From The Wall Street Journal:
When Alfred Taubman was chief executive of the restaurant chain A&W, he came up with a clever way of challenging the competition: He offered a third-pound burger for the cost of a McDonald’s quarter-pounder. The result? More than half of A&W’s customers seethed, convinced that they were being asked to pay the same amount for what sounded to them like a smaller burger.
One lesson from this episode: “Math is no one’s native tongue.” So observe Chip Heath and Karla Starr in “Making Numbers Count,” a close look at the challenge of understanding—and communicating—numerical claims. The authors note that, once we get beyond 1, 2, 3, our ability to grasp numbers quickly deteriorates; it’s better, if possible, to translate them into “concrete, vivid, meaningful messages that are clear enough to make numbers unnecessary.”
Consider how we might describe the world’s water: 97.5% is salinated; the other 2.5% is fresh water, but 99% of that amount is trapped in glaciers, leaving only a small fraction that is actually drinkable. If you want people to “see and feel the numbers, not just read them,” Mr. Heath and Ms. Starr say, consider a visual analogy: Imagine “a gallon jug filled with water with three ice cubes next to it.” The jug represents the earth’s salt water, the ice cubes the glaciers, and “the drops melting off each”—that’s what’s available for consumption. Another eye-catching comparison, this one taken from a 2018 New York Times article: Among Fortune 500 CEOs, there are more men named “James” than there are women in total.
One way to make numbers come alive is through stories, which our brains process “better than statistics.” We’re unlikely to remember details about desperately low wages and unconscionably high interest rates in Bangladesh, for example, but we can’t forget the story of the economist Muhammad Yunus’s efforts to distribute small, transformative loans to grateful recipients.
Often the use of numbers is unavoidable, as Mr. Heath, a business professor at Stanford, and Ms. Starr, a science writer, readily concede. What to do? Since we process “user-friendly numbers” much better than decimals and percentages (as A&W discovered to its dismay), simple analogies can be useful. Global health data, for instance, might be translated into a representative village of 100, in which 29 people would be overweight and 10 would be going hungry. We can also employ culturally relevant frames of reference. The 6-foot social-distancing guidance for Covid has been compared to a hockey stick (in Canada), a tatami mat (Japan), a surf board (San Diego) and an ostrich-like cassowary (Australia). Other comparisons—24 buffalo wings (Buffalo, N.Y.) and 72 (presumably giant) pistachios (New Mexico)—seem more clever than useful.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)
I admittedly would have been lost by the use of pistachios as a unit of distance. And the only thing I know about cassowaries is that they’re possibly related to velociraptors. So I think I would have reacted differently to using them for a social-distancing rule: If you’re close enough to see a velociraptor, you are too close 🙂
That said, while I acutely appreciate that numbers can be hard to understand without a visual analogy, I am surprised that the gambit with the 1/3 pound burger didn’t work. Everyone has to use measuring cups!
If your diet revolves around fast food, or popping something into the microwave – no, you don’t need to know anything about measuring cups. (Except when baking, I rarely use them myself; that is because most of my recipes are in “Grandma” measures.) Arby’s should have used “30% Bigger!”
I have noticed that most stores where you use shopping carts specify the distance as “one shopping cart length.” Once you add the “don’t crowd me, man!” distance to that, it comes out to around six feet.
Or really, “33% bigger!” But the microwave diet (or Grandma-measure recipes) would explain why the gambit failed. At least the shopping carts make sense, more so than pistachios.