I thought that some folks on our TIPS list--or folks whom they
know--might find the little essay below of interest. It's slated to
appear in the December issue of the American Psychological Society's
Observer (and perhaps elsewhere should there be any
interest). Given the current national anxieties, the
Observer
welcomed my making this available on the Internet.
The essay also appears, with documentation, at
www.davidmyers.org/fears
Dave Myers
Do We Fear the Right Things?
David G. Myers
Hope College
�Freedom and fear are at war,� President Bush has told us. The
terrorists� goal, he says, is �not only to kill and maim and destroy� but
to frighten us into inaction.
Alas, the
terrorists have made progress in their fear war, by diverting our
anxieties from big risks toward smaller risks. Flying is a case in
point.
Even
before September 11th,
44 percent of those willing to risk flying told Gallup they felt
fearful. �Every time I get off a plane, I view it as a failed
suicide attempt,� movie director Barry Sonnenfeld has said. After
the September 11th
horror, and with threats of more terror to come, cancellations
understandably left airlines, travel agencies, and holiday hotels flying
into the red.
Indeed, the
terrorists may still be killing us, in ways unnoticed. If we now
fly 20 percent less and instead drive half those unflown miles, we will
spend 2 percent more time in motor vehicles. This translates into
800 more people dying as passengers and pedestrians. So, in just
the next year the terrorists may indirectly kill three times more people
on our highways than died on those four fated planes.
Ah, but
won�t we have spared some of those folks fiery plane crashes?
Likely not many, especially now with heightened security, hardened
cockpit doors, more reactive passengers, and the likelihood that future
terrorists will hit us where we�re not looking. National Safety
Council data reveal that in the last half of the 1990s Americans were,
mile for mile, 37 times more likely to die in a vehicle crash than on a
commercial flight. When I fly to New York, the most dangerous part
of my journey is the drive to the Grand Rapids airport. (My highway
risk may be muted by my not drinking and driving, but I�m still
vulnerable to others who do.)
Or
consider this: From 1990 through 2000 there were 1.4 deaths per 10
million passengers on U.S. scheduled airlines. Flying
understandably feels dangerous. But we have actually been
less likely to crash and die on any flight than, when coin tossing, to
flip 22 heads in a row.
Will
yesterday�s safety statistics predict the future? Even if not,
terrorists could take down 50 more planes with 60 passengers each and�if
we kept flying--we'd still have been safer this year in planes than on
the road. Flying may be scary, but driving the same distance should
be many times scarier.
Why do we
fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers (whose habit shortens
their lives, on average, by about five years) fret before flying (which,
averaged across people, shortens life by one day)? Why do we fear
terrorism more than accidents--which kill nearly as many per week
in just the United States as did terrorism with its 2,527 worldwide
deaths in all of the 1990s? Why do we fear violent crime more than
clogged arteries?
Psychological
science has identified four influences on our intuitions about
risk. First, we fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to
fear. Human emotions were road tested in the Stone Age.
Yesterday�s risks prepare us to fear snakes, lizards, and spiders,
although all three combined now kill only a dozen Americans a year.
Flying may be far safer than biking, but our biological past predisposes
us to fear confinement and heights, and therefore flying.
Second, we
fear what we cannot control. Skiing, by one estimate, poses
1000 times the health and injury risk of food preservatives. Yet
many people gladly assume the risk of skiing, which they control, but
avoid preservatives. Driving we control, flying we do not.
�We are loathe to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves,�
noted risk analyst Chauncey Starr.
Third, we
fear what�s immediate. Teens are indifferent to smoking�s toxicity
because they live more for the present than the distant future.
Much of the plane�s threat is telescoped into the moments of takeoff and
landing, while the dangers of driving are diffused across many moments to
come, each trivially dangerous.
Fourth, we
fear what�s most readily available in memory. Horrific images of a
DC-10 catapulting across the Sioux City runway, or the Concorde exploding
in Paris, or of United Flight 175 slicing into the World Trade Center,
form indelible memories. And availability in memory provides our
intuitive rule-of-thumb for judging risks. Small wonder that most
of us perceive accidents as more lethal than strokes, and homicide as
more lethal than diabetes. (In actuality, the Grim Reaper snatches twice
as many lives by stroke as by accident and four times as many by diabetes
as by homicide.) Vivid, memorable images dominate our fears.
We can know that unprovoked great white shark attacks have claimed merely
67 lives worldwide since 1876. Yet after watching Jaws and
reading vivid accounts of last summer�s Atlantic coastal shark attacks,
we may feel chills when an underwater object brushes our leg.
As
publicized Powerball lottery winners cause us to overestimate the
infinitesimal odds of lottery success, so vivid airline casualties cause
us to overestimate the infinitesimal odds of a lethal airline
ticket. We comprehend Mario Grasso�s winning $197 million in a 1999
Powerball lottery. We don�t comprehend the 328 million losing
tickets enabling her jackpot. We comprehend the 266 passengers and
crew on those four fated flights. We don�t comprehend the vast
numbers of accident-free flights--16 million consecutive
fatality-free takeoffs and landings during one stretch of the
1990s. The result: We overvalue lottery tickets, overestimate
flight risk, and underestimate the dangers of driving.
The moral:
It�s perfectly normal to fear purposeful violence from those who hate
us. But with our emotions now calming a bit, perhaps it�s time to
check our fears against facts. �It�s time to get back to life,�
said terror-victim widow Lisa Beamer before boarding the same flight her
husband had taken on September
11th. To be
prudent is to be mindful of the realities of how humans die. By so
doing, we can take away the terrorists� most omnipresent weapon:
exaggerated fear.
And when
terrorists strike again, remember the odds. If, God forbid, anthrax
or a truck bomb kills a thousand Americans, the odds are 284,000 to1 that
you won�t be among them.
Hope College social psychologist David G. Myers is author of
Intuition: The Powers and Perils of Our Inner Knowing, to be
published by Yale University Press.
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