{"id":62930,"date":"2013-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rockcontent.com\/blog\/the-psychology-of-percentages\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T12:46:56","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T15:46:56","slug":"the-psychology-of-percentages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/the-psychology-of-percentages\/","title":{"rendered":"The Psychology of Percentages"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are all familiar with percentages: we learned about them in grade school and we encounter them everywhere. The concept of abstracting a quantity to a common range can be extremely useful. Percentages let us compare relative quantities of groups, measure changes in quantity over time, we use them in how we calculate interest, to measure slope, and in any number of other ways. By far, the most common use of percentages is to indicate a portion of a whole<\/a>. Despite their advantages, percentages add a layer of abstraction that can depersonalize data. It’s hard to conceptualize percentages and translate them to quantities of real units, especially when the actual quantities are very large. For example 19% of the world’s population lives in China. But since this number has been abstracted and the unit of “People” has been removed, we don’t have much of a personal connection to the statistic. An alternative way of conceptualizing the same numbers would be to create a hypothetical scenario. If the world were 100 people, China would have 19 people in it. This returns the intimacy to the numbers. Now we can have thoughts like, “I know that many people”, “My extended family is that big”, or “That’s fewer than the number of kids in my third grade class.” These types of thoughts can help us empathize with other issues involved in the data: important issues like the number of people going hungry, or literacy rates, or wealth distribution. Let’s take a look at how effective this technique can be. If the World Were 100 People<\/a> looks at some global statistics using this hypothetical situation. Remember, you could put a percentage sign on the end of all of these numbers and they would still be accurate.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"If<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tIf the World were 100 People infographic<\/a> by <\/span>KVSStudio<\/a>. <\/span><\/div>\n

<\/a> \t\t\t \t \t\t\t