NPR’s show On the Media interviewed Nicholas Kristof on the psychology of selling soap and how those tactics could be used to get people to care about some of the most compelling causes of our day. What surprised us was research by psychologist Paul Solvic showing the number at which we tune out… it’s not hundred… it’s two. Here is an excerpt from NPR:
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Well, I came across social psychologist Paul Slovic who has done a great deal of work in this area, and the experiments typically involve exposing people to a particular scenario and then seeing if they will contribute.
One of the classic experiments involves a seven-year-old girl from the country of Mali who’s starving and asking if people will help her out. Everybody wants to help Rokia. But if you ask people to help 21 million hungry people in Africa, nobody particularly wants to help them.
Maybe what I found even more depressing is that the moment you even provide more background information to Rokia, if you say that she is hungry because of a famine in her country, then interest in helping her tends to drop.
You know, we all know that at some point people tend to get numbed and tune out, but [LAUGHS] one of the things that I found fascinating was the number at which we tend to tune out. It’s not a million, it’s not a thousand, it’s not even a hundred – it’s two.
