Paul Slovic and Colleagues Receive Best Paper 2021 from Risk Analysis

Decision Research scientist Paul Slovic and coauthors Sudeep Bhatia, Lukasz Walasek, and Howard Kunreuther received an award from the journal Risk Analysis for Best Paper 2021 for their article “The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Evidence from Natural Language Analysis of Online News Articles and Social Media Posts.”

The authors used software to analyze how deaths were described in millions of news articles from The New York Times and other sources as well millions of Reddit comments. They found that descriptions of the deaths of large numbers of people were less negative and less intense than descriptions of the deaths of small numbers of people. This finding demonstrates how psychic numbing is reflected in news articles and internet comments. Psychic numbing is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to feel indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people, epitomized by the idea that “the more who die, the less we care.”

The full citation for the article is Bhatia, S., Walasek, L., Slovic, P., & Kunreuther, H. (2021). The more who die, the less we care: Evidence from natural language analysis of online news articles and social media posts. Risk Analysis, 41(1), 179–203. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13582. The article is available to read for free on the Risk Analysis website here.

Image of a trophy by macrovector.