Images of suffering refugees depersonalize them rather than generate compassion

Evidence

The oft-repeated scene of hordes of emaciated people struggling to survive under squalid conditions in refugee camps is more likely to depersonalize and dehumanize them than to raise social compassion. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2573

Categorization

• CANDY: A counterintuitive, memorable one-liner about humanitarian imagery that works in conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 390; Sadness is usually engagement with frozen self-images rather than the world — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2336; Images of distant suffering provoke moral engagement and military intervention. — Emanuele Castano, On the Perils of Glorifying the…, 15