Untangling Our Reactions to Titan and the Other Disaster

Four days in June, 2023 will be remembered for two maritime disasters — maybe. The world was rapt in suspense when the Titan submersible disappeared on June 18 on a dive to the Titanic wreck. Five wealthy adventurers were lost. That is the disaster we will almost certainly remember.

Just four days earlier, on June 14, the fishing boat Andriana sank while smuggling hundreds of migrants from Libya to Greece. As of this writing, 104 survived, 82 are confirmed dead, and several hundred are missing and presumed dead.

The Titan incident received saturation coverage. Assuming you were not locked in a sensory deprivation tank, minute-by-minute updates were unavoidable. However, you might have been, like me, shamefully unaware of the unspeakable and inarguably more significant tragedy of Andriana.

Let the castigations of humanity begin.

“It’s a horrifying and disgusting contrast,” says Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. 

On Instagram, artist Oliver Jeffers posted a cartoon depicting a news crew focusing its cameras underwater on Titanwhile dozens drowned right behind them. It has 118,000 likes and counting.

Jeffers wrote, “It’s hard to not be cynical about the state of society that this story has gripped us in the midst of a constantly rising refugee crisis with more and more people dying on the daily, and not getting nearly as much attention.”

He is right; it is not hard to be cynical about the state of society in light of these events. But just because cynicism is easy does not mean we should be cynical. Failing to challenge our instinctive reaction is kind of how we got here in the first place. Let me explain:

I will be the first to confess: I found it much easier to be enthralled by the fate of five about Titan than by the loss of hundreds of souls on Andriana, even after I learned about Andriana. Does it mean I care more about five rich people than 650 unnamed migrants? Does this mean I am a horrible, callous person?

No. It means I am human. So are you. So are we all.

The Titan disaster had every ingredient perfectly formulated to attract human attention. The victims had faces and names. We had a perfectly-cast billionaire “villain” in OceanGate’s CEO and Titan’s pilot Stockton Rush. We had adventure, suspense, drama, and outrage. Memories of Kate Winslet as Rose and Leo DiCaprio as Jack in James Cameron’s Titanic rise easily to the surface of our minds, imbuing the whole storyline with epic dimension.

Every philanthropic organization in the world has long known that the face of one child with a name in need will garner more donations than hard facts about hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands in equal or greater need. Even two starving faces on the postcard results in less giving than a single, identifiable human. The media know this too.

Once upon a time in our evolutionary history this was a feature. Now it is a bit of a bug. We are exquisitely attuned to faces, names, narratives, and novelty. It is how we created the most complex societies of any species on earth. It is how we survived. It is not a sign of our increasing depravity. It is human nature.

If you were more captivated by Titan than Andriana, as I was, you should forgive yourself. You should forgive others for doing the same. Then you should commit to doing better.

This is why we must understand the nature of our human nature. This is why we must learn about the workings of that one thing that is most central to our existence: our own mind. Our brains are hard-wired to find a single person's suffering more emotionally salient and impactful than the suffering of a larger, faceless group. Today we call this the “identifiable victim effect.” For our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago on the savannas of Africa, and for us bonding with our families and friends today, this is a feature. In choosing where to put our attention and resources in a situation like Titanand Andriana, it is a bug, and it creates real problems.

We cannot eliminate this bug (or all the others), but we can notice it. We can learn how it works and when it shows up. We can develop the self-awareness to catch it in action. We can and should forgive it in ourselves and in others. We cannot be otherwise, but we can learn to notice and overrule our built-in bias.

Our crime, if there is one, is not that we are indifferent to the victims of Andriana. That is the out-of-the-box nature of homo sapiens. In a world where the entirety of social, psychological, and neuroscience research is instantly available to all of us, our “crime” would be to continue operating these complex, amazing, terrifying, miraculous brains of ours without bothering to read the manual.

That manual, by the way, is our favorite book (albeit imaginary). Retexo means “to untangle,” or to “un-weave” and the thing we spend most of our time untangling is the nature of human nature, especially as it shows up in the workplace.