Conventional Wisdom About Risk

Most of the time, when the perception of security doesn’t match the reality of security, it’s because the perception of the risk doesn’t match the reality of the risk. We worry about the wrong things: paying too much attention to minor risks and not enough attention to major ones. We don’t correctly assess the magnitude of different risks. A lot of this can be chalked up to bad information or bad mathematics, but there are some general pathologies that come up over and over again.

In Beyond Fear, I listed five:
People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation.
Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks.
People underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control.
Last, people overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny.1

David Ropeik and George Gray have a longer list in their book Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You:
Most people are more afraid of risks that are new than those they’ve lived with for a while. In the summer of 1999, New Yorkers were extremely afraid of West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne infection that had never been seen in the United States. By the summer of 2001, though the virus continued to show up and make a few people sick, the fear had abated. The risk was still there, but New Yorkers had lived with it for a while. Their familiarity with it helped them see it differently.
Most people are less afraid of risks that are natural than those that are human-made. Many people are more afraid of radiation from nuclear waste, or cell phones, than they are of radiation from the sun, a far greater risk.
Most people are less afraid of a risk they choose to take than of a risk imposed on them. Smokers are less afraid of smoking than they are of asbestos and other indoor air pollution in their workplace, which is something over which they have little choice.
Most people are less afraid of risks if the risk also confers some benefits they want. People risk injury or death in an earthquake by living in San Francisco or Los Angeles because they like those areas, or they can find work there.
Most people are more afraid of risks that can kill them in particularly awful ways, like being eaten by a shark, than they are of the risk of dying in less awful ways, like heart disease–the leading killer in America.
Most people are less afraid of a risk they feel they have some control over, like driving, and more afraid of a risk they don’t control, like flying, or sitting in the passenger seat while somebody else drives.
Most people are less afraid of risks that come from places, people, corporations, or governments they trust, and more afraid if the risk comes from a source they don’t trust. Imagine being offered two glasses of clear liquid. You have to drink one. One comes from Oprah Winfrey. The other comes from a chemical company. Most people would choose Oprah’s, even though they have no facts at all about what’s in either glass.
We are more afraid of risks that we are more aware of and less afraid of risks that we are less aware of. In the fall of 2001, awareness of terrorism was so high that fear was rampant, while fear of street crime and global climate change and other risks was low, not because those risks were gone, but because awareness was down.
We are much more afraid of risks when uncertainty is high, and less afraid when we know more, which explains why we meet many new technologies with high initial concern.
Adults are much more afraid of risks to their children than risks to themselves. Most people are more afraid of asbestos in their kids’ school than asbestos in their own workplace.
You will generally be more afraid of a risk that could directly affect you than a risk that threatens others. U.S. citizens were less afraid of terrorism before September 11, 2001, because up till then the Americans who had been the targets of terrorist attacks were almost always overseas. But suddenly on September 11, the risk became personal. When that happens, fear goes up, even though the statistical reality of the risk may still be very low. 2

Others make these and similar points, which are summarized in Table 1. 3 4 5 6

When you look over the list in Table 1, the most remarkable thing is how reasonable so many of them seem. This makes sense for two reasons. One, our perceptions of risk are deeply ingrained in our brains, the result of millions of years of evolution. And two, our perceptions of risk are generally pretty good, and are what have kept us alive and reproducing during those millions of years of evolution.

Table 1: Conventional Wisdom About People and Risk Perception
People exaggerate risks that are:
People downplay risks that are:

Spectacular
Pedestrian

Rare
Common

Personified
Anonymous

Beyond their control, or externally imposed
More under their control, or taken willingly

Talked about
Not discussed

Intentional or man-made
Natural

Immediate
Long-term or diffuse

Sudden
Evolving slowly over time

Affecting them personally
Affecting others

New and unfamiliar
Familiar

Uncertain
Well understood

Directed against their children
Directed towards themselves

Morally offensive
Morally desirable

Entirely without redeeming features
Associated with some ancillary benefit

Not like their current situation
Like their current situation

When our risk perceptions fail today, it’s because of new situations that have occurred at a faster rate than evolution: situations that exist in the world of 2007, but didn’t in the world of 100,000 BC. Like a squirrel whose predator-evasion techniques fail when confronted with a car, or a passenger pigeon who finds that evolution prepared him to survive the hawk but not the shotgun, our innate capabilities to deal with risk can fail when confronted with such things as modern human society, technology, and the media. And, even worse, they can be made to fail by others–politicians, marketers, and so on–who exploit our natural failures for their gain.

To understand all of this, we first need to understand the brain.

Risk and the Brain

The human brain is a fascinating organ, but an absolute mess. Because it has evolved over millions of years, there are all sorts of processes jumbled together rather than logically organized. Some of the processes are optimized for only certain kinds of situations, while others don’t work as well as they could. And there’s some duplication of effort, and even some conflicting brain processes.

Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there’s a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It’s the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what’s called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is responsible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness, and fear. It’s an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes. When an animal–lizard, bird, mammal, even you–sees, hears, or feels something that’s a potential danger, the amygdala is what reacts immediately. It’s what causes adrenaline and other hormones to be pumped into your bloodstream, triggering the fight-or-flight response, causing increased heart rate and beat force, increased muscle tension, and sweaty palms.

This kind of thing works great if you’re a lizard or a lion. Fast reaction is what you’re looking for; the faster you can notice threats and either run away from them or fight back, the more likely you are to live to reproduce.

But the world is actually more complicated than that. Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means that there’s an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for dealing with it.

We humans have a completely different pathway to deal with analyzing risk. It’s the neocortex, a more advanced part of the brain that developed very recently, evolutionarily speaking, and only appears in mammals. It’s intelligent and analytic. It can reason. It can make more nuanced trade-offs. It’s also much slower.

So here’s the first fundamental problem: we have two systems for reacting to risk–a primitive intuitive system and a more advanced analytic system–and they’re operating in parallel. And it’s hard for the neocortex to contradict the amygdala.

In his book Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson relates an incident when he and his wife lived in an apartment and a large window blew in during a storm. He was standing right beside it at the time and heard the whistling of the wind just before the window blew. He was lucky–a foot to the side and he would have been dead–but the sound has never left him:
But ever since that June storm, a new fear has entered the mix for me: the sound of wind whistling through a window. I know now that our window blew in because it had been installed improperly…. I am entirely convinced that the window we have now is installed correctly, and I trust our superintendent when he says that it is designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. In the five years since that June, we have weathered dozens of storms that produced gusts comparable to the one that blew it in, and the window has performed flawlessly.
I know all these facts–and yet when the wind kicks up, and I hear that whistling sound, I can feel my adrenaline levels rise…. Part of my brain–the part that feels most me-like, the part that has opinions about the world and decides how to act on those opinions in a rational way–knows that the windows are safe…. But another part of my brain wants to barricade myself in the bathroom all over again.7

There’s a good reason evolution has wired our brains this way. If you’re a higher-order primate living in the jungle and you’re attacked by a lion, it makes sense that you develop a lifelong fear of lions, or at least fear lions more than another animal you haven’t personally been attacked by. From a risk/reward perspective, it’s a good trade-off for the brain to make, and–if you think about it–it’s really no different than your body developing antibodies against, say, chicken pox based on a single exposure. In both cases, your body is saying: “This happened once, and therefore it’s likely to happen again. And when it does, I’ll be ready.” In a world where the threats are limited–where there are only a few diseases and predators that happen to affect the small patch of earth occupied by your particular tribe–it works.

Unfortunately, the brain’s fear system doesn’t scale the same way the body’s immune system does. While the body can develop antibodies for hundreds of diseases, and those antibodies can float around in the bloodstream waiting for a second attack by the same disease, it’s harder for the brain to deal with a multitude of lifelong fears.

All this is about the amygdala. The second fundamental problem is that because the analytic system in the neocortex is so new, it still has a lot of rough edges evolutionarily speaking. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a great quotation that explains this:
The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years–and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.
Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing. 8

A lot of what I write in the following sections are examples of these newer parts of the brain getting things wrong.

And it’s not just risks. People are not computers. We don’t evaluate security trade-offs mathematically, by examining the relative probabilities of different events. Instead, we have shortcuts, rules of thumb, stereotypes, and biases–generally known as “heuristics.” These heuristics affect how we think about risks, how we evaluate the probability of future events, how we consider costs, and how we make trade-offs. We have ways of generating close-to-optimal answers quickly with limited cognitive capabilities. Don Norman’s wonderful essay, “Being Analog,” provides a great background for all this.9

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for some of this work, talks about humans having two separate cognitive systems: one that intuits and one that reasons:
The operations of System 1 are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, implicit (not available to introspection), and often emotionally charged; they are also governed by habit and therefore difficult to control or modify. The operations of System 2 are slower, serial, effortful, more likely to be consciously monitored and deliberately controlled; they are also relatively flexible and potentially rule governed.10

When you read about the heuristics I describe below, you can find evolutionary reasons for why they exist. And most of them are still very useful.11 The problem is that they can fail us, especially in the context of a modern society. Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.

And when those heuristics fail, our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security.