Abstract
We as humans do not value lives consistently. While we are willing to act for one victim, we often become numb as the number of victims increases. The empathic ability to adopt others’ perspectives is essential for motivating help. However, the perspective-taking ability in our brains seems limited. Using functional MRI, we demonstrated that the core empathy network including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was more engaged for events happening to a single person than those happening to many people, no matter whether the events were emotionally neutral or negative. In particular, the perspective-taking-related mPFC showed greater and more extended activations for events about one person than those about many people. The mPFC may be the neural marker of why we feel indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people in humanitarian disasters.
Highlights
We as humans do not value lives consistently
We found that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was more strongly activated for stories about one person than stories about many people, regardless of the emotional valence of the story (Fig. 1A, One > Many in the yellow-red scale, voxel-level P < 0.001 and cluster-level P < 0.05 family-wise-error corrected)
Having confirmed the involvement of the mPFC and other empathy-related brain regions, we examined to what extent the core network of human empathy contributed to the general singularity effect
Summary
We as humans do not value lives consistently. While we are willing to act for one victim, we often become numb as the number of victims increases. We first examined whether the mPFC or other empathy-related brain regions showed the general singularity effect, using a general linear model.
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