FD Flam: Trying to quantify everything is hurting our decisions

The usual rule of thumb is that stories sell; data doesn’t. But new research suggests that’s not necessarily true. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that numbers are dull and uninspiring, numbers dominate our decisions — on what to buy, whom to hire and where to donate money.

A paper published last month in the journal PNAS shows that numbers are so compelling that when making a decision, people will put more weight on relatively trivial attributes if they’re expressed numerically, factoring them in above more relevant information expressed in qualitative form. The researchers call the phenomenon “quantification fixation.”

“I think it helps explain why there’s such a move to put a number on everything,” said Katherine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the paper. For example, think of online purchases — it’s so much easier to compare customer star ratings than to sort through a bunch of descriptive reviews. Right up top, Amazon gives you not just the average rating as a number and a graphic, but also gives you the number of ratings.

The paper itself starts out with an impressive number — the researchers conducted 21 different experiments to bolster their conclusions and explore how quantification fixation works in different contexts.

In one, volunteers were put in the position of a boss being asked to choose a summer intern. They were told two candidates were comparable in every way except one got a higher grade in management and the other, a higher grade in calculus. When they offered the calculus grade as a number, people tended to hire the candidate with the higher calculus grade, and when they switched and only offered the management grade as a number, the preference flipped.

In another experiment, the researchers wanted to see if a fixation on numbers might nudge people to make unprofitable choices. So they asked volunteers again to play the employer and choose from prospective employees to assist them in a game. The winning pairs would get a cash reward.

The prospective employees were scored in three skill areas — math, trivia and a geometric reasoning assessment called the angles test. People were again more likely to choose the candidate whose skills had been expressed as a number (rather than, say, as a bar graph with no numbers). They did this even when told that the numbered skill was less relevant to winning — and, as a result, those teams won less money.

“I think it’s a brilliant paper,” said Ellen Peters, a former engineer turned psychologist at the University of Oregon. “The stereotype is that people hate numbers, so they’re going to run away from them,” she said. But this and other studies show people prefer using numbers to make decisions.

Peters took part in a recent study that showed people were much more likely to share social media posts on climate change if they included numerical information. The numbers made people think the posts were more trustworthy, she said.

There’s a lesson here for those of us trying to sell things, or get hired, or even to get elected.

If there’s a quality you want people to value, put a number on it. If there’s something you’d rather people ignore, make it qualitative. Perhaps some degree of numeric fixation can explain why, when asked if they’re better off than they were four years ago, voters focus on what’s most quantifiable — the price they see on a carton of eggs.

And there’s a lesson for making better decisions about where to spend our money. Do we really care about a 4.5 versus a 4.4? Or are we ignoring other important information — like whether an item suits our kitchen or our wardrobe? Sometimes we imbue more authority in numbers than they deserve.

There are some caveats to the “quantification fixation.” Most people have poor intuition for big numbers, so when faced with the cost of a Mars mission or a foreign war, it all sounds expensive whether it adds up to $7 million or $270 billion, let alone anything in the trillions.

And numbers don’t work to inspire compassion. Whether it’s deaths from cancer, COVID or natural disasters, people generally don’t muster more compassion for a million than they do for 100,000 or 10,000.

But ratings are on the upswing. In the prescient 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, a future somewhere in the 2020s has become so ratings-obsessed that every time the protagonist walked into a bar, other patrons used a smartphone-like device called an apparat to rate his hotness (always low) and his potential as a long-term mate.

What follows is an all-too-plausible scenario of crass consumerism gone wild, economic collapse and terror when all the apparats stop working. The book only got 4 out of 5 Amazon stars, but don’t be turned off by that. It’s just a number.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.