Another distinction between emotion and condition comes from something we called,
The Trolley Problem and there's a huge cottage industry of papers about this
problem with all kinds of versions but here's the basic question.
Imagine that you're standing next to a train track.
And you see the train is coming, and you see that if the train is going to come and
continue straight, it is going to kill four people.
There are four people who are laying on the tracks, working and doing something,
and they don't know the training is coming, and if the train will come, it
will kill all four of them. Now you are standing quite far away, but
you're standing next to a lever. And if you pull the lever, the train will
take a different track. And instead of killing these four people,
it would only kill one, because on this other track there's only one person
working. Now ask yourself, if you do nothing, the
train will kill four people. If you pull the lever, the train will turn
and would kill one person. Would you do it?
And most people say, yes. Most people say, I compared the life of 4
people to the life of 1, and I think this is a good tradeoff and I am going to
redirect the train. Imagine though a second case.
You're standing on the bridge, and there's a train coming, and if the train comes
it's going to kill the four people who are working on the train because they don't
know it's coming. And next to you is a guy, and this guy is
wearing a backpack, and he's looking over the bridge on the track, and if you push
him he would fall down, and because it's both his weight and the backpack weight,
the train would hit him, kill him, but then the train would stop.
Now in this story you cannot jump yourself, you don't have a backpack and
you don't have the time. The only thing you could do is you could
push him. Would you push him?
People feel very differently about this question, though.
People don't usually say 4 versus 1, they basically say, will I have the guts to
push somebody? And what if he was turning in the other
direction. You pushed him from the back, versus he
was looking you in the eyes, and you pushed him and you would see his eyes as
he was going down on, on, onto the track. Again, people feel differently about it.
If you think about this trolley problem It's really about the fact that we have
these very different modes of thinking. We have a mode of thinking that is
consequentialist, 4 versus 1. That's just recognition, four is more than
one, one, killing one is better than four. And then we have this other mode of
thinking that is about emotion. And when it's one person that we see them
and we care about them, all of a sudden we feel very differently about it.
Now let's take this from the trolley problem, and lets try to implement this
idea in something different. So for example, if you look at the
following plot. This plot shows how much funding in
millions of dollars, is directed toward different problems in the world.
Hurricane Katrina, the terrorist activity in 9/11, the Asian tsunami, Tuberculosis,
Malaria, and AIDS. And on the,[COUGH] on the horizontal axis
you see how many people are affected by each of those in millions.
And of course, this is not all the problems in the world.
But with this set of problems you see a negative correlations.
You see that for things that attack few people like Katrina and 9/11.
We have lots and lots of money going toward them, and for things that are
effecting lots and lots of people like Malaria and AIDS, we have very little
money going toward. And now I want you to think for a second
about all the things that could contribute to that.
Why is this correlation negative? Why is it not the case that as more people
are affected. We have more funding going to it and what
in particular is causing some of those things, to be overfunded and underfunded
relative to other people? So why just think about all the possible
causes, and of course, there's more than one that could contribute to this
situation. So, I'm sure you came up with lots of
reasons of why this is happening. You could say that some of them are more
closer to the US, which gets people to contribute more money.
Some of them are further away from the US, which gets them to contribute less.
It could be racial issues, there could be all kinds of things.
But what I would like to argue, is that one of those things is about the fact that
some of them look like individual causes. Some of them are about people that you
might now. In particular when you have disasters
like, something like Katrina or 911. You can think of yourself as, you might
have been there. It could have been you.
When we talk about things like Malaria and Aids, it's things that other people might
have. It doesn't feel like you could have been
there. And on top of that, whenever we deal with
something of this preventative in nature, it's about preventing the disease from
somebody else of having it in a later time and this is very difficult for us to, to,
to think about. So all these brings us into this notion of
the identifiable victim effect. And the idea is when we see one person
suffering, our heart goes to them, we care about them.
And because of that, we're willing to give them money and we're willing to help them.
But when the problem is large, happening to lots of people.
Some of them are unborn yet, we don't have a face on the problem and because of that
we don't care to the same degree. So, let me give you a little bit about
research on this identifiable victim theory.
And this is something that Joseph Stalin and Mother Theresa agreed on.
And I think that's problem the only thing that the two of them ever agreed on and
Joseph Stalin said one man's death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic.
And Mother Theresa said, if I look at the masses I will never act.
If I look at the one I will, and they basically both captured this notion of we
care about one person. We don't care about groups of people even
if they are a many. So here's the, the research, imagine I
describe you the problem of starvation in Africa, and I said this number this
millions of kids in Malawi and this millions of kids in other country and this
number of million of kids before the [unknown], and I sort of describe the
range of the problem, and then I describe to the one group of people.
And to another group of people I do something different.
I say, there is this one girl, and this one girl is going to be hungry, and this
is her name and this is where the village she is coming from, and this is her
picture. Would you like to give money?
Would you like to give money to starvation in Africa?
Would you like to give money to the girl? And what happened is that the people are
willing to give twice as much money to the identifiable life, to the little girl
called Rokia that they saw their picture, than to give to the statistical life, so
the big problem out there. In this experiment, by the way, people got
$5 for participating in something else presumably unrelated and then they were
asked to say how much of that money they were willing to give.
So the moment we see a face, we start caring about it and then we give more
money. And here's a way for you think about it
for yourself. Imagine you're in Boston for a job
interview, It's your dream job interview. You really wanted to go to this job, and
you're walking over the bridge, over the Charles River on the way to that building,
and you have 15 more minutes before you have to go to your interview.
And all of a sudden you hear a girl crying, you hear a voice of a baby crying,
and you look over the edge and you see a baby about to drown, a very young toddler
about to drown. And you have no time, if you jump in
you'll be able to save them, but if you take your clothes off you're not going to
make it. And you have new jacket, and new shirt,
and new pants, and new socks and new shoes.
All ready for the job interview, you know that if you jump you will never be able to
make it to the job interview. Would you jump?
And most people say what kind of question are you asking?
How can you not, how can you not jump? Now, you could say to yourself let me
leave the baby here to drown and I'll go to the job and I'll get this job hopefully
and, if I get it I'll give 20% of my yearly income to charity, and of course,
20 years, 20% of my yearly income is going to be much more beneficial to poor people
at the world over than saving one child. I could save many people every year with
this amount of money. But most people think of this as a creepy
inhumane way to think about life and they say, you can't live somebody here.
And of course, if you heard that one of your friends did that you would judge them
incredibly harshly. Now, what happens here is that we have
this one face, this one experience. Now what would happen if that girl was not
just here, she was somewhere else. She was far away and you couldn't hear her
cry. And what would happen if there were many
of her? What would happen if she was not born?
All of that would make her much less identifiable, an would get you to be much
less compelled to jump and put some money. The reality that all of us can put a
little bit of money aside and save lots of kids out there.
But we so, because we don't see them crying and because they're not
identifiable, we don't care so much about. So the first part of the experiment, I
think fits very well with intuition and the story about caring about one person.
Not so caring the moment the problem become, become large.
Now here's the next part of the study. In the next part of the study, they said
what if we gave people two sets of information?
We said here's Rokia, the little girl starving, hungry and so on in her picture
but, by the way, if you give her money it's not just going to be for her, there's
millions and millions of other people who are also going to benefit from it because
the problem. The starvation in Africa is incredibly
large. What happens now?
People give lots of money to Rokia, not so many to the statistical problem.
What happens when you get both descriptions?
The amount goes down. So what happens is that every time you add
statistical information about the magnitude of problem, you don't get people
to be compelled to give more, what you do is you shut off their emotions.
You see Rokia, it's just like the girl on the side, you care about it.
You hear about a large problem with lots of people dying or starving, you don't
care so much. You take the emotional input, and you add
the cognitive input and caring goes down. In fact, this was done even to a higher
extreme in another experiment. In which before they asked people to say
how much money they would give, they primed them.
They basically got people to think in computational way, they gave them some
little math problems and asked them to think about computation.
And other people they ask to think about an emotional way.
What happens? The moment you start thinking about the
computational way, caring goes down. Now if you think about it, this actually
makes sense. The reality is that from an economic
perspective, we shouldn't give our money away, especially not to strangers who
could never help us. So if you have some friend that you can
lend money and trouble, and they can help you later.
Maybe you can make a story about why this is okay economically.
But helping people in another part of the world, that we would never get to benefit
from this. This is not the rational thing to do, it's
something that comes from us because of our emotion.
And what happens the moment we start thinking about things in more cognitive
rational way, our emotion gets suppressed we care less.
This by the way, is another example of a case where being irrational is actually
quite good. Ask yourself how much would you like to
live in a society of people who only cared about their benefit.
People had no emotions had no care for other people, were not willing to help
anybody, unless it helped them back directly.
It's a case where being emotional and caring about other people is actually
quite useful. The last experiment I want to tell you
about this is an experiment that actually did not take a huge group versus one
person. They took a small group versus another
person. They took a picture of eight kids and they
said, all of these eight kids are suffering.
All of those kids need help. Would you help one of them?
And in one condition, they said, after you decide how much money to give, we will
randomly sample one of those eight kids and your money will go to one of them, but
you just don't know which one. In the other case, we said we've selected
that kid, here is the kid. It's that kid would you like to give the
money. What happened?
In the second case, people gave much more money.
Now, this ain't not a large group versus one, it's a small group and, in fact, it's
picking one kid before you gave them Versus after you gave them.
And the moment we have a particular face, if you say to yourself, it's one of those
8 kids, you can't care to the same level. If you say it's this kid, or it's this
kid, or it's this kid, [unknown] is the face.
Your heart goes out to them, you care more about them and all of a sudden you give
too much higher degree. Now if you think about this, this idea of
the identifiable victim effect. In our caring of one versus our lack of
caring about the masses is something incredibly important.
This is the reason why countries don't do much for genocide.
This is the reason why there are all kinds of atrocities going around in the world.
And we don't care so much, there are too many people.
The way they are described is just too big, too massive.
Our heart doesn't go out to them. And this is also why some of the biggest
successes in getting us to care about atrocities have been to bring one example
of this. In Haiti, we got people with webcams to
transmit to us from the ground, very, very specific, small things, things that do not
reflect the whole tragedy of the country, but reflected some very specific things.
In some of the problems with Rwanda, there was description of small things that were
happening tragic, but not describing the whole problem.
Yet get people to act to a higher degree. And even with the mad cow disease in
England, they were butchering hundreds of thousands of cows.
But it wasn't until they had one cute young calf on the cover of one of the
British newspapers and they said, this calf is going to die!
That people start getting angry and worried about it, and their hearts went to
this one young calf, and they started calling and protesting, and they stopped
these atrocities. So we need to understand the identifiable
victim effect. We need to understand that the hearts go
to, toward simple, small, contained things.
Like one child that has face. And as more and more information comes in
we care less and less and because of that if we want people to act we need to think
about how to get people to act, how to agree how to represent problems in ways
that compatible with our emotions. And when we have large tragedies in the
world, we need to figure out how do we want to portray this information, how do
we want to convey to people, how do we want to take maybe the big problem, break
it into small pieces and show just some of those that might not be an ideal
reflection of the whole problem but would nevertheless get people to act.
And the reason I find this whole research so important, it's because we do want
people to act. There are many cases in which we think
people are just not acting enough. And usually we try to appeal to their
cognition, we say look how big the problem is, look how important it is.
This is not the right approach. People act, both in terms of times and in
terms of opening our wallets based on the emotions.
And now we need to ask ourselves, how to we get people to care?
And what of the things that are not persuasive to people in a rational way?
But what are the people that get? What are the things that get people to
care? And if we could only do a better job of
that, we can get people to act even better.