In many situations where you have to make a decision about how resources should be allocated "efficiency" or impact is a crucial factor. Often you want every donated crown to do maximum benefit. However, research has shown that feelings of inefficiency are experienced from the fact that not everyone can be helped, often makes people less motivated the individuals you can actually help (which is a form of pseudo-inefficiency). People thus seem to be greatly affected by the negative emotions associated with the great need for resources, even when these emotions are irrelevant to the decision.

During the project, the world also unfortunately experienced continued humanitarian crises. In September, 2015, the media was flooded with pictures of a dead Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach. Aylan's image did what the relentlessly rising death toll had so thoroughly failed to do - it aroused the world and created empathy by giving us a glimpse of the reality behind stunning statistics. Nearly 500,000 deaths since the Syrian war began in 2011. When we feel strong empathy, we hope that the nations of the world are motivated to stop this and help millions of victims who are still living in Syria or as refugees.

Can this hope become a reality? The lesson is that a photograph, no matter how emotionally captivating it is, can only do so much. For a short time, the image of Aylan Kurdi became a catalyst for action among world leaders and the general public. Germany and Austria, for example, opened their borders to immigrants while Pope Francis called on Catholic churches across Europe to host refugees. At home, we briefly saw a strong mobilization among the public as well. For example, donations to one of the large Swedish charities' collection for Syrian refugees increased from SEK 70,000 per day to SEK 4 million on September 3, the day after the picture of Aylan appeared in newspapers and news feeds (data published in the prominent scientific journal PNAS; Slovic et al. 2017).

Unfortunately, this wave of empathy was short-lived. After a month, internet searches for the terms "Syria", "refugees" and "Aylan" had decreased dramatically, indicating that the public interest had also decreased. Donations fell back to the level it was before Aylan's photograph was published.

These results show that empathy is important but not enough. We care deeply about protecting a single person in need, especially if they have a face and a name and look like us. But when the number of victims increases, and their lives become statistics, we lose empathy and the will to act. This "psychological blunting" is exacerbated by an irrational sense of inefficiency when the number in need of help is large and what we can achieve only feels like a partial solution - "a drop in the bucket."

In this research project, the psychological mechanisms that is behind such "biases" and especially how strategies can be developed to help people not to think and act in such a way. The research is experimental and involves both studies of behavior and brain correlates. The project is international with project participants from Sweden, USA and Austria and with data collections in both Sweden and the USA. In total, over 30 experiments and field studies have been carried out during the project.

One of the most important results in the project is our studies which show that emotions are a driving factor for pseudoinefficiency (Västfjäll et al., 2017; Slovic et al., 2017). In a series of studies, we found that the negative emotions that come from the victims you can not help dampen the warm feeling of well-being that motivates giving to those you can help. These results thus indicate that negative emotions demotivate rewarding and that people experience strong negative emotions when not everyone in need of help can be helped. But can different behavioral interventions counteract that negative emotions demotivate rewarding?

In a follow-up study examined this (Västfjäll & Slovic, 2020). Here we obtained another of the project's most important results - we find that pseudo-efficiency can be reduced through various interventions; 1) to increase awareness that emotions are irrelevant to the decision, 2) to ask people to make moral considerations, and 3) to help people to analytical reasoning counteracts the impact of negative emotions on allocation decisions.

This empirical finding led to a third important result in the project. We are now presenting a theoretical framework that shows that the pseudo-effectiveness can arise and be combated both through intuitive emotional factors and more analytical and logical factors (Västfjäll & Slovic, 2020). These results can be used to change and improve the decisions of individuals, organizations, and authorities regarding resource allocation.

The project has also generated new research questions; our studies have primarily examined the pseudoinefficiency of monetary giving. Can you see the same pattern when for other donation behaviors eg time, direct giving of eg food etc? Furthermore, we have primarily studied individual donation decisions and an interesting question is therefore whether the pseudo-effectiveness also occurs in organizations that allocate help? The results of the project have been published in international, peer-reviewed journals, presented at international scientific conferences in the field of decision-making (eg Society for Judgment and Decision Making), and in various popular science contexts (eg to charity organizations).