Opinion: Why is it so hard to mourn the vast number of COVID deaths?

The U.S. recently surpassed a COVID-19 marker: over 277,000 individuals dead. On some days, more than 2,500 have died. Yet many are disconnected from the pain, unwilling or unable to recognize or process the loss.

Where is the collective mourning? I am an empathy scientist and can report that we are not a nation of psychopaths. Cognitive biases — common errors in thinking — make it difficult to process tragedy of this scale over time, creating a sense of psychological distance between us and the COVID-19 deaths. By understanding how these biases work, people can train themselves to feel the weight of our country’s losses again.

Several types of cognitive bias are warping Americans’ ability to process COVID today. First is the numeracy bias, the brain’s inability to wrap itself around large numbers. On Facebook recently, I was saddened by a friend’s announcing the death of his cousin from COVID-19. My friend wrote that behind every statistic, there is a person and a family. He was echoing a popular quote — “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” — sometimes attributed to Stalin.

The quote demonstrates what scientists have long known. We can easily feel empathy for specific individuals, especially those who are close to us. But as these individuals turn into groups, our empathy is diminished. Suffering becomes more emotionally distant and abstract, and turns into a statistic. And people are not good at reasoning about statistics.

We don’t like to think of ourselves in this cold way. In studies, participants predict that they would feel worse if thousands of people were victims of a tragedy, compared to only a few. That reaction, they feel, is the morally right response. But in reality, most of us experience an “emotional flatline,” with no greater feelings of sadness as tragedy grows — as long as we aren’t personally affected.

Another cognitive bias at work during the COVID-19 crisis is the ostrich effect: people’s tendency to avoid negative information. Daryl Cameron, a Penn State scientist who studies compassion avoidance, shows participants pictures of distressed people, such as refugees. Immediately afterward, participants can then choose to “try to feel what the person feels” and “empathically share in the internal emotional experience of the person,” or they can choose to simply describe external details about the picture, such as the person’s age and gender. Participants choose empathy only 36 percent of the time. Cameron’s research shows that people actively try to suppress their emotions to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the face of mass tragedy.

This may be because of a sense of helplessness. In “The Eleventh,” the classic story by Henri Barbusse, a servant invites 10 people into his master’s palace-hospital each month, but has to turn away the 11th. At first, he enjoys being able to help the 10, but soon closing the door on the 11th person becomes torturous. This story highlights the dangers of becoming overwhelmed by those we cannot help, rather than focusing on those we can.

Time messes with our concrete sensory brains, too. The recency effect creates a crippling nearsightedness, where events that are closer to the present are more vivid in our imaginations. A process called hedonic adaptation numbs us to the pandemic’s rise over time, as one death per day becomes 10 deaths per day, then 50, then 500, then 1,000, then 2,000. The number of deaths crept up or down subtly over weeks and months, giving people time to get used to the new normal and dulling their emotional response.

Vivid experiences can skew perception by activating a type of cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic , the tendency to overestimate the prevalence of events that more easily come to mind. This type of bias is the reason people worry about airplane crashes and terrorist attacks, which generate countless dramatic news clips that make them easy to picture, despite the fact that they are not among the top causes of death in the United States. According to a survey from late August, 27 percent of Americans said that a close friend or family member had tested positive for COVID-19, and 15 percent said that a close friend or family member had died. So the vast majority of Americans still had no personal experience with the virus.

So how can we counter these deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, and become more sensitive to mass suffering?

To combat numeracy bias, some might suggest thinking more logically, but research finds that logical thinking can actually backfire: In charitable donations, people driven by logic often realize that giving to individual victims is an emotional response that doesn’t make sense. A better approach involves expanding one’s sense of compassion so that we can apply it to more than one individual at a time.

Some are better at this than others. Those who feel secure in their relationships with others show less numeracy bias. They do not need to know someone’s name or see a picture to understand that a tragedy is a tragedy — even when it affects a group. For more insecure people, thinking of someone who loves them unconditionally can help them extend more compassion to the world, even when events are remote and actors are anonymous. Some studies have found that people who have experienced adversity are less likely to show the numeracy bias, and actually feel more compassion for groups, compared to individuals.

Another simple response is to accept that numeracy bias is a part of how our brains work, and focus on individual victims instead of groups. Public memorials can be helpful for this. One study found that people’s feelings of empathic sadness increased with the numbers when they could see pictures of the people affected. Detroit created a public drive-by memorial in Belle Isle Park with hundreds of portraits and names of victims.

As for the ostrich effect, feelings of helplessness at suffering’s scope don’t have to prevent us from acting. Some people deliberately seek out others in need. These highly empathic people aren’t saints, but instead, expect that helping others will feel good. And research finds that those who feel a sense of efficacy — that they can do small things to help — don’t get as overwhelmed.

To combat hedonic adaptation, we can try to mindfully accept negative information. Instead of focusing on the number of deaths yesterday, we can compare today’s total number of deaths — more than 277,000 — to February’s — one death — or the first day of fall — 201,000. The contrast may feel more appropriately shocking when tracked this way. And to counter the availability heuristic, we can peruse our social media with renewed focus. Sharing personal experiences with COVID online may be one of the best means available, at the moment, for painting a vivid portrait of the disease.

Cognitive biases may psychologically minimize the scope of the pandemic, but there are small steps that we can each take to actually minimize the scope of it. Mother Teresa sagely advised: “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.” By wearing masks, washing hands and staying home, you are doing just that.