In the past several months, America has undergone drastic domestic and international policy shifts with major implications worldwide for poverty, public health, the climate, scientific research, and more.
In the wake of such massive changes affecting the well-being of millions, it’s easy to feel paralyzed by the sense that anything you do would amount to nothing more than a tiny drop in a really, really big bucket.
Of course none of us can single-handedly end poverty, solve the climate crisis, or prevent the next pandemic. But we still care. So, in the face of enormous global issues, we face a tension between our desire to help and our sense of helplessness.
As a social psychologist and director of Giving Multiplier, a research-based charitable giving platform that connects people to charities addressing many of these causes, I think about this tension a lot. What should we make of our simultaneous desire to help and sense of helplessness? And what can we do about it?
In the face of enormous global issues, we face a tension between our desire to help and our sense of helplessness.
There’s plenty of research on how we tend to reason about mass suffering. For one, we’re moved by vivid stories of specific individuals more than abstract statistics, what psychologists call the “identifiable victim effect.” The media plays to this tendency, often ignoring large-scale atrocities while publicizing isolated, captivating events. We also find it harder to care about others far away in physical distance and time, leading to underinvesting in international and intergenerational issues. And our minds are not well-attuned to large numbers. We’re “scope insensitive,” meaning it’s hard to feel 10 times as concerned about a disease that affects 500,000 people as 50,000.
But there’s another psychological phenomenon that I’ve come to appreciate, called proportion dominance, which can help understand our competing feelings of compassion and overwhelm.
Proportion dominance is the preference for making relative progress toward a goal, at the expense of absolute impact. For example, imagine you provided 100 families with one year’s worth of meals. Research suggests it would feel more satisfying if the 100 meals fed every family in a small town rather than merely some of the families in a bigger city. Even if the number of families assisted is exactly the same, the way we feel about our impact could be quite different.
In a foundational paper on proportion dominance, researchers asked participants to rate their support for lifesaving interventions such as emergency medical treatments. In one of the studies, participants tended to favor interventions that saved a greater proportion of lives over interventions that saved more lives overall but a lower total proportion. For example, people preferred a program that saved 225 out of 300 people (75 percent) than one saving 230 out of 920 people (25 percent), despite the former option saving five fewer lives. Even when viewing both options at the same time, nearly half of participants preferred the intervention that saved fewer, but a greater proportion, of lives.
In another of the paper’s studies, most participants preferred to save four hours of writing on a term paper when it would take five hours to complete (80 percent), rather than 10 hours (40 percent). This also applied to saving money: about one third of participants reported they would rather save $10 on a jacket that cost $20 (50 percent savings) than when it costs $100 (10 percent savings), despite saving the exact same amount of money.
Proportion dominance shows that when making decisions, we can be motivated by our perceived impact on solving a problem and less sensitive to the absolute effects of our actions. This means we tend to focus on relative progress at the expense of overall impact.
Maybe you recognize this tendency in other facets of your life. Let’s say you just crossed off three tasks on your to-do list. Would you feel better about your progress if your list were 5 or 50 items long? Our motivation to make progress means we don’t just care about what we’ve done but also how much left there is to do.
Proportion dominance shows that when making decisions, we can be motivated by our perceived impact on solving a problem and less sensitive to the absolute effects of our actions.
Why is proportion dominance so pernicious? Because it can feel like a trap. The larger the problem, the less we might feel like our actions have an impact, regardless of how much of a difference we actually make. With so many people in need, such as the nearly 700 million people living in extreme poverty, the proportion of individuals we’re able to help can seem trivially small.
In addition to proportion dominance, there is another complicating factor. Research in charitable giving finds that if donors are reminded of the people in need they aren’t helping, they give less. The proverbial “warm glow” that we feel after our good deeds is counteracted by an accompanying negative feeling for those left unhelped.
This brings us back to the tension between wanting to make a difference and feeling helpless about it. What are we to do?
It might be tempting to turn away from the most daunting problems, because you feel you won’t have much of an impact. But the research on proportion dominance shows us why we feel this way. If you want to make an impact, it’s important to remember what matters is the size of the drop, not the size of the bucket. That is, if you care about the objective outcomes of your actions, you shouldn’t let the scope of the problem deter you from doing something to address it.
Interestingly, participants in the studies mentioned above generally agreed with this. When researchers asked them directly, they acknowledged that absolute impact mattered more than relative progress. This and other research suggests that making a deliberate effort to reflect on the rationale for your choices could be a useful strategy to overcome proportion dominance.
For example, you may find yourself asking how your $60 donation could possibly matter relative to the nearly $600 billion in total U.S. charitable giving in 2024. Instead, if you care about absolute impact, you can reframe that thought by asking how you can make that $60 do as much good as possible. And you can apply a similar logic to any of the resources you have at your disposal, whether it’s your money, skills, or time.
For charitable giving, this could mean drawing on the recommendations of trusted charity evaluators like GiveWell. Their expert evaluators spend tens of thousands of hours each year rigorously analyzing and identifying highly cost-effective charities, such as Helen Keller Intl’s vitamin A supplementation program or Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. Both programs help prevent deadly diseases and dramatically improve children’s lives at an astonishingly low cost, often a few dollars.
If you want to make an impact, it’s important to remember what matters is the size of the drop, not the size of the bucket.
At Giving Multiplier, our goal is to introduce people to nonprofits recommended by GiveWell and other expert charity evaluators, as well as help donors maximize the impact of their donations. Our psychologically informed donation tool encourages users to split their donations between any charity personally meaningful to them, like a local food bank or animal shelter, and one of the charities recommended by experts as being highly effective at addressing big global challenges. Giving Multiplier also adds matching funds on top to incentivize this donation bundling strategy, which we call giving “smart and from the heart.”
You can also think about creating pragmatic, manageable targets for your impact. By setting yourself up to actually achieve a goal, you can both have an impact and build momentum toward more ambitious targets. We apply this advice in many other aspects of our lives. We all know that if you want to start running, it seems wiser to begin with a 5k instead of an ultra marathon. Why not apply this strategy to our prosocial aims? For example, if you care about global health, you can provide a year’s worth of disease-preventing nutritional supplements to a vitamin-deficient child for about $2 through the Helen Keller Intl program mentioned above. Perhaps you start by setting a goal to help 50 children for $100. It’s a target that you can both accomplish and feel deeply proud about.
The reality that we can’t help everyone in need shouldn’t deter us from doing what we can. By understanding our tendency to favor felt progress over actual impact, we can begin to break through any sense of helplessness. The size of the problem doesn’t need to prevent us from taking action. Rather, it can prompt us to search for the best ways to harness the very real capacity we each have to make a difference.
