Globalization in the face of a Disaster: Familiarity Bias and Media
When faced with a common enemy, is the world a united front?
In issues such as ending terrorism, fighting climate change and preventing pandemics, the world clearly has a common, unified goal. But the actions of each individual member in this global community vary greatly. This is not to say we have not progressed tremendously. We have systems in place to pool international relief efforts and, when situations escalate globally, we leverage the brainpower of the world to come up with solutions. Yet, we miss the mark in what a globalized system could potentially achieve as one unit. Two of the many reasons for this may come from: familiarity bias and the media.
First, psychologically we tend to empathize and care more about the people in our community. This reaction may stem from an inane human instinct developed in the hunter gatherer age to rely heavily on their own tribe and community while seeing others outside of it as foreign. As a result, humans developed an operating system relying heavily on familiarity. So when a crisis is happening across the globe, upon people who seemingly have very little in common to us, we naturally care less.
Secondly, the media plays a huge role in shining a spotlight or taking the spotlight off of certain issues. News such as the coronavirus in China had not been able to compete against broadcasts of the Democratic Primary Election. Additionally, a large scale disaster tends to numb the media. Psychological experiments have shown that in donations, when we target one person as the victim, as opposed to hundreds or thousands of people, people tend to be more willing to give because they feel they can actually do something. As the scale of the coronavirus outbreak had grown to thousands and tens of thousands of people, the public had likely been discouraged and felt that they can do very little, which also resulted in the media committing less time on the subject.
Specifically for the case of the coronavirus, as China’s cases grew, the effect of this familiarity bias along with dampened media attention amazingly led to a de-escalation of fear. As we see in the graph, Google searches for the term “Coronavirus” actually had been decreasing after the end of January until around February 23, in a time when global cases continued to surge.
While the world economy is intertwined and coupled on an economic level, and physically it takes less time than ever to travel from one side of the globe to the other, we are still living in very different worlds. The United Nations and WHO seek to build a system of international governance and cooperation, yet individual actors will continue to focus and advance their national agendas above all else. The Coronavirus is a clear example of the power of barriers since it very hard for us to empathize and understand crises across the globe, because the world is still too large and different.
Yet hypothesize a world that is completely interconnected, with a globally integrated response. The crisis in Wuhan immediately alerts the world into a global emergency, sending in some of the best doctors and resources around the world to curtail the spread. China shares the information immediately to other countries, and is trusted by the global community. Instead of pointing fingers, global policy makers and government officials swiftly decide on a containment policy, sharing their technology and expertise.
If we cared more about each other, we may have responded sooner and alleviated part of the impact . As Yuval recently wrote in Times, “history indicates that real protection comes from the sharing of reliable scientific information, and from global solidarity”. It is not too late. This is the time for the global community to come together, to share information and expertise. Let us push to help ease the burden of countries taking drastic measures in quarantining their cities and lend a helping hand. Because only with a united front, will we be able to take on this common enemy.
