Additional peice (rough draft) that may make it into final paper…
November 19, 2008
Large numbers – which did not play as big of a role in the prehistoric era – do not elicit the same emotional response that images and descriptive words do, and as such, “concrete words – apple, car, gun – do better in our memories than abstractions like numbers.”[1] Paradoxically, a vividly detailed news story about one specific dying child will elicit a stronger emotional response from viewers than a purely factual, non-descriptive report about the death of 300,000 people in an earthquake. The reason statistics evoke less emotional response than images and words is because the human mind – which, as mentioned above, evolved into its current state well before the advent of advanced mathematics – is ill-equipped to deal with large numbers and complex probabilities.[2] (In fact, to fully grasp the concept of a large number, we must often evoke an image – it is much easier to comprehend a distance of 500 yards if you imagine five football fields back-to-back).
