Generally speaking, facts doesn’t sell; stories do. However, recent studies indicate that may not be the case. Numbers influence our choices on what to buy, who to hire, and where to donate money, despite the widespread belief that they are boring and uninspired.
According to a study that was published last month in the journal PNAS, people find that numbers are so persuasive that they will prioritize relatively unimportant characteristics over more pertinent information presented in a qualitative fashion when making decisions. The phenomena is referred to by the researchers as quantification fixation.
I think it helps explain why there s such a move to put a number on everything, said Katherine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the paper. Consider internet purchases, for instance. Comparing customer star ratings is far simpler than sifting through a ton of detailed reviews. At the top, Amazon displays the number of ratings in addition to the average rating as a number and a graphic.
The paper itself begins with a striking figure. To support their findings and investigate how quantification fixation functions in various settings, the researchers ran 21 tests.
In one, volunteers were invited to choose a summer intern in the role of a supervisor. They were informed that two candidates were similar in every aspect, with the exception that one received a higher management grade and the other a higher calculus grade. People inclined to choose the candidate with the higher calculus grade when the calculus grade was given as a number; however, this preference reversed when the management grade was the sole number provided.
In a another experiment, the researchers sought to see whether obsessing over numbers could lead people to make poor decisions. Therefore, they requested volunteers once more to play the role of employer and select potential workers to help them in a game. Cash rewards would be given to the winning pairs.
Three skill areas—math, trivia, and an evaluation of geometric reasoning known as the angles test—were used to rate the potential employees. Once more, people were more inclined to select the applicant whose skills were represented by a numerical value (as opposed to, say, a bar graph without any numbers). These teams won less money as a result of their actions, despite being informed that the numerical skill had less bearing on victory.
The price of eggs
I think it s a brilliant paper, said Ellen Peters, a former engineer turned psychologist at the University of Oregon. According to the notion, individuals will flee from numbers because they detest them, she added. But this and other studies show people prefer using numbers to make decisions.
Peters took part in a recent study that showed people were much more likely to share social media posts on climate change if they included numerical information. The numbers made people think the posts were more trustworthy, she said.
There s a lesson here for those of us trying to sell things, or get hired, or even to get elected.
If there s a quality you want people to value, put a number on it. If there s something you d rather people ignore, make it qualitative. Perhaps some degree of numeric fixation can explain why, when asked if they re better off than they were four years ago, voters focus on what s most quantifiable the price they see on a carton of eggs.
And there s a lesson for making better decisions about where to spend our money. Do we really care about a 4.5 versus a 4.4? Or are we ignoring other important information like whether an item suits our kitchen or our wardrobe? Sometimes we imbue more authority in numbers than they deserve.
An overrated life
There are some caveats to the quantification fixation. Most people have poor intuition for big numbers, so when faced with the cost of a Mars mission or a foreign war, it all sounds expensive whether it adds up to $7 million or $270 billion, let alone anything in the trillions.
And numbers don t work to inspire compassion. Whether it s deaths from cancer, COVID or natural disasters, people generally don t muster more compassion for a million than they do for 100,000 or 10,000.
But ratings are on the upswing. In the prescient 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a future somewhere in the 2020s has become so ratings-obsessed that every time the protagonist walked into a bar, other patrons used a smartphone-like device called an apparat to rate his hotness (always low) and his potential as a long-term mate.
What follows is an all-too-plausible scenario of crass consumerism gone wild, economic collapse and terror when all the apparats stop working. The book only got 4 out of 5 Amazon stars, but don t be turned off by that. It s just a number.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. 2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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