A vivid individual case in a report shapes audience estimates of prevalence more than the statistics presented alongside it.
Zillmann and Brosius found across studies that varying the exemplars in a news item, while holding the base-rate information constant, moved readers' estimates of how common the phenomenon was. The exemplar is concrete, memorable and easy to retrieve, and the base rate is none of those, so a single interviewee outweighs the figure in the same paragraph.
In practice
- A report that pairs a national statistic with one family is remembered as the family.
- A board briefed with a dashboard and one customer story makes decisions about the story.