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By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

If you want to accentuate the importance of a problem, it seems sensible to explain how prevalent it is. Lots of people are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Lots of women carry a gene that makes them susceptible to breast cancer.

A problem that affects a lot of people is more important than one that doesn’t, right?

Except that’s not how we human beings process the information, according to a new research paper. Telling people that a problem is prevalent tends to make them decide it’s less serious, the paper found. People think that the world is basically safe and that problems get addressed, so if something is common, they figure, how bad can it really be?

“People believed dire problems — ranging from poverty to drunk driving — were less problematic upon learning the number of people they affect,” the researchers wrote.

That’s obviously a cognitive bias. Cancer, diabetes and heart disease are common, for example, and they are also extremely harmful. Some dire problems stay dire because they’re intractable. Life is tough, but we don’t like to think that way.

The paper, which was published online in October by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; Luiza Tanoue Troncoso Peres, a predoctoral........

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