Preference for concentrated effects

Overview

People show a preference for concentrated results when making policy decisions – in other words, people will be more likely to support an action whose benefits are focused in a certain area over one with perhaps larger benefits that are spread out.

For example: implementing "daylight savings time" (DST), which officially sets all clocks in most of the United States forward by one hour during the longest days of the year, has a concentrated effect of greatly reducing power usage (during the months when it is in effect) over not implementing DST. However, it also has a diffuse (and, to many people, much more immediate) effect of causing loss of sleep (and hence more road accidents and other incidents) due to the interruption of sleep patterns, the need for many people to get up while it is still dark when it would otherwise be daylight, and so forth.

This preference is probably due to the following things:

• Concentrated effects are easier to measure
• Concentrated effects are easier to understand and explain
• In general, concentrated effects are more meme-like, and hence tend to be weighted more heavily in the collective decisionmaking process