Number fixation: Trying to quantify everything could lead us astray

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The usual rule of thumb is that stories sell, data doesn’t. But new research suggests that’s not necessarily true.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that numbers are dull and uninspiring, numbers dominate our decisions—on what to buy, whom to hire and where to donate money. A paper published in PNAS shows that numbers are so compelling that when making a decision, people will put more weight on relatively trivial attributes if they’re expressed numerically, factoring them in above more relevant information expressed in qualitative form. The researchers call the phenomenon “quantification fixation." “I think it helps explain why there’s such a move to put a number on everything," said Katherine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the paper’s authors.

For example, think of online purchases—it’s so much easier to compare star ratings than read descriptive reviews. Right up top, Amazon gives you not just the average rating as a number and a graphic, but also the number of ratings. The paper itself starts out with an impressive number: they conducted 21 different experiments to bolster their conclusions and explore how quantification fixation works in varied contexts.

In one, volunteers were put in the position of a boss being asked to choose a summer intern. They were told two candidates were comparable in every way except one got a higher grade in management and the other, a higher grade in calculus. Offered the calculus grade as a number, people tended to hire the candidate with the higher calculus grade, and when offered only the management grade as a number, the preference flipped.