The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic

It’s 2 September 2015 around 2am in the Turkish seaside resort of Bodrum. The Kurdi family, dad Abdullah, mum Rehana and two brothers Alan (aged three) and Galib (aged five) are climbing into a small dinghy. Their father has paid around $6000 for a half-hour boat trip to the Greek island of Kos.

The family had fled civil war-ravaged Syria. Previous attempts to get asylum in Canada had failed and, despite warnings from family and acquaintances, they are about to undertake the dangerous crossing. The small inflatable boat takes eight people, yet 16 board it – without life jackets. The boat sets off in the dark night towards Kos. After a few minutes, disaster strikes and the boat capsizes. Mama Rehana and brothers Alan and Galib immediately drown and their bodies wash up on the Turkish coast a few hours later. There, Turkish press photographer Nilufer Demir, takes the iconic photo that shocks the whole world: the lifeless body of a toddler lying at the waterline, his head and belly facing the sand, dressed in a red t-shirt and short blue trousers. “I was petrified” Demir testified afterwards. “We were shocked. We felt sorrow for them. The best thing to do was to make this tragedy heard”.

The photograph struck like a bomb. The image of the drowned toddler raged through Western media like a whirlwind. Government leaders scrambled over each other to express their sympathy and call for an end to the civil war. Yet the civil war had been going on for five years and the media, government leaders and the world’s population knew of 250,000 deaths. Donations to organisations working with Syrian refugees were up to 55 times higher in the weeks following the photo than in the weeks before. The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. How cynical...

Do you want to cure one or eight children of cancer?

This quote is said to be from Joseph Stalin in a conversation with US diplomat, Averell Harriman.

And Stalin was an expert on the subject because, during his reign of terror, between 9 and 20 million people died unnatural deaths. In addition to this brutal dictator, Mother Theresa, anti-poverty activist and nun canonised by the Catholic Church, also came to this psychological realisation that when numbers are high, our compassion collapses. She said “If I look at the mass, I will never act”. So it is not the case that when the number of victims rise, our compassion rises proportionately. On the contrary, when the numbers rise, our sympathy drops incredibly fast. It is a natural reaction not to be personally overwhelmed by the tragedy and grief.

American Psychology professor Paul Slovic conducted extensive research on this subject. In one of his experiments, he asked one group of people to donate money to sponsor the treatment of eight children suffering from cancer. He asked the other group to do the same, but this time for only one child. People gave more money to save one child than eight.

Professional aid organisations are well aware of this psychological trap. In their requests for money, they approach us with concrete stories. Marie is a single mother with two young children who has been struck down by an aggressive breast cancer. Do you want to support her? Robbert was abandoned by his parents and now grows up in an orphanage in the poorest neighbourhoods of Johannesburg. The supervisors have noticed that Robbert is a genius at mathematics and chess. Can you help Robbert with a scholarship? Bob the polar bear lives in Spitsbergen. But last summer a lot of drift ice melted so Bob didn’t find enough food. So, support our climate actions!

A story is up to 22 times stronger

The story of the hungry and helpless polar bear Bob is much likely to persuade you into action than the objective fact that, according to scientists, global warming will cause about 30% of polar bears to die in the next 45 years.

Harvard Professor of Psychology Jerome Bruner, in his book Actual minds, possible worlds, states that our brain functions in two different ways. The first way of thinking is the logical way, full of thought processes to solve puzzles, test hypotheses and find logical explanations. The second way of thinking is the narrative way, with imagination, good stories and gripping drama. Facts told in stories are said to be recalled up to 22 times more.

Both a strong story and well-considered argument can be used to convince people. But both instruments work differently. A good argument is information and tries to convince you of its truth. A strong story is true to life, meaningful and educates you. So the conclusion is simple… If you want to convince people with numbers, wrap it up in a nice story. Add a compelling picture or a striking statistic and you will have much more impact than if you limit yourself to dry, logical analysis.

Examples of this technique are numerous and have been used for a long time. The renowned Florence Nightingale modernised our nursing in the second half of the 19th century. During the Crimean War, she realised that most soldiers did not die as a result of acts of war, but due to a lack of hygiene and good hospital care. In order to convince the government of this, she meticulously collected mountains of data and developed a new type of diagram, the ‘polar diagram’. After the Crimean War, she continued her work for better health care with the help of figures and statistics and beautiful diagrams to convince the upper echelons of society of her thoughts. She lobbied Queen Victoria, convinced that she would take a look at her book. “She may look at it because it has picture” wrote Nightingale in a letter.

A recent example of data wrapped up in a story is the Dollar Street project of the Gapminder Organisation. The idea of the group around Anna Rosling Rönnlund is to represent poverty and wealth visually. On the interactive site, families, houses, beds, toys, toilets and so on are ranked from low to high income. The world is illustrated as if everyone lives in the same dollar street and you discover that the concept of the ‘third world country’ is completely outdated and that, despite their different incomes, people meet their basic needs in a fairly uniform way.

Check your emotions

We’ve learned above that logical analysis and objective data are not the strongest arguments for convincing someone. A powerful picture, a nice statistic or an original illustration are often stronger to incite people to action. This knowledge gives you, as a messenger, a powerful weapon. But how do you defend this as a receiver, as a listener? In his book How to make the world add up, English economic journalist Tim Harford advises us to always check our feelings when we hear or see a figure. “When we encounter evidence that we dislike, we ask ourselves: Must I believe this (...) And when we encounter evidence that we approve of, we ask a different question: Can I believe this.”

A first quick check is to find out who you are trying to convince and why he or she is saying it. In late April 2020, then US President Donald Trump suggested injecting bleach or disinfectant alcohol into people to combat Coronavirus. The idea is, of course, scientific nonsense. But, regardless of Trump’s figure, the president is a respected authority in the United States. Despite warnings from the healthcare industry, the media and even chemical manufacturers in the weeks following the President’s statement, the number of accidents involving disinfectants in the US doubled.

In Russia, we see the opposite. The propaganda of the Putin regime is viewed with such suspicion by a large proportion of the population that they refuse to be inoculated with the Sputnik V vaccine developed in Russia, even though the vaccine’s efficacy has been confirmed, in, for example, the internationally renowned specialist journal The Lancet.

To summarise then, you are more likely to be persuaded of the safe efficacy of the Covid vaccine when your best friend argues it than by a stranger you don’t trust. In many cases, it is more important for us to believe who says it than what they says. If I say that bleach helps against Covid-19, nobody believes it. Buts if Donald Trump says it…

The second check is closely related to this… Ask yourself whether the statement corresponds to your views or not. Tim Harford relates a nice anecdote about this in his previously mentioned book How to make the world add up. In his lectures at King's College, the neuroscientist Kris De Meyer lets his students read the following email from a climate activist who lists his objections to the techniques of the global warming deniers: “To summarise the climate deniers’ activities I think we can say that: (1) Their efforts have been aggressive while ours have been defensive. (2) The deniers’ activities are rather orderly – almost as if they had a plan working for them. I think the denialist forces can be characterized as dedicated opportunists. They are quick to act and seem to be totally unprincipled in the type of information they use to attack the scientific community. There is no question, though, that we have been inept in getting our side of the story, good though it may be, across the news media and the public.” After the students have let off steam during the seminar about the cynical techniques of the climate deniers, De Meyer reveals the true source of the text. It is not a recent email, but a quote from a 1968 memo from a cigarette manufacturer’s marketer denouncing the methods of the anti-cigarette lobby.

The final check is to consider whether your initial reaction to hearing the information is correct. This is described in detail in Daniel Kahneman’s bestseller Thinking fast and slow and based on Shane Frederick’s cognitive reflection test. Frederick developed the test of three questions in 2005. Can you solve them? And is your first answer correct? Good luck!

• A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
• If 5 machines take 5 minutes to make 5 objects, how long do 100 machines take to make 100 objects?
• There is a water lily plant in a lake. Every day the plant grows twice as big. If it takes 48 days for the water lily to cover the entire lake, how long does it take for the water lily to cover half the lake?

So let us be extra vigilant when Mr X or Mrs Y tries to convince us with nicely packaged figures. And finally, of course Stalin is wrong. “The death of one person” is indeed a tragedy. But “The death of millions” is not a statistic, but millions of tragedies. Or as Coldplay sings “Every teardrop is a waterfall”.