Visual persuasion
It was the summer of 2015, and tensions were rising between European leaders. Hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers had been fleeing the war-torn Middle East, crossing the Mediterranean Sea in desperate attempts to re-build their lives on a distant continent. Most of the refugees were passing through Greece and Italy, which had quickly become the bottleneck. Greece couldn't possibly absorb the volume of people, particularly after a controversial debt bailout had just been approved.
European leaders were profoundly moved by the migrants’ plight, but also nervous about triggering an overwhelming influx of refugee claims. The data points were arresting. More than 200,000 asylum-seekers had arrived by sea in 2014, a 265% year-over-year increase. In 2015, the number had grown a further 360% to more than a million. Some 900 people had perished at sea because many of the migrants’ boats were tragically ill-equipped for the journey.
But these numbers alone didn’t move the EU leaders to act. It was the image of a three-year-old Syrian boy in a red t-shirt and blue shorts, his lifeless body found on a beach in Turkey after he, along with his brother and mother, had capsized and drowned. This was the final straw for Angela Merkel, who announced that any refugees who made it to Germany would be permitted to stay. “We can do this,” she affirmed, and other European leaders soon followed suite.
The refugee crisis had been steadily escalating since 2011, but it was a single photograph that catalyzed a policy change. This story illustrates an important theme of human psychology: visual persuasion is considerably more powerful than raw numerical persuasion. It isn’t that facts and figures don’t matter. They certainly do. It’s just that they don’t crystallize a message the way an image can.
Think of pictures that suddenly shifted the general sentiment in politics: the “Tank Man” who brought international awareness to Tiananmen Square; the “Napalm Girl” who turned public opinion against the Vietnam War; the “Situation Room” photo of President Obama and his advisors as they followed the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.
More than epitomizing drama, pictures also simplify multivariate realities. Think of the graphs that set the terms of debate in contentious areas: the R Number Curve that sounded the alarm on COVID-19; the Gini Coefficient that became a graphical measure of income inequality; the “hockey stick graph” that suggested climate change was a clear and present danger.
There are neurological reasons for the shorthand resonance of these images and graphs. It is estimated that about half the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to our visual system. Vision is to humans what smell is to dogs. It’s a primary sense-making mechanism.
This is clearly a point worth pondering for anyone engaged in influence work. We should always be asking ourselves, How can I make my case more visual? How can I bring the numbers to life with a personal story that represents a core dramatic need? Is there a graph that neatly distills the truth within a complex domain?
Images drive narratives and decisions much more than facts alone ever will.