Identifiable Victim Effect
Humans, on average, are bad at understanding large numbers.
It’s easy to parse the concept of “ten” because it’s a number that we encounter and use and compare to other things on a regular basis. It’s human-scale: we generally have ten fingers, ten toes, and we can pay for things using currency notes that come in increments of ten.
We understand, intuitively, that twelve is a little bite more than ten, twenty-two is a bit more than twice as large, and that one hundred is substantially more than ten, but not so different as to be incomparable—most of us have a fairly accurate sense of how ten and one hundred compare.
The concept of one million, on the other hand, is more difficult to intuitively grasp.
We throw the word around casually, these days, because the scale of wealth in the world, measurement of processing power in our devices, and other such things to which we refer on a regular basis have expanded to include numbers that are only meaningful on this order of magnitude or beyond.
But if you try to imagine a million of something, it’s not as simple as picturing ten of something.
A million seconds is nearly twelve days worth of seconds. Which is a great deal more than ten seconds—a span so short that many of us wouldn’t have any trouble holding our breath for its duration.
A billion seconds is even more unfathomable, adding up to more than 30 years, while a trillion seconds is more than 30,000 years.
Despite these immense differences in scale, though, most of us lump these numbers together into a mental category that we might call “very large numbers.” And while these numbers are probably not used interchangeably, they’re also not used accurately in terms of their true distinction from each other, or in terms of their difference in scale from the numbers we use more commonly and precisely, like ten.
Think for a moment about the difference between ten dollars and a million dollars based on the aforementioned seconds comparison, and then think about what a billion dollars actually means; how alien such a figure is from the amount of money most people will ever encounter or need to think about with any degree of precision.
The gap between the reality of these numbers and the heuristics we use when we think about them is thought to be part of why we have trouble identifying with, and even caring about, groups of other human beings—at least compared to how much we might care about a single member of such a group.
The “Identifiable Victim Effect” refers to a psychological tendency to demonstrate greater concern and care for individual strangers than we do for groups of strangers.
The archetypical example of this effect—in part because some of the relevant research has been conducted using the easy-to-quantify data from such examples—is that of donations made to people suffering from various afflictions and circumstances.
When calls go out for financial support for groups of people suffering from starvation in far-off countries, for instance, you can expect a certain amount of money to trickle in for the cause. That trickle almost always becomes a torrent, though, if the organization making the ask presents potential contributors with a singular point of focus: an individual human who is part of that larger group that is starving.
This is consistent even when you adjust other variables, like the age or gender of the person being presented, the location of the people who are suffering, and the type of suffering they’re experiencing.
It’s also been shown that this effect influences legislation that has the name of an individual attached.
If a bill bears the name of someone who suffered from a disease or who was a victim of the behavior that the bill addresses, that bill will be more likely to garner the public and political support required to be passed.
This effect seems to hold true in the other direction, as well: we tend to punish groups of people more leniently than we do individuals from those groups.
A crowd of people committing a crime, then, will be more likely to get away with it, or to be let off with a relative slap on the wrist. But if that crowd is broken up into individuals, each of whom is presented as being representative of the larger crime in question, those singular people will tend to receive more significant punishments than if they had remained just one part of a larger whole.
This effect is thought to influence everything from our criminal justice systems to our approaches to health care. It determines how we market ideas and causes to the masses, and it’s why politicians will almost always bring up the names and stories of individuals when trying to get the public to support a particular cause.
Some researchers contend that this effect has more to do with guilt and narrative than our inability to accurately parse large numbers, while others contend the opposite.
Still others attribute this effect to in-grouping and othering, saying that we should lump this in with the larger body of tribe-related research and assume that those making more donations or offering more political support do so because the identification of an individual makes it more likely that they’ll find some kind of tribal affiliation with that person; which is a lot less likely when we heuristically simplify unique individuals into an undifferentiated group.
Whatever the origin of this tendency, it’s important to remember that just as we struggle to deal with large numbers and other out-of-scale concepts, so too do we have trouble identifying and empathizing with groups of people, even if we might intuitively do so with individual members of such groups.
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This week’s essay comes from one of my other projects, Brain Lenses.
If you found some value in it, consider subscribing—I publish a free essay and podcast episode each Tuesday, and folks who become paid subscribers receive an additional essay and podcast on Thursdays.
Projects
Brain Lenses: Psychobiome & Hunger
Let’s Know Things: Artificial Scarcity
Curiosity Weekly: March 30, 2021
Other: I’m in the process of recalibrating my Curiosity Weekly setup, trying out the features of Revue (which are substantially different from Substack and Email Octopus, which is what I’m using to disseminate this and some of my other email publications), and I received a torrent of really useful feedback from subscribers when I asked about the use of photos alongside the curated links; I typically just provide the links, but am experimenting with other layouts.
It always makes me smile, hearing from the folks on the other end of these missives: it’s similar in some ways to meeting people in person when I’m giving talks, as it reminds me that I’m not shouting into a vacuum—that what I’m putting out into the world is landing somewhere, and at times even proving some kind of value to those who receive it.
It also helps me see the things I make from other angles, which can’t help but be valuable on my end.
This is a dynamic that is a lot rarer with some of my other projects—books and podcasts in particular—because that kind of feedback mechanism isn’t built into the medium. I hear from folks who read my books and listen to my podcasts via email and social media from time-to-time, but there isn’t a simple, universally understood method of talking to the author after reading a particularly meaningful chapter in a book, or a way to quickly leave a voice message for the host if you have a question about something mentioned in a podcast episode.
I suspect there’ll be ways to fill this gap in the publication/communication market in the near-future. I’m particularly keen to experiment with Clubhouse-style “social” audio formats, though I’ll likely wait until there’s a widely available platform that everyone can access, rather than opting for the more exclusive options (invite-only and iOS-only) that predominate in that facet of the industry, currently.
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things to click:
How Masayoshi Matsumoto Creates His Magic Balloon Artworks(these are really quite cool looking)
Behemoth: Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine…Only Too Heavy(I absolutely love these sorts of projects)
How to Read a Research Paper(important knowledge to possess—especially in an age of heightened research-derived “clickbait” headlines that don’t accurately describe the research in question)
This Word Does Not Exist(refresh the page for more words that aren’t, but maybe should be, real)
First Day of the Week in Different Countries(not something I’d thought about until I saw this)
100-Million-Year-Old Seafloor Sediment Bacteria Have Been Resuscitated (I’m sure this is fine and won’t go wrong in film-worthy ways)
Feelings Wheel(super-useful tool if you’re keen to get more granular about how you’re actually feeling, rather than defaulting to more generic and familiar, but possibly less-helpful terms)
Outro
We made it through the last of the awkward selfies last week, so I’ll be sharing some of my travel photos in this newsletter until and unless a new community-based project arises (I’m very open to suggestions).
A great big thanks to everyone who submitted an awkward selfie: that was a lot of fun, and you all have amazing faces!
I’m in the process of moving everything from one computer to another; the “new” one is from the same year as the old one (2017), so there isn’t much of a performance upgrade, but it’s a little bit bigger (15” instead of 13”) and hopefully won’t have the same battery issues my previous one has been suffering from these past several months.
I typically try to run my devices into the ground, wringing as much use from them as possible before I sell or trade them in for something new—so this isn’t a process I go through super frequently.
I do tend to enjoy it, though, because it’s a bit like a physical move to a new home: it offers a built-in opportunity to reassess what you’ve got piling up in your e-space, in terms of files and software but also routines and habits and default expectations about how things are managed and how tasks are approached.
As such, I’m currently making a million little tweaks to my setup, trying out a slew of new tools, reorganizing gobs of old files, and generally undertaking a nice Spring cleaning of my digital workspace.
There’s lot of dust, but I think the effort will be worth all the e-sneezing.
Making any changes to your usual setup? Any plans coming to fruition in the near-future? If you have a spare minute, drop me a line and tell me what you’ve been up to.
Also: if you need an encouraging word about absolutely anything, or just need to vent, please feel free to write—I respond to every email I receive.
You can reach me at colin@exilelifestyle.com or by responding to this email.
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You can also communicate via the typical channels: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or playful illusion made of household objects.
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