Why Big Problems Can Feel Small

The hope, for many, is that highlighting the prevalence of an issue will help them garner support or funding for their cause.

But research from Kellogg assistant professor of management and organizations Lauren Eskreis-Winkler shows that this approach often has the opposite effect. In fact, when people are shown how widespread problems are, they tend to believe those problems are less dangerous than they initially thought they were.

Across a series of studies, Eskreis-Winkler and her coauthors—including former Kellogg research fellow Luiza Tanoue Troncoso Peres and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago—encountered numerous examples of this phenomenon, which they dub the “big-problem paradox.” It shapes how people view almost everything, from the dangers of drunk driving to personal medical risks.

“We live in a world where we constantly encounter information about problems at scale,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “My coauthors and I were curious: Does this distort our thinking about the problems themselves? We thought it might, and we found it did.”

The downside of optimism

For decades, research has shown that while humans are caring and altruistic toward individuals, we often struggle to relate to the suffering of large groups. Sensing the scale of a problem, it seems, warps our empathy. Eskreis-Winkler and her colleagues wondered if scale not only affects our ability to feel but also changes the way we think.

“We can read that ‘such-and-such million people die in car accidents each year,’ but how do numbers like that really register for us?” she says. “That’s what we set out to explore in this project.”

Ironically, it is another strength of humanity that the researchers proposed could be causing this big-problem paradox: optimism. People generally believe the world is safe and that we are able to eradicate what is wrong.

But that very optimism might also lead us to assume that, if a problem were serious, humanity would have already solved it.

The researchers tested this hypothesis across a series of studies that probed a wide range of problems in real-world scenarios.

“We wanted to explore the big-problem paradox in relation to problems that people actually deal with in their daily life,” Eskreis-Winkler says.

In one of these studies, more than 300 Chicago residents read about one of three local problems: a restaurant that had failed a health inspection, a building that had violated a safety code, and a toddler who had not gotten vaccinated against measles, mumps, or rubella. They rated the likelihood that the problem would cause harm on a scale of 1 to 100. Then they learned the actual prevalence of the problem (e.g., “investigators found that over 10,000 buildings in Chicago have been cited for a building code violation”) and once again rated the problem’s likelihood of causing harm.

In each situation, participants believed the problem was less likely to cause harm after they learned about the prevalence of the problem.

Estimating harm

The research team confirmed this big-problem paradox in a variety of other situations.

For instance, in a study similar to the first, they investigated how roughly 120 employees at a pharmaceutical-company conference viewed the problem of an individual not taking medication as prescribed. The employees estimated the likelihood that this behavior would cause the patient to be hospitalized. Then they saw real-world ads showing that 75 percent of patients don’t take their medication as prescribed and then estimated the likelihood of the patients being hospitalized.

Again, once participants saw how widespread the problem of medication nonadherence was, they concluded that it was less likely to cause harm than they initially thought. The big-problem paradox in this case turned out to influence even the opinion of experts.

This finding held true for several additional studies as well, including for studies focused on common problems like drunk driving and for studies where participants were paid to guess the risk of harm correctly.

Difficult problems

The research team also explored problems that have been notoriously difficult to get people to address, such as environmental issues, and found further evidence of the big-problem paradox.

In one such study, 200 participants read about a suburban family who learned that several chemicals—including polyamide, polyester, and polymerizing vinyl chloride—had leached into their drinking water. Some participants were told that these chemicals are common in tap water, while others were not given this information. All participants then ranked the likelihood of the following statements: first, that the family would not get sick from the water, and second, that the government had tested the water and ensured it was safe.

Those who learned about the actual prevalence of the chemicals were more likely to believe that the family would not get sick and that the government had safely addressed the problem. In effect, the participants were more optimistic about the situation after learning about the prevalence of these chemicals.

So, if this big-problem paradox occurs because people feel optimistic about a situation, then it stands to reason that it should fall apart when people feel less optimistic.

Contrary to this line of reasoning, however, the researchers found that the paradox applied even to situations where people did not expect good things to happen.

In one study, for example, more than 100 participants read about either a family who lived in a wealthy neighborhood or a family in a poor neighborhood. All participants learned about the same contaminations in tap water and were asked how sick they thought the family would get from these chemicals. Participants in both groups—regardless of whether they were optimistic about the family’s situation—believed the contaminated water was less harmful after learning that the chemicals were commonly found in tap water.

Of note, however, the big-problem paradox was less pronounced for the group that read about the poor neighborhood—suggesting that the effect might not be as strong when people are less optimistic.

Shaping how people help

These findings motivated Eskreis-Winkler and her colleagues to investigate how this paradox might affect people’s motivation to help others.

To that end, the team ran multiple studies asking participants to imagine a friend having a medical condition, to estimate how much danger their friend’s life was in, and to rate how motivated they would feel to get their friend urgent medical attention.

In a study about chest pain, for example, people believed that their friend’s chest pain was less likely to cause severe harm after they learned that chest pain was common (“Over 9 million adults in the United States have chest pain each year”). This information also made people feel less motivated to help their friend.

What’s more, learning about the prevalence of other medical conditions made people less willing to support funding for those conditions.

The research team, in another study, showed participants two online profiles—one set up for a girl who needed ulcer surgery and the other for a girl who needed upper gastrointestinal (GI) surgery. The team let participants know that it only had the funds to support one of the two surgeries.

Participants who learned about the prevalence of these conditions—ulcer surgery (common) and GI surgery (rare)—not only believed that the more common problem was less severe but also preferred to help the girl with the rare condition.

“These are the most important studies in the paper,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “The implication is that learning about the prevalence of a problem can sap peoples’ motivation to act in the real world.”

Still, Eskreis-Winkler points out that misperceptions like the big-problem paradox are themselves neither inherently good nor bad. Whether they cause positive or negative effects really depends on the situation.

Perhaps “if someone has an unreasonable fear of an illness, and they learn the prevalence of the illness, it could help them fear it less and live a fuller life,” she says. “The big-problem paradox could have useful benefits.”