Salience
We all know from the television ads you see late at night that there are a lot of starving children out there. We also know that not most of us who see those ads don’t bother to donate a rather small amount of money towards helping those starving children eat. We know that we should, and we know that it wouldn’t be very painful for us to give what’s being asked of us. So why doesn’t it seem to bother us much who don’t give? Why don’t the starving children of the world haunt our dreams, our thoughts, our consciences? Why is it that we seem so much more concerned about the destruction of a local landmark, even one we don’t care much for, than mass starvation?
The same question can be asked in the political realm. Ostensibly, people want politicians who will cut back on pork-barrel spending and focus on what’s really important. Yet every congressman (and woman) fights to get money to his or her district, to get special local projects financed, and this always pays off at the ballot box. At home, the argument is: “Look at what I’ve done for us;” in Washington, it’s “We need to cut this wasteful spending!” Thus, one man’s bridge to nowhere is another’s support of the local economy. Certainly, we know as a general fact that other states and locales have projects at least as important, if not more important, than our own, and that, if our projects deserve attention, so do theirs. So why don’t we take this into consideration? Why do we tend to keep the big picture out of mind?
The salient is that which strikes us, that which grabs our attention, and salience is the degree to which something is salient. Salience is not to be confused with relevance, which is the actual strength of the connection of something to an issue; something can be very salient to us while having no real affect on us, and something can be relevant without it even being on our radar. Salience, in short, is how something rates on our attention span, and understanding how it works in our minds can help to explain why some issues grab our attention while others that should do not.
Salience itself is not a complicated concept. The idea is simply that, the more salient something is, the more likely it is to draw our attention. The important question is why some things are salient and others are not. Why isn’t world hunger salient? Why are those pork-barrel projects salient in the positive sense when they’re local, and in the negative sense when they’re not? An easy answer seems to be selfishness. We are selfish, so we don’t care about others. The starving children in Ethiopia are not my problem, nor are voters in another state or district. But this doesn’t always hold. People who give to charitable causes don’t always think in terms of what cause specifically does the most overall to combat need. People always seem more likely to commit to causes that are more local; we give to local fundraisers and such more often than to distant causes, even if the distant causes are greater. Might this still be attributed to selfishness? Not if the local cause, despite being local, doesn’t affect us. Some give to local organizations that have no direct impact on them or those connected to them, and do so more often than to those charities that focus their work in other countries. Likewise, with the example of pork, we support projects that keep the local economy strong, and congressmen who look out for our interests, even if we ourselves and those we know are not in need of such help. Such a congressman (or woman) “cares for the community.” But don’t the others as well, if they are operating in a similar way? Perhaps selfishness has some involvement in the overall equation. But at the least, it doesn’t seem to be the sole factor at work here.
Might it be knowledge, or, more specifically, awareness of the issues? Perhaps those who are concerned simply don’t know enough about the plight of children in other countries; they may not realize the depth of the suffering. Likewise, when we support the bringing money to our home state through political means, we may not really stop to consider the situation of others, and how having a senior senator on the appropriations committee is rather unfair to most other states. One doesn’t see the other side. Again, this isn’t quite sufficient. Salience isn’t all about mere knowledge; for, as noted in the very beginning, we all very well know that people are actually starving to death in other countries, and that for a very small amount of money we could feed some of them indefinitely. We know that those pork-barrel projects in other states create jobs for those states, and that some of those states may be worse-off than our own. But this knowledge is abstract; while we know that kids are starving, do we really feel it? Has each of us spent some time today considering what it is like to not have any food for a week? For two weeks? Has each of us considered that, by forgoing a minor pleasure each day, we could keep people from death?
The truth of the matter is, we really have not. We are too preoccupied with our own lives; our jobs, our relationships, the circumstances of those close to us. These things have more salience to us. Likewise, issues in our own state or country have more salience to us than those in other states or countries. And now, perhaps, we are ready for a better definition of salience. It includes all of the elements mentioned so far; a bit of selfishness (not necessarily in the negative sense), a bit of knowledge, and a good bit of feeling. Salience is the degree to which a circumstance grabs us by the shoulders and gives us a good shake. It requires knowledge, and is often accompanied by selfishness, but most of all it requires emotion, specifically care; salient things are those we care about, in the general sense as those things we are somehow concerned with. It’s important to us as individuals. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that it is important in general, or important at all; but it is taken as being important, and here, that’s what’s important.
So, to return to our question: why isn’t world hunger important to us? We have knowledge of it. Given the smallness of the contributions usually asked for in those late-night commercials, selfishness is likely not central (or else it would be a very petty selfishness indeed). The answer is problem a combination of distance and overexposure. For one thing, world hunger is a very abstract problem, one that seems beyond our capacity to change. Sure, we can help one child, but what does our tiny contribution really do? Further, it’s very difficult to conceptualize any influence one actually does have. What do our donations actually result in? What have I done? Sure, a family is saved; but that’s still too abstract. It’s some family out there, five thousand miles away. There are thousands, millions of families like that. On that scale, it seems virtually unreal; the family saved is lost in the multitude. Thus abstraction and distance form a major stumbling block to salience, as they loosen the visceral emotional grip that the most local, the most visible acts and consequences have on us. It is to fight against this that those late night commercials ask you not just to give money, but to sponsor a child. If you sponsor a child, it sounds as though you are directly responsible for that person’s well-being. Your impact becomes tangible in the letters and pictures you are sent from that child’s family. Solving world hunger thus becomes more relevant, because it becomes more personal, more pointed straight at you. It’s tangible, and beyond all else the salient is tangible.
Keeping to this thread, overexposure (and constant exposure) is perhaps just as great a threat to solving world hunger as distance and underexposure, ironically enough. Overexposure, seeing images again and again and again of starving children, leads to a dulling effect. Everyone is starving over there, it seems; what can I do? While it’s not necessary for salience, novelty is an easy means through which to make something salient; likewise, familiarity does not always make salience disappear, but absent some other reason to stay salient, with it goes interest. If something is new, mysterious, unknown, or surprising, it grabs our attention and does not easily let go. Once we understand, or have seen it repeatedly, we lose interest as our mind categorizes it and moves on. Thus, the first time you tied your shoes, it was novel and cause for celebration; now, you give it virtually no conscious thought whatsoever; it occupies no place in your schedule or planning; its salience is basically nil; whereas, at age four, it was all-consuming. When we see examples of corrupt politicians again and again, it ironically serves to dull the interest of many in fixing corruption, as we just resign ourselves to the idea that all politicians are corrupt and that there’s nothing we can do about it. Selfishness and laziness play a hand here, as they often do; but, if anything, we should be expected to fight for our interests as we find more corruption. Yet, those who fight corruption actively and vocally seem a minority; for the rest of us, we are more concerned with immediate issues, such as whether our local economy is suffering and our jobs are safe. Thus, pork-barrel spending is an abstract problem, bad but not something that we feel directly impacted by; money just flies in all directions in government, and we can’t be expected to know what to do about it. We feel powerless and distant before the scale of it all. Local issues, on the other hand, the money we have for community projects and such, are clear, direct, and impact us immediately (and, though I downplayed it to a degree before, it would be stupidity to deny that how something impacts us literally (and financially) has no effect on salience). We not only know, we see with our own eyes what a little extra appropriation can do. We know it’s needed, and the government can live with a couple million dollars less (our yearly GDP, after all, is greater by a factor of six zeroes). In other states, other local economies, things may be worse and have greater need; but that’s distant from us, not something that we can see the effects of. It’s not mere selfishness; if we saw, if we felt the suffering a community in bad financial straits is going through, we would likely feel more sympathetic. When we talk to relatives in other communities, we can feel genuine sympathy for those otherwise distant communities. But without that eyewitness account, we don’t feel it. And if we don’t feel it, it’s that much harder to muster the will to argue for change. To get true involvement, then, in politics and otherwise, requires a proper method, a way of making salient.
The same question can be asked in the political realm. Ostensibly, people want politicians who will cut back on pork-barrel spending and focus on what’s really important. Yet every congressman (and woman) fights to get money to his or her district, to get special local projects financed, and this always pays off at the ballot box. At home, the argument is: “Look at what I’ve done for us;” in Washington, it’s “We need to cut this wasteful spending!” Thus, one man’s bridge to nowhere is another’s support of the local economy. Certainly, we know as a general fact that other states and locales have projects at least as important, if not more important, than our own, and that, if our projects deserve attention, so do theirs. So why don’t we take this into consideration? Why do we tend to keep the big picture out of mind?
The salient is that which strikes us, that which grabs our attention, and salience is the degree to which something is salient. Salience is not to be confused with relevance, which is the actual strength of the connection of something to an issue; something can be very salient to us while having no real affect on us, and something can be relevant without it even being on our radar. Salience, in short, is how something rates on our attention span, and understanding how it works in our minds can help to explain why some issues grab our attention while others that should do not.
Salience itself is not a complicated concept. The idea is simply that, the more salient something is, the more likely it is to draw our attention. The important question is why some things are salient and others are not. Why isn’t world hunger salient? Why are those pork-barrel projects salient in the positive sense when they’re local, and in the negative sense when they’re not? An easy answer seems to be selfishness. We are selfish, so we don’t care about others. The starving children in Ethiopia are not my problem, nor are voters in another state or district. But this doesn’t always hold. People who give to charitable causes don’t always think in terms of what cause specifically does the most overall to combat need. People always seem more likely to commit to causes that are more local; we give to local fundraisers and such more often than to distant causes, even if the distant causes are greater. Might this still be attributed to selfishness? Not if the local cause, despite being local, doesn’t affect us. Some give to local organizations that have no direct impact on them or those connected to them, and do so more often than to those charities that focus their work in other countries. Likewise, with the example of pork, we support projects that keep the local economy strong, and congressmen who look out for our interests, even if we ourselves and those we know are not in need of such help. Such a congressman (or woman) “cares for the community.” But don’t the others as well, if they are operating in a similar way? Perhaps selfishness has some involvement in the overall equation. But at the least, it doesn’t seem to be the sole factor at work here.
Might it be knowledge, or, more specifically, awareness of the issues? Perhaps those who are concerned simply don’t know enough about the plight of children in other countries; they may not realize the depth of the suffering. Likewise, when we support the bringing money to our home state through political means, we may not really stop to consider the situation of others, and how having a senior senator on the appropriations committee is rather unfair to most other states. One doesn’t see the other side. Again, this isn’t quite sufficient. Salience isn’t all about mere knowledge; for, as noted in the very beginning, we all very well know that people are actually starving to death in other countries, and that for a very small amount of money we could feed some of them indefinitely. We know that those pork-barrel projects in other states create jobs for those states, and that some of those states may be worse-off than our own. But this knowledge is abstract; while we know that kids are starving, do we really feel it? Has each of us spent some time today considering what it is like to not have any food for a week? For two weeks? Has each of us considered that, by forgoing a minor pleasure each day, we could keep people from death?
The truth of the matter is, we really have not. We are too preoccupied with our own lives; our jobs, our relationships, the circumstances of those close to us. These things have more salience to us. Likewise, issues in our own state or country have more salience to us than those in other states or countries. And now, perhaps, we are ready for a better definition of salience. It includes all of the elements mentioned so far; a bit of selfishness (not necessarily in the negative sense), a bit of knowledge, and a good bit of feeling. Salience is the degree to which a circumstance grabs us by the shoulders and gives us a good shake. It requires knowledge, and is often accompanied by selfishness, but most of all it requires emotion, specifically care; salient things are those we care about, in the general sense as those things we are somehow concerned with. It’s important to us as individuals. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that it is important in general, or important at all; but it is taken as being important, and here, that’s what’s important.
So, to return to our question: why isn’t world hunger important to us? We have knowledge of it. Given the smallness of the contributions usually asked for in those late-night commercials, selfishness is likely not central (or else it would be a very petty selfishness indeed). The answer is problem a combination of distance and overexposure. For one thing, world hunger is a very abstract problem, one that seems beyond our capacity to change. Sure, we can help one child, but what does our tiny contribution really do? Further, it’s very difficult to conceptualize any influence one actually does have. What do our donations actually result in? What have I done? Sure, a family is saved; but that’s still too abstract. It’s some family out there, five thousand miles away. There are thousands, millions of families like that. On that scale, it seems virtually unreal; the family saved is lost in the multitude. Thus abstraction and distance form a major stumbling block to salience, as they loosen the visceral emotional grip that the most local, the most visible acts and consequences have on us. It is to fight against this that those late night commercials ask you not just to give money, but to sponsor a child. If you sponsor a child, it sounds as though you are directly responsible for that person’s well-being. Your impact becomes tangible in the letters and pictures you are sent from that child’s family. Solving world hunger thus becomes more relevant, because it becomes more personal, more pointed straight at you. It’s tangible, and beyond all else the salient is tangible.
Keeping to this thread, overexposure (and constant exposure) is perhaps just as great a threat to solving world hunger as distance and underexposure, ironically enough. Overexposure, seeing images again and again and again of starving children, leads to a dulling effect. Everyone is starving over there, it seems; what can I do? While it’s not necessary for salience, novelty is an easy means through which to make something salient; likewise, familiarity does not always make salience disappear, but absent some other reason to stay salient, with it goes interest. If something is new, mysterious, unknown, or surprising, it grabs our attention and does not easily let go. Once we understand, or have seen it repeatedly, we lose interest as our mind categorizes it and moves on. Thus, the first time you tied your shoes, it was novel and cause for celebration; now, you give it virtually no conscious thought whatsoever; it occupies no place in your schedule or planning; its salience is basically nil; whereas, at age four, it was all-consuming. When we see examples of corrupt politicians again and again, it ironically serves to dull the interest of many in fixing corruption, as we just resign ourselves to the idea that all politicians are corrupt and that there’s nothing we can do about it. Selfishness and laziness play a hand here, as they often do; but, if anything, we should be expected to fight for our interests as we find more corruption. Yet, those who fight corruption actively and vocally seem a minority; for the rest of us, we are more concerned with immediate issues, such as whether our local economy is suffering and our jobs are safe. Thus, pork-barrel spending is an abstract problem, bad but not something that we feel directly impacted by; money just flies in all directions in government, and we can’t be expected to know what to do about it. We feel powerless and distant before the scale of it all. Local issues, on the other hand, the money we have for community projects and such, are clear, direct, and impact us immediately (and, though I downplayed it to a degree before, it would be stupidity to deny that how something impacts us literally (and financially) has no effect on salience). We not only know, we see with our own eyes what a little extra appropriation can do. We know it’s needed, and the government can live with a couple million dollars less (our yearly GDP, after all, is greater by a factor of six zeroes). In other states, other local economies, things may be worse and have greater need; but that’s distant from us, not something that we can see the effects of. It’s not mere selfishness; if we saw, if we felt the suffering a community in bad financial straits is going through, we would likely feel more sympathetic. When we talk to relatives in other communities, we can feel genuine sympathy for those otherwise distant communities. But without that eyewitness account, we don’t feel it. And if we don’t feel it, it’s that much harder to muster the will to argue for change. To get true involvement, then, in politics and otherwise, requires a proper method, a way of making salient.
posted by Derek at 11:48 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home