Novocain for Monkey Brain

“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.

How psychophysical numbing causes pain in our wallets