The other day I read something fascinating in a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, the bestseller by a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist called Daniel Kahneman – probably the single most interesting book I’ve ever read about how people think.
Here’s what his research has found.
If you ask people on the street whether they’ll donate to support a pollution-free environment for dolphins, you’ll be moderately successful. If you ask people whether they want to donate to a cancer testing service for farm workers at risk of skin cancer, you won’t have much luck.
But if you ask people to compare the two and decide which one they want to give more money to?
The farm workers win out.
This is an example of an apparently quite common psychological phenomenon called joint and single evaluation, part of the wider phenomenon of framing – the fact that people think differently about issues, depending on how they’re presented.
In the first two cases, you’re initially using single evaluation. When you’re asked to think about dolphins, you compare them with other things like dolphins – wombats, carp, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs – and the dolphins do quite well. When you’re asked to think about farm workers and cancer, you compare it in your mind with other types of public health issue – children with leukaemia, young mothers with breast cancer – and the farm workers get stuffed.
But when you compare farm workers with dolphins, you’re using joint evaluation. You are now comparing humans with animals. The humans win.
What Kahneman doesn’t mention, unfortunately, is whether the amount you’re willing to give to farm workers goes up, or the amount you’re willing to give to dolphins goes down.
Nonetheless, I wonder if this could be a valuable technique for less popular causes. Can we re-frame the debate to make them more attractive, by comparing them with other things that apparently elicit more sympathy?
One example of this is cancer. A lot of the campaigning around prostate and testicular cancer recently has been based on its lack of funding compared to breast cancer. The obvious suggestion that the relevant charities make is that all cancers should receive the same funding, and that it’s up to us to make sure it happens.
It works, too. I’ve given money to prostate cancer charities for exactly that reason. I’m now wondering, though, whether they’re the ones who should really be reframing the debate. Are there poorer relations in the cancer charity world?
Perhaps I should give my money to colorectal cancer charities instead – it’s the UK’s second biggest killer, but charities for this kind of cancer raise only a fraction of the amount given to some other cancer causes. Perhaps they should suggest to donors that they should be funded as generously as their more fortunate cousins?
And I wonder which other less popular causes could boost their appeal by comparing themselves to similar, better-funded areas, and pointing out the discrepancy.