I have become profoundly interested in bias. Avoiding it is an important part of the research I do (studying bias and how to avoid it is a big part of epidemiology) but I also find it interesting to learn about the biases that are programmed into our tiny human brains. How sometimes, though we want to do the right thing, our biases lead us astray.

Confirmation bias is a classic example where people wanting to read up on a subject end up only getting part of the story because of the way they frame their search terms. For example, someone who doesn’t believe in global warming and who only searched Google for why global warming isn’t true will never come across the reams of great sites with reasons why global warming is reality. My personal way to counter this is to always try an convince myself of the opposite of what I believe. Sometimes my opinion yo-yos for a while, but when it stops swinging, I’m usually familiar enough with both sides of the argument to be comfortable with the opinion I’ve settled on.

But what are we supposed to about biases like identifiable victim bias. Jonah Lehrer posted an excerpt from his book How We Decide on his blog about identifiable victim bias:

The experiment is simple: Slovic asks people how much they would be willing to donate to various charitable causes. For example, Slovic found that when people were shown a picture of a single starving child named Rokia in Mali, they acted with impressive generosity. After looking at Rokia’s emaciated body and haunting brown eyes, they donated, on average, two dollars and fifty cents to Save the Children. However, when a second group of people were provided with a list of statistics about starvation throughout Africa⎯more than three million children in Malawi are malnourished, more than eleven million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance, etc.⎯the average donation was fifty percent lower. At first glance, this makes no sense. When we are informed about the true scope of the problem we should give more money, not less. Rokia’s tragic story is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don’t activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our mind can’t comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. Or why we donate thousands of dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover of a magazine, but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur. As Mother Theresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Lehrer says that identifiable victim bias explains why there is so much coverage of the trapped Chilean miners while comparatively larger crises go unnoticed. That doesn’t mean he’s not wholly sympathetic to the miners and their families:

Just because the identifiable victim bias exists doesn’t mean it’s a mistake to move heaven and earth to save the miners. That impulse reflects one of the noblest human urges. But it does suggest that we should be more mindful of all the moments when we’re not compassionate, when there are so many victims that no one can be identified.

It’s easy to counteract confirmation bias by reading up on what other people believe, but how do you get around identifiable victim bias? Only numbers can accurately describe the worst tragedies yet our minds don’t respond to numbers. What are we to do?