World leaders letting too many children 'drown' in poverty and disease

It's the Group of 8 summit in Italy, and world leaders are strolling along when they spot a girl floundering in a pond, crying out and then dipping beneath the surface.

There are no cameras around. The leaders could safely rescue the girl, but they would get drenched and risk damaging their $600 shoes. A rescue would also delay the group's discussion of Very Important Issues.

In that situation, I'm convinced, the presidents and prime ministers would leap into the water to save the girl. So would you or I.

(The difference is that the G-8 leaders would then hold a televised press conference to spotlight their compassion, perhaps canceling their session on humanitarian aid to do so.)

This raises an interesting question: If the G-8 leaders are so willing to save one child, why are they collectively so far behind in meeting humanitarian aid pledges to save other children?

A few countries, including Canada and the United States, will meet the aid targets for 2010 that they set in 2005. But France is falling short, and Italy — the host of the G-8 summit this year — is disastrously far behind.

In a thoughtful book published this year, "The Life You Can Save," Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University offers the pond example and explores why we're so willing to try to assist a stranger before us, while so unwilling to donate to try to save strangers from malaria half a world away.

One of the reasons, I believe, is that humanitarians are abjectly ineffective at selling their causes. Any brand of toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than the lifesaving work of aid groups. Do-gooders also have a penchant for exaggeration, so that the public often has more trust in the effectiveness of toothpaste than of humanitarian aid.

There's growing evidence that jumping up and down about millions of lives at stake can even be counterproductive. A number of studies have found that we are much more willing to donate to one needy person than to several. In one experiment, researchers solicited donations for a $300,000 fund that in one version would save the life of one child, and in another the lives of eight children. People contributed more when the fund would save only one life.

"The more who die, the less we care." That's the apt title of a forthcoming essay by Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has pioneered this field of research.

Yet it's not just, as the saying goes, that one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic. More depressing, appeals to our rationality actually seem to impede empathy.

For example, in one study, people donate generously to Rokia, a 7-year-old malnourished African girl. But when Rokia's plight was explained as part of a larger context of hunger in Africa, people were much less willing to help.

Perhaps this is because, as some research suggests, people give in large part to feel good inside. That works best when you write a check and the problem is solved. If instead you're reminded of larger problems that you can never solve, the feel-good rewards diminish.

Another factor is personal responsibility: How many people share it? Singer notes that in one experiment, students filled out a market research study while a young woman went behind a curtain and then appeared to climb on a chair to get something — and fell down. She then moaned and cried out that her ankle was injured.

When the person filling out the form was alone, he or she helped 70 percent of the time. But when another person was in the room, also filling out the survey and not responding, then only 7 percent tried to help.

In the case of fighting poverty, there are billions of other bystanders to erode a personal sense of responsibility. Moreover, humanitarian appeals emphasize the scale of the challenges — 25,000 children will die today! — in ways that are as likely to numb us as to galvanize us.

I also wonder if our unremitting focus on suffering and unmet needs stirs up a cloud of negative feelings that incline people to avert their eyes and hurry by. Maybe we should emphasize the many humanitarian successes, such as the falling child mortality rates since 1990 — which mean that 400 children's lives are saved every hour, around the clock.

There are no easy answers here, but if a toothpaste company had these miserable results in its messaging, it would go back to the drawing board. That's what bleeding hearts need to do as well.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a regular columnist for The New York Times.