Seat at the Table

Last year I wrote about a picture being worth more than a statistic in drive people to act.  At the time, I was referring to a point Carl Bialik (the Wall Street Journal’s The Numbers Guy was making about a picture of a single child driving more donation than a statement of fact that millions were staving.

Richard Edelman raises a  similar point in the section of his post from Davos about what consumers will pay for green products.   Professor Ariely of MIT explained why consumers won’t spend more than they are (which isn’t much) to buy a green product because they don’t have “an identifiable victim.”  In other words, like pictures of single starving children driving more donations  than the fact that many are starting, the emotion of seeing one person that is a victim of environmental damage can do more to drive consumer action than the numbers that quantify how much damage is done.

Both numbers and human stories have a place. A number is the fact that proves a story true (x acres of rainforest have been destroyed and displaced X people).  But it is the single person’s story or picture that provide the emotional impact which allows people to absorb that number and understand it’s significance.  With a number, people don’t have the emotion impact needed to act.  With the story or picture, people don’t have the quantitative impact needed to know how much they should act.  With both, you can see substantial action.