It’s often inevitable that government projects will come with vast price tags. Research from Carnegie Mellon highlights how people can often tune out as the sum gets ever larger. The researchers argue that if program managers can rescale the cost of their project, it can re-engage people and further their understanding of the funding choices involved.
“When President Trump wanted to spend $10 billion on the border wall, conservatives were saying it was a great idea while liberals were saying why spend that much money on a wall,” they explain. “This got our team thinking, and we began by asking how big is $10 billion, and how do people really think about such a really big number?”
Decision making
The researchers explain that understanding the numbers involved in a decision is key to effective decision-making, but we’re not always very good at the job. They argue that have generally evolved to think in quite small terms, so conceptualizing vast numbers can often be extremely hard, which is perhaps why we can zone out when thinking of huge government programs.
The authors wanted to explore how rescaling the information involved can help improve our understanding. They showed around 400 participants a range of statements about potential Covid relief packages in the US. They were asked to evaluate each program on the price-per-program ($100 billion for one, $2 trillion for another) or the price-per-person ($1,200 vs $2,400). Both statements were designed to present a scale of 20:1. The results showed that people had a better time when they were differentiating between the two when it was presented in the “per-person” form.
“With a simple manipulation rescaling big numbers into smaller numbers, people can understand this information better,” the authors explain. “Understanding numerical information can play a critical role in citizenship.”
This was then confirmed by a second study, with participants better able to comprehend information in the price-per-person form. This was even the case when the information was scaled using an unfamiliar unit, suggesting that rescaling large numbers into smaller ones can greatly help our comprehension.
“Surprisingly, we rescaled the information using an arbitrary unit [other than a per capita], and we still see the same effect,” the authors continue. “People are better at discriminating among smaller numbers.”
The authors believe that the work could easily be expanded to cover other aspects of public debate, such as those around public health during the pandemic.
“People are bad at processing and understanding big numbers,” they conclude. “If your goal is to help people be good citizens and savvy evaluators of how tax dollars are spent, scale numbers that place them in range that people can appreciate.”
