Out of Reach, Out of Mind? Mechanisms of Psychological Distance and Emotional Reactions to Tragedy Abroad

Increased psychological distance can dampen emotions and decrease self-efficacy for prosocial behavior like helping. But can distance and its downstream effects impact emotional responses to news reports of tragedies, and by what mechanisms? We hypothesized that common theories in which distance increases abstraction are insufficient for explaining affective consequences of distance. By contrast, we proposed that distance reduces affective responses to tragedies by reducing helping self-efficacy, which motivates a “collapse of compassion.” In 2 studies (Ntotal = 804), we manipulated news of a bombing to occur in many countries (Experiment 1) and in the same country with differing primed distances to the attack (Experiment 2). Across studies, greater perceived geographic distance was associated with less emotional response (r = .32, p < .001), mediated by lower compassion (B = .03, SE = .04, bootstrapped 90% CI: [.002, .135]), consistent with a compassion collapse mechanism.