We Empathize Most With Stories That Feel Familiar to Us

For 15 years, Nancy Guthrie had called her house "home." Her family did not expect her to abandon a home that was so comforting to her. Once her missing person status came into effect, constant video footage and public assistance requests have been made. Her local sheriff's office has provided daily updates concerning her case. Each piece of evidence that has emerged has produced strong emotions in the public, including a disconnected video doorbell, her pacemaker transmitting an alert to the authorities that Nancy was gone from her residence for at least one hour, and a still image of a male wearing a mask. Nancy Guthrie is the mother of a famous public figure, making this a law enforcement case with national media coverage; therefore, millions of people have been following its progress. The anguish of a daughter searching for her mother is something most people understand instantly. Nancy and her family deserve every available resource, every credible lead, and every ounce of public support. Grief does not have a hierarchy. Their suffering is real.

Fear, Facts, and the Stories We Amplify

It is important to ground this conversation in facts. In the United States, most kidnappings are not carried out by strangers but by family members or people known to the victim. However, the general public's anxiety about abduction is based mostly on both rare, unexpected, and either accidental or on-purpose acts of kidnapping, perpetrated by unknown individuals and or strangers, and, therefore, even more frightening and unpredictable due to the lack of predictability. However, based on historical data, kidnapping is usually closer to home than most people may think; thus, the difference between what is real and what people believe is real contributes to their levels of fear, as well as their levels of attention.

Hundreds of children and women were kidnapped both within the U.S. and throughout the world at the same time Nancy was kidnapped. These include children who were taken out of violence-riddled border areas and women who were trafficked through major metropolitan areas across the U.S. Some were individuals whose names never trended and whose faces never appeared on national television. Millions of people worldwide are currently being trafficked. Numerous Indigenous women in North America have gone missing with little recognition. Children vanish from refugee camps without cameras capturing their absence.

Their stories are no less worthy. Their lives are no less precious.

Media organizations respond to engagement—stories that generate clicks. When a news organization sees that a particular story is getting lots of engagement, they will publish more stories that have similar engagement levels, which creates more "buzz," and so on. It is not always intentional, but rather a case of emotional economics. Unfortunately, this has huge implications since a large portion of missing persons come from low socio-economic communities, immigrant families, and/or communities in which there is no video surveillance of their disappearance or no media presence; thus, very often an individual in that situation will not have anyone who is well known at the national level to advocate for their case and, therefore, their suffering lacks the same level of visibility or awareness. There are many uncomfortable questions raised by the situation outlined above: Do we give a missing person more attention because they "look like us" or have an experience we can relate to? It is easy to empathize with someone when we see a reflection of ourselves, but when we do not, we can lose interest.

Widening the Compassion

We appear to care too narrowly. The injustice is not in rallying around one woman's disappearance. It is in failing to extend that same depth of concern to others whose names we never learn. Many people think that since the media is biased, there is nothing they can do about it. However, we can change this. We can develop our news diet by looking for independent, international media, supporting journalists who cover underserved communities, and by spreading missing-persons alerts. We can ask news organizations who they are not highlighting, and then find reporters dedicated to telling these stories.

The Guthrie family should feel empathy and their desire for justice as much as the mother who is missing their daughter in Guatemala and the brother in Detroit. Human suffering is not a contest; we should continue to support the Guthrie family and hope that their loved one returns safely. We can also develop a culture of empathy that is equally shared. News stories can highlight not just those we feel connected with or emotionally invested in, or are familiar with. We should all strive for broader experiences of empathy, not narrower.