How many people do you think you have the capacity to care about in a story?
Nicholas Kristof has an answer: we stop caring when the story is about more than one person!
At an event in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof shared research that explains just how challenging it is for storytellers to engage audiences on issues that often don’t affect them directly.
According to Kristof, compassion doesn’t scale. Turns out we tune out when a story involves two or more people. Not two million, not two thousand. Just two. Our brains connect to individual human experiences, not statistics. Whether it’s about reproductive justice, climate displacement, or gender-based violence, it seems one story may break your heart but a hundred will numb you.
So what should we do? Kristof says journalists should start with one life, then add the bigger picture. But if you’ve ever wondered why a single story stays with you while headlines about “thousands affected” don’t, this may well be why. What do you think? Does it sound about right to you?
It seems the question for all of us is this: how do we stay connected to the scale of human suffering without losing our ability to feel it?
Kristof was speaking at an event co-hosted by The Fuller Project and MSI Reproductive Choices.
