Communicating Unthinkable Things
Friday, May 27th, 2011
The horror and numbers involved in acts of genocide should cause outrage, compassion and action but often don’t. And this appears to be true for other forms of unthinkably bad news that impacts large groups of people such as public health issues or industry-wide safety problems.
This phenomenon, called psychic numbing, is important for anyone designing communications that involve bad news at a large-scale. There are strong cognitive biases involved. A nice summary is provided by J.E. Robertson in his post, Why Does Mass Suffering Cause Mass Indifference:
“The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.”
While these claims are grounded in research, more research is required to explore the psychology of processing bad news about large numbers of people. Fortunately, these preliminary findings offer designable insights. We can test and refine them through the communications we create as cognitive designers.
