one-in-a-million bogeyman while
virtually ignoring the true risks that
inhabit our world. News coverage of
a shark attack can clear beaches all
over the country, even though sharks
kill a grand total of about one American annually, on average. ;at is less
than the death count from cattle,
which gore or stomp ;; Americans
per year. Drowning, on the other
hand, takes ;,;;; lives a year, without a single frenzied call for mandatory life vests to stop the carnage. A
whole industry has boomed around
conquering the fear of flying, but
while we down beta-blockers in
coach, praying not to be one of the
;; average annual airline casualties, we typically give little thought
to driving to the grocery store, even
though there are more than ;;,;;;
automobile fatalities each year.
In short, our risk perception is
often at direct odds with reality. All
those people bidding up the cost of
iodide? ;ey would have been better
off spending ;;; on a radon testing
kit. The colorless, odorless, radioactive gas, which forms as a by-product
of natural uranium decay in rocks,
builds up in homes, causing lung cancer. According to the Environmental
Protection Agency, radon exposure
kills ;;,;;; Americans annually.
David Ropeik, a consultant in risk
communication and the author of
How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears
Don’t Always Match the Facts, has
dubbed this disconnect the perception gap. “Even perfect information
perfectly provided that addresses
people’s concerns will not convince
everyone that vaccines don’t cause
autism, or that global warming is real,
or that ;uoride in the drinking water
is not a Commie plot,” he says. “Risk
communication can’t totally close
the perception gap, the difference
between our fears and the facts.”
;; ;;; ;;;;; ;;;;;, ;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Daniel Kahneman, now at Princeton
University, and Amos Tversky, who
passed away in ;;;;, began investigating the way people make decisions, identifying a number of biases
and mental shortcuts, or heuristics, on
which the brain relies to make choices.
Later, Paul Slovic and his colleagues
Baruch Fischho;, now a professor of
social sciences at Carnegie Mellon
University, and psychologist Sarah
Lichtenstein began investigating how
these leaps of logic come into play
when people face risk. They developed a tool, called the psychometric
paradigm, that describes all the little
tricks our brain uses when staring
down a bear or deciding to ;nish the
;;th hole in a lighting storm.
ate threat, although we have only a
;-in-;;,;;; chance of being killed
by a cataclysmic storm. Even a terrible tornado season like the one last
spring typically yields fewer than ;;;
tornado fatalities (see Destination
Science, page ;;). Heart disease, on
the other hand, which eventually
kills ; in every ; people in this country, and ;;;,;;; annually, hardly
even rates with our gut.
Many of our personal biases are
unsurprising. For instance, the optimism bias gives us a rosier view of
the future than current facts might
suggest. We assume we will be richer
;; years from now, so it is ;ne to blow
our savings on a boat—we’ll pay it o;
then. Con;rmation bias leads us to
prefer information that backs up our
current opinions and feelings and to
discount information contradictory
to those opinions. We also have tendencies to conform our opinions to
those of the groups we identify with,
to fear man-made risks more than
we fear natural ones, and to believe
that events causing dread—the technical term for risks that could result
in particularly painful or gruesome
deaths, like plane crashes and radiation burns—are inherently more
risky than other events.
The “representative” heuristic
makes us think something is probable
if it is part of a known set of characteristics. John wears glasses, is quiet,
and carries a calculator. John is therefore . . . a mathematician? An engineer?
His attributes taken together seem to
;t the common stereotype.
But it is heuristics—the subtle men-
tal strategies that often give
rise to such biases—that do
much of the heavy lifting in
risk perception. The “avail-
ability” heuristic says that the
easier a scenario is to conjure,
the more common it must
be. It is easy to imagine a
tornado ripping through a house;
that is a scene we see every spring on
the news, and all the time on reality
TV and in movies. Now try imagin-
ing someone dying of heart disease.
You probably cannot conjure many
breaking-news images for that one,
and the drawn-out process of athero-
sclerosis will most likely never be
the subject of a summer thriller. ;e
e;ect? Twisters feel like an immedi-
But of all the mental rules of
thumb and biases banging around
in our brain, the most in;uential in
assessing risk is the “a;ect” heuris-
tic. Slovic calls a;ect a “faint whis-
per of emotion” that creeps into our
decisions. Simply put, positive feel-
ings associated with a choice tend
to make us think it has more ben-
e;ts. Negative correlations make us
think an action is riskier. One study
by Slovic showed that when people
decide to start smoking despite
years of exposure to antismoking
campaigns, they hardly ever think
about the risks. Instead, it’s all about
the short-term “hedonic” pleasure.
;e good outweighs the bad, which
they never fully expect to
experience.
O
;; ;;;;;;;; ;; ;;;;;;;;
threats at the expense of
real ones influences more
than just our personal lifestyle choices. Public policy
and mass action are also at stake.
;e O;ce of National Drug Control
Policy reports that prescription drug
overdoses have killed more people
than crack and heroin combined did
in the ;;;;s and ;;;;s. Law enforcement and the media were obsessed
with crack, yet it was only recently
that prescription drug abuse merited
even an after-school special.
