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Chasing Life

Uncomfortably Numb

Chasing Life

CNN

Nutrition, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.58K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Around the world, more than a million people have now died from the coronavirus. Rationally, we know this is devastating, but emotionally, why can we feel so removed from it? CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks to Associate Professor of Psychology Azim Shariff about the limits of human empathy, and what a computer game might teach us about our response to this pandemic. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

There's a strange phenomenon we might all experience, but don't often acknowledge.

0:07.0

When there is some sort of mass tragedy like a shooting or an earthquake, the first few

0:11.6

deaths we learn about are incredibly emotional for us.

0:15.5

We empathize with those people who are suffering, often strangers.

0:19.9

Maybe we even feel moved to take action to provide aid.

0:24.2

But sometimes, once the number of people suffering starts to grow, we also begin to

0:29.6

feel less and less.

0:32.5

This gradual, emotional detachment is actually part of being a human, and right now, nearly

0:38.8

all of us are experiencing it to some degree during this pandemic.

0:43.8

Around the world, more than a million people have now died from the coronavirus, one million

0:49.6

people.

0:50.6

Rationally, we know this is devastating, but emotionally, why can we feel so removed from it?

0:57.7

The answer it turns out may have something to do with a concept called compassion-fade

1:04.3

and an experiment that reveals some of our most surprising moral intuitions about whose

1:09.6

lives are most worth saving.

1:13.6

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, seen in chief medical correspondent.

1:17.8

And this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

1:27.1

Some of the groups that people were most biased against in our experiment are also the people

1:33.0

who are most vulnerable to the pandemic.

1:36.4

Azim Sharif is an associate professor of social psychology at the University of British Columbia.

1:42.7

In 2016, he and some colleagues launched this experiment called the Moral Machine.

1:49.5

They asked people around the world to play a computer game that generated a series of

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