Credit: iStockphoto/NASA
Bill Gates is an improbable humanitarian. He built a reputation as a nightmare boss at Microsoft, a totalitarian who screeched at employees he thought to be stupid.
He bludgeoned competitors and played hardball with regulators. And he’s a nerd’s nerd: someone who seems perennially uncomfortable around people and only at ease dealing with the intricacies of software code.
And that is precisely why he’s now saving the world.
As you probably know, Gates is aggressively tackling Third World diseases. He has targeted not only high-profile scourges such as AIDS but also maladies such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasitic infections.
These latter illnesses are the important ones to attack, because they kill millions a year and are entirely preventable. For decades, they flew under the radar of philanthropists in the West. So why did Gates become the first to take action? The answer lies in the psychology of how we understand numbers.
I’ve been reading the fascinating work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist who runs the U.S. social-science thinktank Decision Research, in Eugene, Oregon.
He studies a troubling paradox in human empathy: we’ll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight.
We’ll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the West for lifesaving surgery, but we don’t offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.
You could argue that we’re simply callous, or hypocrites. But Slovic doesn’t think so. The problem isn’t a moral failing: it’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but terrible at conceptualising the suffering of large ones.
In one recent experiment, Slovic presented a number of subjects with a picture of ‘Rokia’, a starving child in Mali, and asked them how much they would be willing to give to help feed her.
Then he showed a different group photos of two Malinese children: ‘Rokia and Moussa’. The group presented with two kids gave 15% less than those shown just one child.
In a related experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a dying child. When a second set of subjects was asked to donate to a group of eight children dying of the same cause, the average donation was 50% lower.
Slovic suspects this stuff is hardwired in our brains. Psychologists have long observed that our ability to discriminate among quantities is finely tuned when dealing with small amounts but quickly degrades as the numbers get much larger.
Our ears work that way, too. When a very quiet sound becomes slightly louder, we detect the difference right away. But once a noise is really loud, it has to increase dramatically for it to seem ‘louder’.
Authorship?
Though I'm delighted at Bill Gates taking initiative towards problems that have easily staggered others, I feel like the author of this article focuses too strongly on Gates' social abilities and consider what he has written to be outright offensive.
Please consider a higher level of professionalism in your writing and bring us the facts which pertain to the interest. There was no need to balance the article or set a counter-point between Gates' entrepreneurial/creative solutions to significant problems with the reality of his competency (a diplomatic use of the word) as a businessman.
I am aware that it is an opinion article, but as the author values his own credibility, he ought to edit out the ham-handed declarative statements which demean the persons whom he's spotlighting (in this case being Gates).
Bravo, Gates. May your work inspire others and have a significant impact on the suffering world.