The Prominence Effect: How Our Minds Deceive Us About Important Decisions

By Emiliano Rodríguez Nuesch and María Morena Vicente

Have you ever been so focused on one task that you completely missed something happening right in front of you?

There is a complex psychological phenomenon called the Prominence Effect. It refers to our tendency to give undue attention to certain aspects of a situation or decision, often at the expense of other important factors.

This can lead to biased or suboptimal decisions, as we prioritize what's most prominent in our minds rather than what's most important.

This prominence bias is a significant component of the deadly arithmetic of compassion, contributing to the overlooking of urgent problems like genocides and mass atrocities due to misguided slow thinking and simplified tradeoffs. 

Understanding this mechanism is crucial because it can sometimes be exploited by algorithms, the media, and politicians. But this phenomenon is not solely caused by external manipulations. It is also an effect generated by our own minds.

Let’s see some real-world examples.

Climate Change and Comfort

Our attitudes toward climate change reveal how near-term comforts and conveniences capture our daily attention, overshadowing the importance of preserving the environment for future generations. This results in actions that often contradict our carefully considered values.

For instance, consider the prevalent use of single-use plastics. Despite knowing its detrimental impact, convenience often overrides environmental concerns, resulting in continued reliance on plastic products.

The prominence effect also influences consumer behavior, as seen in a wide variety of topics such as fashion, food choices, and energy consumption. Despite advocating for renewable energy, energy-intensive appliances and wasteful consumption patterns persist due to the immediate benefits we see in them. Addressing this bias is crucial for aligning our actions with our beliefs about how we should respond to climate change.

Public Health Crises and Economic Stability

During health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, governments often faced tradeoffs between public health measures and economic stability. The prominence of immediate economic concerns and benefits sometimes led to delayed or relaxed public health measures, exacerbating the crisis and leading to more severe consequences to people’s health. 

For example, in the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, some U.S. states, like Florida, delayed lockdown measures to protect the economy, especially the tourism industry. This decision resulted in a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases and overwhelmed healthcare systems. 

Similarly, Brazil's focus on economic stability under President Jair Bolsonaro led to less restrictive measures, causing significant spikes in cases and deaths. He downplayed the virus's severity by repeatedly dismissing the virus as "a little flu" and resisted implementing lockdowns or other restrictive measures. In a speech during the pandemic in 2020, after firing Brazil’s health minister during the coronavirus crisis, Bolsonaro stated at a press conference: "Life is priceless, but the economy and employment need to return to normality”. This focus on immediate economic concerns overshadowed the long-term health consequences, contributing to Brazil's high infection and mortality rates.

Product Marketing Versus Worker Rights

In some industries, the drive for immediate economic gains can lead to the neglect of worker rights and safety. Consumers may not be aware of this, as the marketing prominence of the products we buy and consume can hide poor working conditions and labor exploitation.

The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh drew attention to a hidden reality. Factory owners prioritized profit over safety, leading to the deaths of over 1,100 workers that were working in unsafe conditions. This wasn’t the first garment industry accident, but its severity and preventability put the problem into the spotlight. In part due to the tragedy at Rana Plaza, various consumer-centered movements have brought attention to the working conditions involved in the manufacturing of our clothes. 

The tragedy led to significant changes, including the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, and stronger Bangladeshi labor laws. Industry practices improved with stricter factory inspections and upgraded safety standards. However, challenges remain in fully implementing these laws, ensuring effective worker representation, and maintaining ethical practices, as evidenced by over 100 accidents reported since the tragedy.

Technology Adoption and Privacy Concerns

The rapid adoption of new technologies, such as facial recognition and data collection tools, often prioritizes convenience and comfort over privacy. The prominence of security and technological advancement can overshadow the long-term implications for individual privacy and civil liberties.

For instance, the extensive use of facial recognition for surveillance boosts security but infringes on citizens' privacy and civil liberties. Facial recognition software aids crime-solving but raises significant privacy concerns by scraping images from social media without consent. These infringes are mostly overlooked.

Here is a tech reporter at The New York Times talking about her research on the topic and her book “Your Face Belongs to Us”. 

In 2014, the Snowden disclosures exposed different mechanisms in which citizen’s privacy was seriously breached.  Privacy concerns were put into the spotlight and that triggered a debate on how vulnerable the Internet is. How can we ensure that the prominence effect does not lead us to sacrifice privacy for the promise of technological convenience and security?

Nuclear Threats and Political Decisions

The prominence of immediate threats can overshadow long-term consequences, particularly in political and military decision-making. For example, decisions about whether to use nuclear weapons in a conflict might focus on securing strategic interests and prioritizating immediate security concerns, often neglecting the long-term consequences of military escalation, overlooking the humanitarian impact on civilian populations and the environmental devastation caused by armed conflicts. This is an example of a deadly arithmetic of compassion.

Attention is a limited resource

The prominence effect illustrates how we often focus on immediate, tangible concerns at the expense of more significant, long-term issues. Allowing our limited attention span to eliminate important factors we have to weigh and balance makes the decision easier, though flawed. Therefore, attention is finite and resolving conflicts among important but conflicting issues, is difficult.

These examples demonstrate how both internal biases and internal manipulation of attention and information processing can lead us to prioritize less important but more prominent factors, often with detrimental consequences. Fortunately, there are ways to counter prominence bias through changing the ways we make decisions to ensure that all important elements get the attention they deserve. For example, when vital but easily ignored humanitarian consequences are at stake, advocates for such values must be given a seat at the decision-making table.

To read more on social change and compassion, see the following:

The Uyghur Genocide and the Prominence Effect / September 19, 2022

The Prominence Effect and the Torture of Majid Khan / November 18, 2021

The Effects of Psychological Biases and Social Media on Nuclear War Decisions / May 9, 2019

Security Prominence Trumps the FY 2020 Budget Proposal / March 19, 2019

Uprising in Sudan / January 18, 2018

COP21 and Business as Usual / October 19, 2016