Multiple Choice Quiz: Asshole, Stupid, or Just Plain Dumb?

It's quiz day on Zeitgeist-y!

Do you think human beings
a) are self absorbed (assholes)
b) are blissfully ignorant (stupid)
c) think big numbers suck (dumb)
d) all of the above (and then some)

Being a born cynic with below average skills in mathematics (dumb!), I've been pondering this question for some time. I caught a little nugget on the radio today that shed some light on the matter, an interview with Paul Slovic, University of Oregon professor and founder of Decision Research, a think tank of sorts with the mission statement of "helping individuals, industry, government, and society understand and cope with the complex and often risky decisions of modern life." They analyze the decision making process—why individuals choose to (or not) wear seat belts and societal opinions on broader sunny topics like global warming and nuclear technology.

The interview started on the subject of Darfur but Slovic also talked in more general terms about why we fail to intervene in large-scale humanitarian disasters. Basically, it comes down to the fact that people can't process big numbers. We should be shocked to hear about the hundreds of thousands killed in Darfur over the last few years, but numbers this big leave us feeling numb and disengaged. (As an aside, I wonder if a visual aid would help here, e.g., if you laid all of the dead end to end it would stretch halfway around the equator, or something like that? It works when they talk about penny minting or the number of chocolate chip cookies sold each year.)

Anyway, Slovic made the obvious point that humans readily respond to the plight of a single individual, or even a small group of people, rather than a needy, faceless horde. We need that emotional connection, with pictures and stories and narrative to motivate us into action. And here's where the media comes into play. We donated vast sums of money after the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina because CNN told us to, 24/7 for days and days on end. Or think back to Band Aid—all the more effective because of the celebrities. I could rant on and on about celebrity humanitarianism, but what can you say? People love their celebrities and their human interest sob stories, both subjects the backbone of the local 11:00 news. If people donate money because Sir Bono told them to, then at least they gave money. "I am Africa," ok, fine.

But Slovic's analysis continued, and here's where things get interesting. Decision Research collects opinion through "simulated experiments." In one study he asked people to pretend to be ministers (?!) in charge of allocating humanitarian aid to a Rwandan refugee camp based in Zaire. You could use your money to buy enough water to support 4,500 refugees. Would you give your money to a camp of 11,000 people or to a camp of 250,000? Respondents overwhelmingly opted to send aid to the smaller camp because, Slovic thinks, they looked at the percentage of people that could be helped, not the total number. Or, in his estimation, people mustered less emotion for the bigger camp of refugees with a population so mind numbingly large that it hindered their ability to decide to take action.

A study I read about on Decision Research's website is darker. In Slovic's words, "Donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries."

I can kind of understand how difficult it is to wrap your head around a refugee camp of 250,000 people. But how is it that the factual information accompanying a picture of a starving child actually turns people off? Amazing!

I used to think that people were simply a) self-absorbed assholes and b) stupidly, blissfully, and willfully ignorant. Now I can assume that they are also c) dumb. You learn something new every day!