"To Get a Feel for What This Means": Annie Dillard's Thought Experiments and the Quest to Understand Compassion.

The article presents the discussion on psychological barriers that prevent humans from fully engaging with large-scale events and suffering. Topics include emphasizing the difficulty of sustaining compassion for impersonal others; and concepts of psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy, and the prominence effect, as well as the exploration of human compassion through the lens of literature and psychological studies.