Risk Assessment
by
David G. Myers
“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 the horror of September 11 and the ensuing crash at
Rockaway Beach, 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 rry Sonnenfeld has said.
After five crashed airliners, 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 miles, we will spend two percent more time in motor
vehicles. This translates into 800 more deaths of 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 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 flights. 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. A thousand massively publicized
anthrax victims would similarly rivet our attention more than yet
another 20,000+ annual influenza fatalities, or than another 30,000+
lives claimed by guns (via suicide, homicide, and accident). 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 Maria Grasso's winning of $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
9-11 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 11. 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. fear.
And when terrorists strike again, remember the odds. If, God forbid,
anthrax or truck bombs kill a thousand Americans, we will all recoil in
horror. Small comfort, perhaps, but the odds are 284,000 to one that you
won't be among them.
Risk Assessment
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