Nick Kristof on psychic numbing

Among those who will pay a huge price for the drunken orgy of mortgages and other financial excesses in the United States will be some of the neediest people in Africa. They are less likely to get TB medication, malaria nets and schooling, because at a time when our own ship feels as if it is sinking, it’s far harder to build the political will to send off lifeboats to help others.

So look out! I’m afraid that the rising interest in global health and good works may be heading for a bust.

That makes it imperative that those who care about these issues get smarter about  building political will. Any company peddling toothpaste works out a marketing plan far more sophisticated than any devised in the humanitarian community. Ideally, the U.N. could help, but it’s one of the worst organizations at public relations I’ve ever seen.

 That gets us to the issue of psychic numbing, which is a pivot in the film “Reporter.” The standard humanitarian argument to try to galvanize a response is: “1 million people are dying!” But there’s abundant evidence from the work of Paul Slovic and other social psychologists that these kinds of numbers make us glaze over and turn away. Big numbers don’t move us, although individual stories do. That’s why the toothpaste companies don’t tell us that 1 million people have fresher breath because of Crest – they show us a model who looks utterly scrumptious, presumably solely because she brushes with Crest.

I’m not saying that the solution is TV commercials showing a model who claims to get rid of split ends because she has donated anti-malaria bed nets. But I think the humanitarian community must think much more rigorously about marketing and – while remaining as intellectually honest as anyone can be while thinking of marketing – fashion messages that will actually reach people and have impact. Particularly during this financial crisis, humanitarians must work harder at story-telling, at building empathy — or the real losers will be people half a world away who have never heard of mortgages.