Researchers conducted three experiments to determine how a request for donations and the number of victims a participant is shown will influence emotional response to a tragedy. The study suggests that people self-regulate emotions in the case of mass suffering, either as a form of self-interest (when asked for donations) or because the problem appears too overwhelming to manage.

[Abstract excerpted from original source.]

“As the number of people in need of help increases, the degree of compassion people feel for them ironically tends to decrease, a phenomenon termed the collapse of compassion. Some researchers have suggested that this effect happens because emotions are not triggered by aggregates. We provide evidence for an alternative account. People expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming, and as a result, they engage in emotion regulation to prevent experiencing overwhelming levels of emotion. Because groups are more likely than individuals to elicit emotion regulation, people feel less for groups than for individuals. In Experiment 1, subjects only displayed the collapse of compassion when they expected to be asked to donate money to the victims. This suggests that the effect is motivated by self-interest. Experiment 2 showed that the collapse of compassion emerged only for people who were skilled at emotion regulation. In Experiment 3 we manipulated emotion regulation. Subjects who were told to down-regulate their emotions showed the collapse of compassion, but subjects who were told to experience their emotions did not. We examined the time course of these effects using a dynamic rating to measure affective responses in real time. The time course data suggested that subjects regulate emotion toward groups proactively, by preventing themselves from ever experiencing as much emotion toward groups as toward individuals. These findings provide initial evidence that motivated emotion regulation drives insensitivity to mass suffering.”