The Evolutionary Illogic Of Crime, Punishment, And Attention
Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 10:42
in Psychology & Sociology
The attention we give to (or withhold from) tragedies has little to do with numbers: many hundreds can die in a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe or hundreds of thousands in an earthquake in China and it receives nowhere near the press and public outrage as nearly 200 killed in terrorist attacks in Mumbai. (This isn’t meant to diminish the tragedy of Mumbai, only to act as comparison.) Still, we can imagine the evolutionary logic of this: our mind quickly jumps to the cause of a disaster, evaluating it for relevance to our own survival. Once we’ve “solved the crime” of culpability, it’s as if the case is closed—we know what to be wary of and our brains can read more