The Mathematics of Depression

   How can NGO’s gain better attention from general public? Any appeal to support charity by explaining the mission and vision of your NGO is not going to work, on the other hand explaining the plight of an individual at your NGO might have much better impact.

  Imagine Pravin running an NGO for educating young and underprivileged kids. He has put his heart and soul into it, but he is in dire need for more fund to serve the community better. How many people do you think will come forward to provide fund or help him in any other way? How many complete strangers will come forward to help him? May be some. But what if he wants more people to join hands with him, how can he achieve that?

  Research says that acting on the emotions of human beings is the answer. A simple or very often used method is to talk about a specific person helped by the NGO, providing a very natural story of an underprivileged kid in the NGO for that matter. Jack Nicholson adopts the Tanzanian  Ndugu Umbo in the movie ‘About Schimdt’ after hearing the six year olds circumstances. Nicholson writes letters to him and sends his photo. The kid responds by sending him a beautiful scratchy pencil sketch of an old man holding hands with a young kid. Tear swells up in your eye when you see that, at that moment you want to support someone with all that you can. Unfortunately, the NGO’s wouldn’t know that you’ve just watched ‘About Schimdt.’, and you probably will not know how to go about helping a kid.

   Stories about individuals have high impact and inspiration quotient than stories about a group of people or abstract things.  What do you think will inspire people? The integrity of your NGO or a story about a young kid who has beaten the odds to survive. We care about individuals, not about masses. Masses distract us, and often mislead us. We want individuals to take decisions, what we need is story tellers at NGO, not just people who have the passion to give back to the community.

The original research:

  The research was conducted by appealing for fund to a charity in two different ways. The first group tried to persuade by speaking about how the NGO has been helping people for so many years, how clean their balance sheets are, and stressing the certifications given by Government authorities etc.  The second group persuasive technique was simple personal stories. They told stories about kids or senior citizens sheltered by them, not more than one story to a person. Stories that inspire.

 The results were obvious; the second group had much better impact. They were able to create interest in almost 70% of the people they met. Compare this with 30% the first group was able to attract among the people they met. A clear indication of how simple specific personal stories can be of great help in persuading people to act.

So what about Mathematics?

 The second group continued experiments to the next level. The next time they went to canvas participants to create interest in their organization, they did not tell stories straightaway. They gave simple math problems to solve. May be they could have even challenged the participants with a Sudoku. They told the same inspirational stories after the math problem, and the results this time were not so obvious. Less than 50% of the people they met were interested in Charity. A simple math problem reduced the impact of the story by a good 20 people for every hundred participants.

 What is happening here?

  The math problem had deep impact that made the participants switch to the analytical mode. Even while the emotional stories were being told, their minds were still in a state of “analytical inertia”. They were prone to think analytically than emotionally, and in turn the impact of the personal story went down drastically. This also explains why analytical people are generally misers.

What about depression?

 Depression is an emotional situation, a state where someone is unnaturally anxious or at the grip of any other emotion. You may be depressed because of fear, anger, love, disgust or any other strong feelings. In the modern world, we tend to get into the depression mode quite often. We mostly close our door to the outside world, some people go out the malls and open their purse to the outside world, and in some severe cases anti-depressants are the only way out. The result of the research could provide one of the simplest solutions to depression.

If doing a math problem can bring keep us in analytical inertia and stop us from acting emotionally, can doing a math problem when you are depressed bring down the emotional conflict in your mind?

Ok here are the numbers.

1. During the second part of the experiment, nearly half of the sample showed interest in charity; these people broke the analytical inertia and were able to connect emotionally to the personal stories.
2.  Even with stories, roughly one third of the group did not show interest in the first experiment. Let us not consider these people at all.
3.  One fifth of the sample was unable to get out from the analytical inertia, and this group had the highest impact on the results of the two experiments.

 Considering all this, the third group has a good chance of getting out of depression by doing a simple Sudoku than any other group. Even if one fifth of the population can shake themselves out of depression by doing a simple math problem, the world would be a better place, and less depressed place to live. 

Disclaimer: There was no research on correlation between depression and mathematics yet; it is just a theory I’m proposing here. Try this when you are depressed next time and let me know which category you belong to. And one more thing, I’m not legally or morally responsible for your depression or anything that you do in that state of mind.