was simple: gather around a few children and ask them what they wish for. One would wish to take a picture with a football player and one would wish for a lot of toys. However, the little girl with a heart condition said "I wish to live"

People Interact With One Person More Than They React With Numbers

Experiments showed that people would pay a lot to feed one little girl, almost as much to feed a little boy, but almost half to feed both. Here, we are talking about the difference between one person opposite two people and the same principle applies to one opposite to hundreds of thousands.

There was a study that compared a donation for one hungry girl to millions in Ethiopia starving and it had the same result. One little girl got more donations than millions of people.

In Conclusion

It's unfortunate that we could only interact with only one story. One death could incentivize us to donate thousands of dollars, but thousands of death may not even get a dollar out of us.

The point of this post isn't to defend any side. It's merely an explanation aimed to make anyone reading more aware of the correct to represent your cause. And also to be aware as a receiver to know when you are manipulated and know how to put your money in the right place.