The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

See also Social Comparison Bias (ch. 72); Hedonic Treadmill (ch. 46)

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87
WHY YOU PREFER NOVELS TO STATISTICS
Personification
For eighteen years, the American media was prohibited from showing
photographs of fallen soldiers’ coffins. In February 2009, defence secretary
Robert Gates lifted this ban and images flooded on to the Internet. Officially,
family members have to give their approval before anything is published, but such
a rule is unenforceable. Why was this ban created in the first place? To conceal
the true costs of war. We can easily find out the number of casualties, but
statistics leave us cold. People, on the other hand, especially dead people, spark
an emotional reaction.
Why is this? For aeons, groups have been essential to our survival. Thus, over
the past 100,000 years, we have developed an impressive sense of how others
think and feel. Science calls this the ‘theory of mind’. Here’s an experiment to
illustrate it: you are given $100 and must share it with a stranger. You can decide
how it is divided up. If the other person is happy with your suggestion, the money
will be divided that way. If he or she turns down your offer, you must return the
$100, and no one gets anything. How do you split the sum?
It would make sense to offer the stranger very little – maybe just a dollar. After
all, it’s better than nothing. However, in the 1980s, when economists began
experimenting with such ‘ultimatum games’ (the technical term), the subjects
behaved very differently: they offered the other party between 30% and 50%.
Anything below 30% was considered ‘unfair’. The ultimatum game is one of the
clearest manifestations of the ‘theory of mind’: in short, we empathise with the
other person.
However, with one tiny change it is possible to near-eliminate this compassion:
put the players in separate rooms. When people can’t see their counterparts – or,
indeed, when they have never seen them – it is more difficult to simulate their
feelings. The other person becomes an abstraction, and the share they are
offered drops, on average, to below 20%.
In another experiment, psychologist Paul Slovic asked people for donations.
One group was shown a photo of Rokia from Malawi, an emaciated child with

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pleading eyes. Afterward, people donated an average of $2.83 to the charity (out
of $5 they were given to fill out a short survey). The second group was shown
statistics about the famine in Malawi, including the fact that more than three
million malnourished children were affected. The average donation dropped by
50%. This is illogical: you would think that people’s generosity would grow if they
knew the extent of the disaster. But we do not function like that. Statistics don’t stir
us; people do.
The media have long known that factual reports and bar charts do not entice
readers. Hence the guideline: give the story a face. If a company features in the
news, a picture of the CEO appears alongside (either grinning or grimacing,
depending on the market). If a state makes the headlines, the president
represents it. If an earthquake takes place, a victim becomes the face of the crisis.
This obsession explains the success of a major cultural invention: the novel.
This literary ‘killer app’ projects personal and interpersonal conflicts on to a few
individual destinies. A scholar could have written a meaty dissertation about the
methods of psychological torture in Puritan New England, but instead, we still
read Hawthorne’s 
The Scarlet Letter
. And the Great Depression? In statistical
form, this is just a long series of numbers. As a family drama, in Steinbeck’s 
The
Grapes of Wrath
, it is unforgettable.
In conclusion: be careful when you encounter human stories. Ask for the facts
and the statistical distribution behind them. You can still be moved by the story,
but this way, you can put it into the right context. If, however, you seek to move
and motivate people for your own ends, make sure your tale is seasoned with
names and faces.