Scope Insensitivity
Our willingness to address a problem does not scale appropriately with the size of the problem.
Scope insensitivity (or scope neglect) is the failure of people to respond to problems at a scale proportional to their magnitude. People asked to donate to save 2,000 birds, 20,000 birds, or 200,000 birds from oil spills donate similar amounts regardless of the scale. Our emotional response is driven by the image of a suffering animal, not by statistics. This has major implications for effective altruism and public policy.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Charity One vs. Many People donate far more money when shown a photo of a single named child in need than when shown statistics about millions of children in the same situation.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
A donor gives the same contribution to a charity helping fifty families as they would to one helping fifty thousand families, because the numerical scale of human suffering does not proportionally increase the emotional response that drives charitable giving.
She spends two hours researching the best brand of toothpaste but only five minutes reviewing the terms of a 30-year mortgage.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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