When Numbers Get in the Way of Compassion

Suppose I were seeking donations to the charity Save the Children, to help feed poor children in Africa. Which of the following three messages would be most persuasive?

(1) A description and photo of one seven-year-old girl in Mali, named Rokia, who “is desperately poor and faces a threat of hunger or even starvation.”

(2) Four statistics about the food crisis, such as, “More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.”

(3) A combination of (1) and (2).

Researchers recently tried out all three messages, seeking up to $5 in donations. Message 1 was by far the most effective, yielding an average donation of more than $2. Neither of the other two message averaged more than $1.43 — meaning that whatever psychological effect was created by personalizing the charity ended up negated by the numbers. “The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim,”
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Prof. Slovic’s focus is on the mass deaths of humans, such as in Darfur. He writes that “we need to create laws and institutions that will compel appropriate action when information about genocide becomes known,” because moral outrage won’t suffice. We are, as his Foreign Policy piece is headlined, “numbed by Numbers.”