If you think of it, this is sort of strange.
If you think of this from a purely sort of rational point of
view, this is strange because these
were university students, they presumably weren't stupid,
they must have known, if they'd stop to think for a minute, that
it wasn't that the lab was collecting all this money to give to Rokia.
I mean, you know, then Rokia, one child
in Malawi, was going to really become relatively wealthy
for a child in Malawi, whilst all the rest
of the children were just as hungry as before.
They must've realized that Rokia is a kind of a token child, a
token of the type child that we're helping, but in fact they gave more.
So presumably, it was as you were suggesting,
that they felt an emotional pull to this child,
and although they didn't think they were only giving
to her, that emotional pull prompted them to give.
And I think that is a real problem in terms
of getting people to address global poverty as an issue.
It's a problem because, it is a statistic.
It's very hard to make it individual in this way.
You can do things as, as that said,
you can, you can appeal to people, individuals.
Some charities try to get people to adopt a
child in the sense of sending money to a particular
child, but that's not really the most effective way of
helping because a lot of problems need more systematic approach.
If you put in safe drinking water for
a village, not an individual family for instance.
So, so there is this problem that we're not emotionally moved by global poverty
in the way that we would be moved by a child in front of us.
But, the question I want you to think about is, that may explain why we don't
give that much to the global poor, but does it justify the difference.
Does it justify us in thinking it's less wrong not to give.
I mean, once you realize this, don't you
also realize that this shouldn't really make a difference
to whether it's right or wrong to help somebody,
the fact that you are emotionally drawn to them.
I mean, our emotion's maybe triggered by all sort of things.
Again, there's research showing that we're more likely to
respond emotionally to somebody who looks rather like us.