In the 21st Century, the gap between perceived risk and actual risk is vast. The world has never been a safer place and yet apparently the human race has never been so fearful.
After the terrorist attacks of September 2001 people shunned air travel in their millions, regardless of the fact that the odds of their being killed in a terrorist attack was infinitesimal, while the odds of their being killed in car crash was 1-in-6,000.
Parents, besieged by stories of child molestation and abduction, wrap their children in cotton wool to protect them from the predators they believe lurk in every shadowed doorway – and yet in the US, in any one year, only 50 children and teenagers are abducted. There are about 70 million people under 18 in the US. That makes the risk of any one of them being abducted about one in 1.4 million – which is very close to being zero.
Then there are the threats to our health. In a 2007 research project Oxford University asked women at what age a woman is ‘most likely to get breast cancer’. 56.2 percent said “Age doesn’t matter,” 9.3 percent said women in their forties were most at risk, 21.3 percent earmarked the fifties, 6.9 the sixties and 1.3 percent the seventies. A tiny 0.7 percent came up with the correct answer – that the risk of developing breast cancer is greatest in women aged 80 or over.
Why is this? Why is our perception of risk so seriously skewed? The answer is threefold, and in Risk Dan Gardner explains the biology and mechanics of fear (and the way it’s manipulated by the media, politicians and other vested interests) lucidly, intelligently and with more than a touch of world-weary humour.
Firstly, there’s the good old human brain:
We listen to iPods, read the newspaper, watch television, work on computers and fly around the world using brains beautifully adapted to picking berries and stalking antelope. The wonder is not that we sometimes make mistakes about risks. The wonder is that we sometimes get it right.
There is, as Gardner says, some very old wiring in our brains and – put in its simplest terms, every day of our lives we ‘think’ using two different systems. System One is the ancient one – it’s fast and intuitive. It’s the source of our ‘gut reactions’. System Two is slower and more rational; it’s conscious, reasoning thought and it kicks in quite a long time after System One – if at all.
System One is the ‘skewed perception’ culprit. Employing a series of truly Heath Robinson techniques (which Dan Gardner explains in some detail) such as The Example Rule and The Rule of Typical Things, it leaps to the wrong conclusion and generally stays there. When we are gently shown the error of our ways by wiser minds, we can be brought round to reason – but there are no guarantees we’ll stay put because System One is hard-wired into us. When we were all living in caves, it saved our lives. He who stood still long enough to analyse the difference between the rustling sounds made by a large and hungry carnivore looking for homo sapiens in the undergrowth and the rustling sounds made by an amiable herbivore in search of a mixed salad didn’t live to father children.
And then of course, there’s the media, bless ‘em. There are no sales in good news. Blood, death and destruction sells. Dying children sell. Beautiful young women with terminal illnesses sell. Terrorism, violent crime and mayhem sell. Look at the obsessive media interest in Derrick Bird and Raoul Moat. Raoul Moat even became a folk hero – according to the media. Except, if you apply Dan Gardner’s ruthless logic to it, the 35,000 people who clicked the ‘Like’ button on the offending Facebook page represented about six one-hundredths of one percent of the UK population – and that’s assuming they were all UK citizens, which they probably weren’t. Put another way, they wouldn’t have come close to filling Wembley Stadium. Hardly a mass rising of the disaffected under-classes then.
Give the tabloid newspapers a good news story and a bad news story and they’ll unerringly make beeline for the latter.
Of course – they have help. Take the World Health Organization’s press release announcing the publication of World Cancer Report.
“Global Cancer Rates could increase by 50% to 15 million by 2020” it trumpeted.
It wasn’t until you got several paragraphs in that the report revealed that this was because:
( a ) People are living longer. The older you get, the more likely you are to develop cancer.
( b ) In many parts of the world, smoking is prevalent. Smoking causes cancer. In the developed world, smoking rates are declining and so are the rates of the related cancers.
( c ) We are adopting unhealthy lifestyles.
So – what the report was really saying was nothing like as alarming as the strap line of the press release suggested. In fact, some of it was actually quite good news – but good news doesn’t sell – which is why the WHO’s press office went for the global apocalypse approach.
The final piece in the puzzle can be loosely termed “Where’s the percentage?”. There is money to be made and power to be gained from frightening people. In its simplest form, businesses that sell security systems want you to believe that burglary – especially violent burglary – is endemic in society. Politicians want to be seen to be tackling global threats like terrorism because they know people will vote for governments that promise to keep them safe. This results in billions being thrown at counter-terrorist measures and peanuts at controlling malaria.
In the last 40 years, international terrorism has killed around 15,000 people. Malaria kills roughly one million people every year.
It’s exactly the same mentality that results in politicians going as curly as corkscrews over ‘the drugs menace’ while ignoring the fact that alcohol and tobacco individually kill more people every year than every Class A and B drug on the planet. The irony of fulminating over ‘drugs’ while they have a cigarette in one hand and whisky in the other is completely lost on them.
In short, we’re frightened of all the wrong things, and as long as we continue to be so money will be thrown away on measures to ‘control’ virtually non-existent threats.
What, you may ask, can we – the Public – do about it?
Number one – buy, borrow or steal this book. Number two, don’t believe anything you read nor more than half that you see. Number three: buy yourself a calculator, and the next time you see a shock-horror headline, do the maths yourself.
Virgin Books (Random House). Paperback. 2009. ISBN: 9780753515532. 406pp.
Sounds like a very wise and timely book to me, Moira – thanks for the tip!
Anne
Thanks for a great review of what seems to be an excellent book, Moira. Indeed it is timely and indeed many people need to read it. Even though the message will preach to the converted when I read this, I have no doubt I will thoroughly enjoy it, so thanks for sharing it with us.
Thank you Moira – great review of a must-read. I am glad that there is something published that backs me up as I wander round annoying people by muttering ‘Have you run the numbers?’
This is one of those books which need a much wider readership than it’s probably getting. If all “The Shack” or “Twilight” buyers would read a book such as this, the world would be a much saner place.
The author of this book must be one frustrated person. I hope he has a sense of humor, as it would be difficult to watch people in all areas of life say the opposite of what the facts prove. It would really make one a cynic.
It’s an interesting cover, but perfect for the book.
I have been meaning to read this book for a long time. Thanks for this great review, I’ll go ahead and check this book out, right now.
Really interesting review, Moira. I go through phases of worrying so i’d probably benefit from this book. VL is going to bankrupt me at this rate.