The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely

  In the aftermath of the rescue, the McClure family received more than $700,000 in donations for Jessica. Variety and People magazine ran gripping stories on her. Scott Shaw of the Odessa American newspaper won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the swaddled toddler in the arms of one of her rescuers. There was a TV movie called Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure, starring Beau Bridges and Patty Duke, and the songwriters Bobby George Dynes and Jeff Roach immortalized her in ballads.

  Of course, Jessica and her parents suffered a great deal. But why, at the end of the day, did Baby Jessica garner more CNN coverage than the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, during which 800,000 people—including many babies—were brutally murdered in a hundred days? And why did our hearts go out to the little girl in Texas so much more readily than to the victims of mass killings and starvation in Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Congo? To broaden the question a bit, why do we jump out of our chairs and write checks to help one person, while we often feel no great compulsion to act in the face of other tragedies that are in fact more atrocious and involve many more people?

  It’s a complex topic and one that has daunted philosophers, religious thinkers, writers, and social scientists since time immemorial. Many forces contribute to a general apathy toward large tragedies. They include a lack of information as the event is unfolding, racism, and the fact that pain on the other side of the world doesn’t register as readily as, say, our neighbors’. Another big factor, it seems, has to do with the sheer size of the tragedy—a concept expressed by none other than Joseph Stalin when he said, “One man’s death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin’s polar opposite, Mother Teresa, expressed the same sentiment when she said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will.” If Stalin and Mother Teresa not only agreed (albeit for vastly different reasons) but were also correct on this score, it means that though we may possess incredible sensitivity to the suffering of one individual, we are generally (and disturbingly) apathetic to the suffering of many.

  Can it really be that we care less about a tragedy as the number of sufferers increases? This is a depressing thought, and I will forewarn you that what follows will not make for cheerful reading—but, as is the case with many other human problems, it is important to understand what really drives our behavior.

  The Identifiable Victim Effect

  To better understand why we respond more to individual suffering than to that of the masses, allow me to walk you through an experiment carried out by Deborah Small (a professor at the University of Pennsylvania), George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic (founder and president of Decision Research). Deb, George, and Paul gave participants $5 for completing some questionnaires. Once the participants had the money in hand, they were given information about a problem related to food shortage and asked how much of their $5 they wanted to donate to fight this crisis.

  As you must have guessed, the information about the food shortage was presented to different people in different ways. One group, which was called the statistical condition, read the following:

  Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children. In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42% drop in the maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated 3 million Zambians face hunger. 4 million Angolans—one third of the population—have been forced to flee their homes. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.

  Participants were then given the opportunity to donate a portion of the $5 they just earned to a charity that provided food assistance. Before reading on, ask yourself, “If I were in a participant’s shoes, how much would I give, if anything?”

  The second group of participants, in what was called the identifiable condition, was presented with information about Rokia, a desperately poor seven-year-old girl from Mali who faced starvation. These participants looked at her picture and read the following statement (which sounds as if it came straight from a direct-mail appeal):

  Her life would be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed her, provide her with an education, as well as basic medical care and hygiene education.

  As was the case in the statistical condition, participants in the identifiable condition were given the opportunity to donate some or all of the $5 they had just earned. Again, ask yourself how much you might donate in response to the story of Rokia. Would you give more of your money to help Rokia or to the more general fight against hunger in Africa?

  If you were anything like the participants in the experiment, you would have given twice as much to Rokia as you would to fight hunger in general (in the statistical condition, the average donation was 23 percent of participants’ earnings; in the identifiable condition, the average was more than double that amount, 48 percent). This is the essence of what social scientists call “the identifiable victim effect”: once we have a face, a picture, and details about a person, we feel for them, and our actions—and money—follow. However, when the information is not individualized, we simply don’t feel as much empathy and, as a consequence, fail to act.

  The identifiable victim effect has not escaped the notice of many charities, including Save the Children, March of Dimes, Children International, the Humane Society, and hundreds of others. They know that the key to our wallets is to arouse our empathy and that examples of individual suffering are one of the best ways to ignite our emotions (individual examples emotions wallets).

  IN MY OPINION, the American Cancer Society (ACS) does a tremendous job of implementing the underlying psychology of the identifiable victim effect. The ACS understands not only the importance of emotions but also how to mobilize them. How does the ACS do it? For one thing, the word “cancer” itself creates a more powerful emotional imagery than a more scientifically informative name such as “transformed cell abnormality.” The ACS also makes powerful use of another rhetorical tool by dubbing everyone who has ever had cancer a “survivor” regardless of the severity of the case (and even if it’s more likely that a person would die of old age long before his or her cancer could take its toll). An emotionally loaded word such as “survivor” lends an additional charge to the cause. We don’t use that word in connection with, say, asthma or osteoporosis. If the National Kidney Foundation, for example, started calling anyone who had suffered from kidney failure a “renal failure survivor,” wouldn’t we give more money to fight this very dangerous condition?

  On top of that, conferring the title “survivor” on anyone who has had cancer makes it possible for the ACS to create a broad and highly sympathetic network of people who have a deep personal interest in the cause and can create more personal connections to others who don’t have the disease. Through the ACS’s many sponsorship-based marathons and charity events, people who would otherwise not be directly connected to the cause end up donating money—not necessarily because they are interested in cancer research and prevention but because they know a cancer survivor. Their concern for that one person motivates them to give their time and money to the ACS.

  Closeness, Vividness, and the “Drop-in-the-Bucket” Effect

  The experiment and anecdotes I just described demonstrate that we are willing to spend money, time, and effort to help identifiable victims yet fail to act when confronted with statistical victims (say, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans). But what are the reasons for this pattern of behavior? As is the case for many complex social problems, here too there are multiple psychological forces in play. But before we discuss these in more detail, try the following thought experiment:*

  Imagine that you are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, interviewing for your dream job. You have an hour before your interview, so you decide to walk to your appointment from your hotel in order to see some of the city and clear your head. As you walk across a bridge over the Charles River, you hear a cry below y
ou. A few feet up the river, you see a little girl who seems to be drowning—she’s calling for help and gasping for air. You are wearing a brand-new suit and snappy accoutrements, all of which has cost you quite a bit of money—say, $1,000. You’re a good swimmer, but you have no time to remove anything if you want to save her. What do you do? Chances are you wouldn’t think much; you’d simply jump in to save her, destroying your new suit and missing your job interview. Your decision to jump in is certainly a reflection of the fact that you are a kind and wonderful human being, but it might also be due partially to three psychological factors.*

  First, there’s your proximity to the victim—a factor psychologists refer to as closeness. Closeness doesn’t just refer to physical nearness, however; it also refers to a feeling of kinship—you are close to your relatives, your social group, and to people with whom you share similarities. Naturally (and thankfully), most of the tragedies in the world are not close to us in terms of physical or psychological proximity. We don’t personally know the vast majority of the people who are suffering, and therefore it is hard for us to feel as much empathy for their pain as we might for a relative, friend, or neighbor in trouble. The effect of closeness is so powerful that we are much more likely to give money to help a neighbor who has lost his high-paying job than to a much needier homeless person who lives one town over. And we will be even less likely to give money to help someone whose home has been lost to an earthquake three thousand miles away.

  The second factor is what we call vividness. If I tell you that I’ve cut myself, you don’t get the full picture and you don’t feel much of my pain. But if I describe the cut in detail with tears in my voice and tell you how deep the wound is, how much the torn skin hurts me, and how much blood I’m losing, you get a more vivid picture and will empathize with me much more. Likewise, when you can see a drowning victim and hear her cries as she struggles in the cold water, you feel an immediate need to act.

  The opposite of vividness is vagueness. If you are told that someone is drowning but you don’t see that person or hear their cry, your emotional machinery is not engaged. Vagueness is a bit like looking at a picture of Earth taken from space; you can see the shape of the continents, the blue of the oceans, and the large mountain ridges, but you don’t see the details of traffic jams, pollution, crime, and wars. From far away, everything looks peaceful and lovely; we don’t feel the need to change anything.

  The third factor is what psychologists call the drop-in-the-bucket effect, and it has to do with your faith in your ability to single-handedly and completely help the victims of a tragedy. Think about a developing country where many people die from contaminated water. The most each of us can do is go there ourselves and help build a clean well or sewage system. But even that intense level of personal involvement will save only a few people, leaving millions of others still in desperate need. In the face of such large needs, and given the small part of it that we can personally solve, one may be tempted to shut down emotionally and say, “What’s the point?”*

  TO THINK ABOUT how these factors might influence your own behavior, ask yourself the following questions: What if the drowning girl lived in a faraway land hit by a tsunami and you could, at a very moderate expense (much less than the $1,000 that your suit cost you), help save her from her fate? Would you be just as likely to “jump in” with your dollars? Or what if the situation involved a less vivid and immediate danger to her life? For example, let’s say she was in danger of contracting malaria. Would your impulse to help her be just as strong? Or what if there were many, many children like her in danger of developing diarrhea or HIV/AIDS (and there are)? Would you feel discouraged by your inability to completely solve the problem? What would happen to your motivation to help?

  If I were a betting man, I would wager that your desire to act to save many kids who are slowly contracting a disease in a faraway land is not that high compared with the urge to help a relative, friend, or neighbor who is dying of cancer. (Lest you feel that I’m picking on you, you should know that I behave exactly the same way.) It is not that you are hard-hearted, it is just that you are human—and when a tragedy is faraway, large, and involves many people, we take it in from a more distant, less emotional, perspective. When we can’t see the small details, suffering is less vivid, less emotional, and we feel less compelled to act.

  IF YOU STOP to think about it, millions of people around the world are essentially drowning every day from starvation, war, and disease. And despite the fact that we could achieve a lot at a relatively small cost, thanks to a combination of closeness, vividness, and the drop-in-the-bucket effect, most of us don’t do much to help.

  Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, did a good job describing the distinction between an individual life and a statistical life when he wrote:

  Let a 6-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.17

  How Rational Thought Blocks Empathy

  All this appeal to emotion raises the question: what if we could make people more rational, like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock? Spock, after all, was the ultimate realist: being both rational and wise, he would realize that it’s most sensible to help the greatest number of people and take actions that are proportional to the real magnitude of the problem. Would a colder view of problems prompt us to give more money to fight hunger on a larger scale than helping little Rokia?

  To test what would happen if people thought in a more rational and calculated manner, Deb, George, and Paul designed another interesting experiment. At the start of this experiment, they asked some of the participants to answer the following question: “If a company bought 15 computers at $1,200 each, then, by your calculation, how much did the company pay in total?” This was not a complex mathematical question; its goal was to prime (the general term psychologists use for putting people in a particular, temporary state of mind) the participants so that they would think in a more calculating way. The other participants were asked a question that would prime their emotions: “When you hear the name George W. Bush, what do you feel? Please use one word to describe your predominant feeling.”

  After answering these initial questions, the participants were given the information either about Rokia as an individual (the identifiable condition) or about the general problem of food shortage in Africa (the statistical condition). Then they were asked how much money they would donate to the given cause. The results showed that those who were primed to feel emotion gave much more money to Rokia as an individual than to help fight the more general food shortage problem (just as in the experiment without any priming). The similarity of the results when participants were primed with emotions and when they were not primed at all suggests that even without emotional priming, participants relied on their feelings of compassion when making their donation decisions (that is why adding an emotional prime did not change anything—it was already part of the decision process).

  And what about the participants who were primed to be in a calculating, Spock-like state of mind? You might expect that more calculated thinking would cause them to “fix” the emotional bias toward Rokia and so to give more to help a larger number of people. Unfortunately, those who thought in a more calculated way became equal-opportunity misers by giving a similarly small amount to both causes. In other words, getting people to think more like Mr. Spock reduced all appeal to compassion and, as a consequence, made the participants less inclined to donate either to Rokia or to the food problem in general. (From a rational point of view, of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, a truly rational person would generally not spend any money on anything or anyone that would not produce a tangible return on investment.)
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br />   I FOUND THESE results very depressing, but there was more. The original experiment that Deb, George, and Paul carried out on the identifiable victim effect—the one in which participants gave twice as much money to help Rokia as to fight hunger in general—had a third condition. In this condition, participants received both the individual information about Rokia and the statistical information about the food problem simultaneously (without any priming).

  Now try to guess the amount that participants donated. How much do you think they gave when they learned about both Rokia and the more general food shortage problem at the same time? Would they give the same high amount as when they learned only about Rokia? Or would they offer the same low amount as when the problem was presented in a statistical way? Somewhere in the middle? Given the depressing tone of this chapter, you can probably guess the pattern of results. In this mixed condition, the participants gave 29 percent of their earnings—slightly higher than the 23 percent that the participants in the statistical condition gave but much lower than the 48 percent donated in the individualized condition. Simply put, it turned out to be extremely difficult for participants to think about calculation, statistical information, and numbers and to feel emotion at the same time.