Jar contains 100 marbles, of which 8 are red.

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To highlight this impact of how business case data is communicated, consider another example Kahneman shares. You have the choice of picking a marble from one of two jars that sit in front of you. If you pick a red marble from the jar you select, you win a prize. While you can’t see inside either jar, I tell you that:

Jar #1 contains 10 marbles, of which 1 is red.


Which jar would you prefer to pick a marble from?

Of course, you realize that the chances of picking a winning red marble are 10% in the case of jar #1 and 8% for jar #2. But in laboratory experiments, 30-40% of participants chose to pick from jar #2! In fact, I’ve posed the very same questions to participants in my training programs and the results have been equally surprising (or perhaps not so). Why? Because the principle of denominator neglect tells us that those participants focused on the number of red marbles (the numerator of the probability fraction), letting visions of the number of non-red marbles (the denominator) drift into the background.

Incredibly, the same principle of statistical bias can also work when the probabilities are reversed!

In another study, people who saw information about ”a disease that lebanon telegram data kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000” assessed its risk as being higher than “a disease that kills 24.14% of the population”, even though the first description represents a statistically lower risk of death. During the pandemic, this same principle was one of the reasons why COVID-19 statistics induced so much fear. The rapid appearance of 4,000 cases in a given country certainly sounds more alarming than saying that 0.0067% of a population became infected.



Crafting your business case for maximum impact
In the past, I’ve spoken about the critical role that connecting with your customers on an emotional level plays when it comes to converting modern buyers. I’ve also covered how using data can help produce that emotional contrast in the mind of our customers. After all, if your goal is to move someone from their position to yours, it’s important for your business case to help them understand the difference between their current state and the potential future state your solutions can help them attain.