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Learning that a problem is widespread may, paradoxically, cause people to view the problem as less dangerous. Kasandra Brabaw offers a readable overview of this dynamic in “The ‘Big Problem Paradox'” (Chicago Booth Review, December 10, 2024). Brabaw writes:

 If you want to get people’s attention to address a problem, making it seem as big as possible is a nearly universal reflex.

But it’s almost certain to backfire, according to Northwestern’s Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Cornell predoctoral scholar Luiza Tanoue Troncoso Peres, and Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach. In a study, they name this the “big problem paradox. Across more than a dozen experiments, they find that describing how big a problem is tends to lessen people’s estimates of its severity. “When you learn there are many people who don’t finish college, you say, ‘Probably it won’t affect their lives that much,’” Fishbach says. “When we remind you that air pollution is common, you say, ‘Well, I guess it’s not so bad.’” Big numbers often give you a false sense of security, and the way a problem is communicated is often at odds with the intended message, according to the study.

In their experiments, the researchers told participants the size of a range of problems, including city-wide building code violations; children who aren’t vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella; patients who don’t take their medications; drunk driving; adultery; and positive screenings for a breast cancer gene mutation. No matter the problem, people who learned it was prevalent inferred that it caused less harm.

The underlying research appears in “The Bigger the Problem the Littler: When the Scope of a Problem Makes It Seem Less Dangerous,” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Luiza Tanoue Troncoso Peres, and Ayelet Fishbach (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, online publication October 24, 2024). The research approach here is to do two surveys side-by-side: one asks about a problem, with no information about how common the problem is; the other asks about the problem, and also provides quantitative evidence that the problem is widespread. It turns out that concern expressed about the problem is consistently lower with the additional quantitative data provided.

The authors offer this explanation:

Yet severity has two dimensions: breadth, which refers to the number of people the problem affects, and depth, or the harm felt by an individual experiencing the problem. We propose that, psychologically, these dimensions affect each other. Our main hypothesis is that people who consider the prevalence of a problem infer it causes less harm, a phenomenon we dub the big problem paradox. The bigger the problem, the littler.

The authors argue that when you hear about a very large number of people affected by a problem, one reflexive reaction is to think: “Well, how bad can it really be?” One of their examples discusses “medication nonadherence”–that is, not taking medications correctly. The potential harms here are enormous. But focusing on the overall number of people who don’t always take medications correctly is likely to make many people think about the time they forgot to take a pill on time, or took an extra dose by mistake, and nothing all that terrible happened.

To the extent that such a tradeoff exists between how people perceive the depth and breadth of problems, it may be that when when trying to raise public concern over an issue, it may be more productive to focus on how it represents an especially deep problem for a smaller group of people, rather than how the problem “affects” in a milder way a larger number of people.

A word of warning here. These conclusions summarize the results of 15 different studies with a total of 2,636 participants– so on average, fewer than 200 participants per study. A number of the studies are based on participants from websites that recruit people to participate in online research, but others involve asking people on the street in downtown Chicago, a survey taken of participants at a pharmaceutical conference, and the like. As the authors note, there are issues of “external validity” here–that is, are the result from the kind of people who choose to participate in these surveys representative of the broader population? On the other hand, the fact that the “big problem paradox” seems to apply across a wide variety of settings gives it some credence.

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