People don’t care about numbers, so how do we get them to act?
Market researchers need to step back from the numbers and become storytellers if they want to get people to care, and to act, argues Matthew Swinson.
People don’t care about numbers. We consistently fail to act on them. If we hear a story of a child in a war-ravaged place, we connect. We feel something. We act. If you bring in that child’s brother or sister, response diminishes. If you bring in their sibling and tell the reader that there are 500,000 other suffering children, the response drops off the cliff.
This is the point psychology professor Paul Slovic makes in his TEDx talk, dramatically titled ‘The More Who Die, The Less We Care’. And it’s a point that has huge consequences, particularly for the market research industry.
‘The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.’ – Joseph Stalin
Statistics are people with the tears wiped away… or something to that effect x
The other thing to consider here is the bystander effect – which posits that the more people in a position to act towards a person in distress, the less each individual will actually do something.
For an excellent example of humanising data, I recommend Charles Duhigg’s ‘Smarter, Faster, Better’ which features the story of teacher Nancy Johnson and the Cincinnati Elementary Initiative.
Thanks man – will look it up.
Free copy here. Chapter 8…
https://brookspsychology.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/smarter-faster-better_-the-secrets-of-bein-charles-duhigg.pdf
Great article Matt. Within marketing specifically, I’d say that at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a tendency for ‘quantification bias’ in that, decisions are made based on what is measurable and therefore perceived to be more valuable. For example, digital attribution.