But there’s another psychological phenomenon that I’ve come to appreciate, called proportion dominance, which can help understand our competing feelings of compassion and overwhelm. Proportion dominance is the preference for making relative progress toward a goal, at the expense of absolute impact. In a foundational paper on proportion dominance, researchers asked participants to rate their support for lifesaving interventions such as emergency medical treatments. In addition to proportion dominance, there is another complicating factor. But the research on proportion dominance shows us why we feel this way.