Psychologically speaking, the inability to grasp the scope of human suffering may be something that's ingrained.
"Humans are evolutionarily disposed to care about and look after both ourselves and those to whom we are related," Ellard explains.
"I think those kinds of kinship-related responses probably go some way to accounting for why we might have more difficulty responding to news of thousands of people, including hundreds of young children, who drowned in the floods in Pakistan than we do the 31 people who were killed by Hurricane Fiona."
