The same old rule of thumb is that tales promote; knowledge doesn’t. However new analysis means that’s not essentially true. Opposite to the standard knowledge that numbers are boring and uninspiring, numbers dominate our selections — on what to purchase, whom to rent and the place to donate cash.
A paper revealed final month within the journal PNAS reveals that numbers are so compelling that when making a call, folks will put extra weight on comparatively trivial attributes in the event that they’re expressed numerically, factoring them in above extra related data expressed in qualitative kind. The researchers name the phenomenon “quantification fixation.”
“I think it helps explain why there’s such a move to put a number on everything,” mentioned Katherine Milkman, a professor on the Wharton Faculty on the College of Pennsylvania and one of many authors of the paper. For instance, consider on-line purchases — it’s a lot simpler to check buyer star rankings than to kind by means of a bunch of descriptive evaluations. Proper up high, Amazon provides you not simply the common ranking as a quantity and a graphic, but additionally provides you the variety of rankings.
The paper itself begins out with a powerful quantity — the researchers performed 21 completely different experiments to bolster their conclusions and discover how quantification fixation works in several contexts.
In a single, volunteers had been put within the place of a boss being requested to decide on a summer season intern. They had been advised two candidates had been comparable in each manner besides one acquired the next grade in administration and the opposite, the next grade in calculus. After they provided the calculus grade as a quantity, folks tended to rent the candidate with the upper calculus grade, and once they switched and solely provided the administration grade as a quantity, the choice flipped.
In one other experiment, the researchers wished to see if a fixation on numbers would possibly nudge folks to make unprofitable decisions. In order that they requested volunteers once more to play the employer and select from potential staff to help them in a sport. The profitable pairs would get a money reward.
The potential staff had been scored in three ability areas — math, trivia and a geometrical reasoning evaluation known as the angles check. Folks had been once more extra doubtless to decide on the candidate whose abilities had been expressed as a quantity (somewhat than, say, as a bar graph with no numbers). They did this even when advised that the numbered ability was much less related to profitable — and, in consequence, these groups received much less cash.
The value of eggs
“I think it’s a brilliant paper,” mentioned Ellen Peters, a former engineer turned psychologist on the College of Oregon. “The stereotype is that people hate numbers, so they’re going to run away from them,” she mentioned. However this and different research present folks want utilizing numbers to make selections.
Peters took half in a latest research that confirmed folks had been more likely to share social media posts on local weather change in the event that they included numerical data. The numbers made folks assume the posts had been extra reliable, she mentioned.
There’s a lesson right here for these of us making an attempt to promote issues, or get employed, and even to get elected.
If there’s a top quality you need folks to worth, put a quantity on it. If there’s one thing you’d somewhat folks ignore, make it qualitative. Maybe some extent of numeric fixation can clarify why, when requested in the event that they’re higher off than they had been 4 years in the past, voters concentrate on what’s most quantifiable — the worth they see on a carton of eggs.
And there’s a lesson for making higher selections about the place to spend our cash. Do we actually care a couple of 4.5 versus a 4.4? Or are we ignoring different necessary data — like whether or not an merchandise fits our kitchen or our wardrobe? Generally we imbue extra authority in numbers than they deserve.
An overrated life
There are some caveats to the “quantification fixation.” Most individuals have poor instinct for large numbers, so when confronted with the price of a Mars mission or a overseas battle, all of it sounds costly whether or not it provides as much as $7 million or $270 billion, not to mention something within the trillions.
And numbers don’t work to encourage compassion. Whether or not it’s deaths from most cancers, COVID or pure disasters, folks typically don’t muster extra compassion for 1,000,000 than they do for 100,000 or 10,000.
However rankings are on the upswing. Within the prescient 2010 novel “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart, a future someplace within the 2020s has grow to be so ratings-obsessed that each time the protagonist walked right into a bar, different patrons used a smartphone-like system known as an apparat to price his hotness (all the time low) and his potential as a long-term mate.
What follows is an all-too-plausible state of affairs of crass consumerism gone wild, financial collapse and terror when all of the apparats cease working. The guide solely acquired 4 out of 5 Amazon stars, however don’t be turned off by that. It’s only a quantity.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. ©2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
