“If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
–Joseph Stalin
You have an opportunity to donate to a charity.
Charity A can provide clean drinking water to a refugee camp with 11,000 people. Efforts from this charity will save 4,500 lives.
Charity B can provide clean drinking water to a refugee camp with 250,000 people. Efforts from this charity will save 4,500 lives.
Which one would you prefer to send money to?
This was a question asked by Stanford University’s David Fetherstonhaugh and his colleagues in trying to understand how we deal with large tragedies.
They found that more people (44%) responded that it was better to support Charity A than that it made no difference which one they supported (42%).
Even though each charity could save the same amount of lives, we are subjected to a phenomenon in our limbic systems called psychophysical numbing, which, as Fetherstonhaugh and his research defined it, means that the larger the tragedy, the more numbed to it we are.
A tsunami kills hundreds of thousands, and we are struck by the magnitude of the tragedy, but not particularly affected by it. A small child is hit by a stray bullet and killed, and a significant portion of the town comes to the funeral to grieve with the parents.
Why?
The reason is twofold. First, our limbic systems, or Monkey Brain as I like to call it, since it’s the part of the brain that we share with simians, simply aren’t prepared to deal with such large numbers. When our ancient counterparts were roaming the plains searching for woolly mammoths, there was no such number as a billion, or even a million. A large number might be a herd of fifty mammoths or hundreds of leaves on a tree.
The second reason is that we are sensitive to large changes in small numbers but not to small changes in large numbers, even if the magnitude of the small change in a large number is much greater. As we saw in “Monkey Brain Confuses Rates and Raw Numbers,” we don’t do well at estimating or large percentages, and we don’t often take the step involved to multiply the rate and the number to determine the true outcome.
As the University of Oregon’s Drs. Paul Slovic and Ellen Peters explain, we often focus on the numerator and not the denominator when faced with numerical problems. When asked whether they wanted to pick from a jar that had one winning red jellybean and nine losing white jellybeans or seven winning red jellybeans and ninety three losing white jellybeans, people invariably chose the latter bet, figuring, incorrectly, that since there were seven winners versus one, their odds were better.
The larger the number, the more Monkey Brain is numbed to its affects.
While this numbing helps us not break down into wailing of misery every time something bad happens in the world (by the way, turning off the television and not reading the news helps, too), it can have devastating effects in our financial lives.
Excellent article, Jason!
I actually just experienced this last week. I was being interviewed for an article and the interviewer asked me how many months worth of expenses I had saved up. I’d never really thought of my net worth in that way so I had to go away and compute it before giving her an answer.
When I did, I was pleasantly surprised and for the first time in a long time, I could actually comprehend how much I’d saved.
Watching a large sum tick up doesn’t really mean anything but when you realize you’ve saved up hundreds of months’ worth of expenses, you realize how big of an accomplishment that actually is (especially considering how many people are living paycheck to paycheck).
It was a great realization and very motivating so I highly recommend that others follow your advice in the article and do the math and reframe big numbers so that you can appreciate what the large numbers actually mean.
Great stuff!
Hey! Good to hear from you!
Even though math, at its core, isn’t hard, as you pointed out, reframing an issue, such as calculating how much annual income your net worth can convert into makes the big numbers more salient. If you know, for example, that you can cover 85% of your current expenses using what you’ve saved and invested, you know just how far away you are from financial independence.
Good luck on your leap out of the work world later this year!
Thanks! Looking forward to catching up over a few beers in New Orleans!
I think I’m guilty of this when it comes to retirement planning. Monkey Brain says it’s easier to lean on the 4% rule of thumb, screaming “Mr. Money Mustache does it! You think you smarter than him?”
4% is not a bad metric, unless you plan on retiring early. I’ve also seen academic studies that suggest a SWR as low as 1.7%, though I’m not sure I’d go that low.