Why People Get Upset About The Wrong Stories

“One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic”– Commonly attributed to Stalin

Let’s look at two stories.

After reading each of these stories, which one makes you feel the most sad? Which cause would you be more likely to donate money to? Do you value the lives of those in one story more than the other?

A rational thinker might conclude that the 23,000 homeless in Indonesia is a much sadder situation than the single 12 year old girl. Then again, human beings aren’t rational. In a rational world, our sadness would increase linearly based on the number of victims. If 1 person died, we would be sad. If 1,000 people died, we would be 1000 times sadder. But human beings aren’t machines, and our psychology isn’t rational.

Americans were collectively devastated by the 2,977 deaths on 9/11, yet the 425,000 (and counting) deaths from COVID19 don’t seem to have caused too much sadness in most people. British people were enraged by the murder of soldier Lee Rigby on British soil by a muslim extremest, but there was far less anger about the 3977 civilian causalities in March 2003 during the first month of the Iraq war in which the British military took part in.

The public consistently gets upset about the wrong stories.

“Harm to a particular person invokes anxiety and sentiment, guilt and awe, responsibility and religion (but)… most of this awesomeness disappears when we deal with statistical death” – American Economist Thomas Schelling

As stated over and over again on this blog: human beings are evolved to live in tribes of around 150 people. The entire structure of our brain developed in a world where we lived in small tribes; as such we can’t fully comprehend the enormous societies, filled with hundreds of millions of people, we now find ourselves in. We can logically and rationally understand that 10,000 have died in a tragedy, but we cannot emotionally understand a tragedy of this scale.

If a single person dies, we might cry and mourn. If 100,000 people die all we can do is shrug and say “wow”. Our brains simply don’t have the capacity to understand these kinds of numbers.

The more people who suffer from a tragedy, the less we care about them.

When people are affected by a disaster, a kind of psychological numbing occurs. Though people are capable of feeling deeply for a single victim and their plight, compassion fade can set in when a tragedy involves large numbers of victims.

The identifiable victim effect shows us that people are more likely to help a single person about whom they have personal information than unidentified or statistical people.

Kogut and Ritov (2005) found that donation appeal letters that ask for donations for a lifesaving cure are more effective when they show a single ill child than when they show 8 children with the same illness. They are even more effective when the child is identified by their name, age and picture.

Charities have known for quite some time that it’s better to focus on individuals rather than numbers, which is why charity ads tend to use images of a single suffering child rather than focusing on statistics.

Media is primal. In our tribal environment, statistics didn’t exist. On the other hand, the suffering of children in our tribe did exist. That’s why big images of suffering children can make us emotional, while text saying “80,000 children are homeless in the UK” doesn’t.

The attention we pay to different tragedies around us, is not be based on their objective level of horror, but instead on the way in which they invoke emotions in us. People’s emotional reaction to a tragedy is not based on the scale of the horror, but instead on the fashion in which the tragedy occurred.

Obesity kills an estimated 300,000 per year in the United States. Much of this due to a food industry that purposefully creates addictive foods in order to make profit. Yet this is a slow moving, boring tragedy that is only witnessed first hand by doctors in hospitals, so Americans don’t spend much time crying over this particular tragedy despite the enormous amount of suffering it’s caused for American citizens.

On the other hand, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that killed 2977 people (less than 1% of yearly obesity deaths), caused Americans to tear up, sing the national anthem and wage war in revenge. It was the dramatic, public fashion of the tragedy that caused people to react this way. The buildings collapsing to the ground, people jumping to their deaths, firefighters being buried underneath the rubble – this is why people reacted emotionally in the way they did.

According to the data (which is up for debate), COVID19 has killed 425,000 Americans in the space of a single year. Despite the enormous number of deaths, many people seem quite disinterested in this tragedy. People will say “Thousands die from the flu every year”, “Calm down, people die every day” or “Death is a normal part of life”. Ask yourself, would Americans have ever made statements like this about 9/11 (2977 deaths) or hurricane Katrina (1833 deaths)? People are able to make justifications and dismissals like this because they’re emotionally unaffected by COVID death statistics.

Many aren’t emotionally affected by the COVID19 deaths for various reasons. First, the numbers are simply too big for our lizard brains to understand. Second, many of those who died were elderly or had comorbidities. Third, most of the deaths happened behind the close doors of hospitals away from our eyes and our cameras.

In the first two months of the Iraq war, over 7000 innocent people were killed. Estimates for the total number of dead civilians during the entire war range from 100,000 to over 1 million.

As usual, we’re unable to emotionally react to these statistics. Because: 1. The numbers are too big for us to understand. 2. The deaths were from the “enemy” and therefore justified in our minds. 3. We didn’t see much footage of these deaths as the western media downplayed the atrocities, instead only focusing on American and British military deaths. As we didn’t see Iraqi civilian deaths with our own eyes, our lizard brain doesn’t believe they actually occurred. 4. Our main exposure to the Iraq war came through movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker, movies that generally avoided dealing with the topic of Iraqi civilian deaths.

The public frequently get outraged about things that don’t matter, and fail to get outraged about the things that do. Governments and media manipulators know which stories make the public upset and which don’t.

In 1990, teenage girl Nayirah gave her testimony describing Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the floor. This point was then repeated over and over again by news outlets and President George H.W. bush. This had a dramatic impact on American public opinion towards the gulf war in Iraq, and two months afterwards, the gulf war began.

As it turns out, Nayirah’s testimony was completely false. She was actually the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her speech was created by American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton.

This PR firm crafted a story that was perfectly designed to outrage the public. They conjured an image in the minds of the American public of innocent babies being thrown onto the floor and left to die. This story hijacked the public’s natural instincts to protect children and used them to gather support for the war. The most telling line of her speech is when she says “left them to die on the cold floor”. Would a normal person add the word “cold” in this sentence? Only a speech writer for a PR firm would write something like this.

Which stories the public gets upset about is entirely predictable. Media manipulators know this, and use it to their advantage.

In 2020, a video of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd went viral. George Floyd died from this incident, and it sparked nationwide “Black Lives Matter” protests that continued for months.

Statistics about racism towards blacks would never inspire that much emotion in people. No protest has ever started because of a newly released statistic. Instead, what it takes to spark anger is the right video in the right situation.Certainty, you might say that the video simply sparked a large amount of anger that had been building amongst the black community for a long time. But that’s the point. It took a video pushing particular buttons to go viral before this anger transformed into protests.

When we see a man being choked to death while pleading for his life with our own eyes, we get angry. When we hear statistics about the numbers of incidents (many of which just as horrifying as the George Floyd incident), we don’t get emotional about it. We get emotional about the same things we would have done in our tribal environments. Seeing someone being choked to death bushes our evolutionary buttons, reading statistics does not.

Miles Scott was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia (a form of leukemia) at 18 months old. The Make-A-Wish Foundation, helped by a social media marketing agency, sent out an email asking for supporters. The project was a wild success, and by the time the event came around, the Batkid had over 12,000 supporters.

They staged an entire roleplay around the city of San Francisco, with actors, props and even a fake media broadcast asking the Batkid for help saving the city. There were multiple scenes, one with a damsel in distress and one with a villain called “The Riddler” stealing money from a bank vault. It was an enormous event, with countless resources dedicated to it, all in the name of a single child.

The social media campaign was so effective because it focused it’s efforts around a single child. Thousands of people were touched by Miles’s story and offered to help. If the campaign had asked for help in treating the illness of 10,000 children with cancer, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

The problem with all of this is that public policy decisions often reflect what the public cares about. And if the public continually gets upset about the wrong things, then our governments will continually put their efforts and resources towards the wrong problems.

Next time you see a statistic saying 12,000 people have died, don’t shrug your shoulders and say “wow”. Remember that each and every one of those people was an individual with their own hopes and dreams, and had family who loved them just as much as you love your own family.

Instead of seeing the statistics simply as numbers, imagine a stadium filled with people. If 80,000 people have died in a tragedy, then look at the image below and understand what 80,000 looks like. And try to rethink which stories you get upset about, and which you don’t.