You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Paul Slovik studies how humans make decisions.

I'm a research psychologist and for quite a long while I've been studying the psychology

of risk and decision making.

I actually remember learning about Paul and his work back when I was in grad school.

I was a scientist before I became a journalist and I followed your work for a really long time.

I'm a little star-struck to be honest. This is very cool for me.

Thank you. I've been doing this for a long time.

Some of his most famous work looks at a psychological phenomenon known as psychic numbing.

Basically, it's when we feel indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people.

When we should be feeling very emotionally connected to some situation and we don't do that,

we just, you know, bounces off our brain with leaving no impression at all.

That's psychic numbing. You know, if we're just kind of seeing the numbers and we're not

pausing to stop and think about the reality of, you know, the lives beneath the surface of the numbers.

A humanitarian crisis, a natural disaster.

Sometimes the devastation feels so big that it seems there's nothing we can do.

It's very important in trying to understand, for example, why we turn our backs on genocide and

other mass abuses of human beings when we state as a value that we value these lives.

And yet we act in ways that contradict those values.

And now, Paul says we're seeing psychic numbing in the pandemic,

potentially contributing to decisions that could put us and our communities at risk,

not wearing masks or physically distancing when we should.

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