I think there could be some other factors operating in this overestimation of the danger of air travel. First, everyone travels in cars all the time and we have long ago become habituated to the danger (which doesn't actually bode well for the safety of car travel but does explain why it feels safer). Most people don't travel by air frequently enough to become habituated to it (more people are probably sensitized to it). Those that do travel by air frequently enough to be habituated to it probably do not have a hard time believing it is safer than car travel (also based on personal experience and therefore, no more statistically valid than those who fly rarely who fear air travel).
There is another factor related to the availability heuristic that you don't often see addressed. Of course, plane crashes, due to the news, will be more available to memory than car crashes (of which there are so many that only the most horrific would end up on the news). A largely unconsidered factor that relates to the availability heuristic is the frequency of car travel vs. air travel. We see cars all the time around us and planes only when we go to the airport so I think people don't have a good idea of the base number of plane flights there are every day and the number of people who fly each day to compare to the fatalities of the occasional plane crash. According to Wikipedia, on 9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_on_9/11), Canadian and American air traffic controllers had to land 6,500 planes carrying close to a million people. And that was just at one point in time, not the total number of air travelers scheduled to travel on that day. Checking a flight tracker such as http://flightaware.com/ gives you some perspective about the number of flights each day. When I checked it today at 3:30 pm CST, it claimed to be "tracking 4,849 airborne aircraft" and to have "tracked 44,851 arrivals in the last 24 hours". Clicking on the map with the red dots gives you some idea of how many flights there are in the air at any one time. Of course, this doesn't compare to the number of cars but the planes carry many more passengers than the cars and they crash much less frequently than the cars. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Box 3055 x7295 [email protected] http://tinyurl.com/DrFroman Proverbs 14:15 "A simple man believes anything, but a prudent man gives thought to his steps." From: Claudia Stanny [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 3:10 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: RE: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology The short-term probability calculation is an interesting consideration. However, the relative risk of air travel compared to travel by automobile is consistently in favor of air travel as the safer option. Nevertheless, people consistently prefer travel by car as the "safer" option. Much of this fear is driven by ease of retrieving examples of fatalities in air crashes and overweighting this risk. Fatalities in auto crashes are mundane, not covered well in the media, and their risk is underestimated. 911 enhanced the ease of retrieval of air crashes with fatalities (and may have marginally increased the "real" risk of air travel). I doubt that the safe "soft crash" of an airplane in the Hudson River with zero fatalities did anything to reduce this overestimation of the risk of air travel. But that is an empirical question. Anybody working on it? :) Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor, Psychology University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435 e-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm From: Maxwell Gwynn [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 2:38 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology I'm not an expert on Risk Assessment, but it would seem to me that when people were considering the riskiness of traveling by car versus by air, they would have been likely to consider that (after September 11) there had recently been four commercial flights in which all passengers had been killed. The NSC data would not have included this information in their data base. I don't think that the possibility/probability of further terrorist hijackings would be independent of the incidence of recent terrorist hijackings, and so wouldn't people be making a conditional risk calculation? That is, the comparison would not be Probability of dying in a car crash versus Probability of dying in a plane crash (37:1), but rather Probability of dying in a car crash in the next few days of traveling versus Probability of dying in a plane crash in the next few days of traveling given that there had been recent terrorist hijackings of commercial flights (??:1). What I'm getting at is that the increase in car travel was not necessarily all a result of the "dread risk" phenomenon, but also included some novel calculations of relative risks based on reality rather than overreaction. -Max Maxwell Gwynn, PhD Psychology Department Wilfrid Laurier University 519-884-0710 ext 3854 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> >>> "Frantz, Sue" [email protected]> 3/25/2009 11:51 AM >>> >><mailto:[email protected]%3e%203/25/2009%2011:51%20AM%20%3e%3e> Bungled Risk Assessment and Tragic Road Trips<http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/index.cfm?fuseaction=entry&entryID=333> Fearing dying in a terrorist airplane crash because the September 11 events were so prominent in our memories, we reduced our air travel and increased our automobile travel, leading to a significantly great number of fatal traffic accidents than usual. It is estimated that about 1,600 more people needlessly died in these traffic accidents (Gigerenzer, 2006). These lives could have been saved had we not reacted to the dread risk as we did. We just do not seem to realize that it is far safer to fly than to drive. National Safety Council data reveal that you are 37 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a commercial flight." - --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
