Turning a blind eye …

There is intriguing research on the psychological costs of turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. The study by Cameron and Payne from the University of North Carolina was published in the journal Psychological Science (March 2012, vol. 23, pp 225-229). Here is the study abstract:

It has often been argued that compassion is fundamental to morality. Yet people often suppress compassion for self-interested reasons. We provide evidence that suppressing compassion is not cost free, as it creates dissonance between a person’s moral identity and his or her moral principles. We instructed separate groups of participants to regulate their compassion, regulate their feelings of distress, or freely experience emotions toward compassion-inducing images. Participants then reported how central morality was to their identities and how much they believed that moral rules should always be followed. Participants who regulated compassion—but not those who regulated distress or experienced emotions—showed a dissonance-based trade-off. If they reported higher levels of moral identity, they had a greater belief that moral rules could be broken. If they maintained their belief that moral rules should always be followed, they sacrificed their moral identity. Regulating compassion thus has a cost of its own: It forces trade-offs within a person’s moral self-concept.

Subjects were shown images that typically elicit feelings of sympathy and compassion along with neutral images. One group was instructed to control and suppress thoughts of wanting to help the victims. Another group was told to limit negative emotions such as sadness  in response to images. The final group was free to react to the images without any constraints. The researchers measured how strongly participants valued moral traits and rated their personal expression.

Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others caused subjects to either downgrade the importance of moral traits or take refuge in situational ethics (i.e., find exceptions where moral traits were not necessary). In other words, callousness messes with your mind. It causes you to care less about moral trait dimensions or create moral loopholes.

In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus said the callous will be damned. The more you turn your eyes away from others in need, the better your chances of being labeled a goat and getting booted into the proverbial lake of fire. And if the price for being callous is this severe, I can only imagine the consequences for inflicting harm on others.

We, however, are fortunate to live in a gilded age of Christians fashioned from the purest of gold. Our Christians would never allow the poor to go without food, shelter, clothing, or medical care. Our Christians would never make excuses why crumbs should be taken away from those in need and given instead to the rich. Lighten up, brothers and sisters. The Lord was probably just kidding when he talked of separating the sheep from the goats.

The study by Cameron and Payne suggests that deliberately turning a blind eye to the suffering of others messes with our minds, even the tiny dose of callousness acceptable to human subjects review boards. It is a bit like selling our souls to the Devil one callous act at a time until we look like goats, act like goats, and even smell like goats.