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    Why We Grow Numb To Staggering Statistics — And What We Can Do About It

    The growing coronavirus death toll doesn't provoke the same type of emotional response that a plane crash might. It's a coping mechanism and how our neurons are wired, says psychologist Elke Weber.
    by Ailsa Chang Jul 28, 2020 2 minutes
    "People are not very good with large numbers," says Elke Weber, a professor of psychology at Princeton University. "We don't discriminate between 150,000 or 300,000 or 3 million."

    COVID-19 has now killed more than 148,000 people in the U.S. On a typical day in the past week, more than 1,000 people died.

    But the deluge of grim statistics can dull our collective sense of outrage. And part of that has to do with how humans are built to perceive the world.

    "With any kind

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