Why Do We Care More About Smaller Concerns? How Quantitative Numbing Impacts Emotional Response
February 14, 2017
The affecting article on Visual Business Intelligence titled When More is Less: Quantitative Numbing explains the phenomenon that many of us have probably witnessed on the news, in our friends and family, and even personally experienced in ourselves. A local news story about the death of an individual might provoke a stronger emotional response than news of a mass tragedy involving hundreds or thousands of deaths. Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic explore this in their book Numbers and Nerves. According to the article, this response is “built into our brains.” Another example explains the Donald Trump effect,
Because he exhibits so many examples of bad behavior, those behaviors are having relatively little impact on us. The sheer number of incidents creates a numbing effect. Any one of Trump’s greedy, racist, sexist, vulgar, discriminatory, anti-intellectual, and dishonest acts, if considered alone, would concern us more than the huge number of examples that now confront us. The larger the number, the lesser the impact…This tendency… is automatic, immediate, and unconscious.
The article suggests that the only reason to overcome this tendency is to engage with large quantities in a slower, more thoughtful way. An Abel Hertzberg quote helps convey this approach when considering the large-scale tragedy of the Holocaust: “There were not six million Jews murdered: there was one murder, six million times.” The difference between that consideration of individual murders vs. the total number is stark, and it needs to enter into the way we process daily events that are happening all over the world if we want to hold on to any semblance of compassion and humanity.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 14, 2017
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