It's no secret that a sizable number of people are very concerned
about the risk of Ebola and that either as part of the cause or part of
the effect, the media are obsessive in their coverage, grasping for any
aspect of the disease, its history and its treatment, that can be talked
about by an ever-changing cast of experts as well as the same familiar
faces. They may pause to cover a plane crash, a shooting, but the
business of the day is Ebola: those who have it, those who may get it
and those you might get it from whether you're in Bayou Sorrel,
Louisiana or Braggadocio, Missouri.
How do we choose what we worry most about? What scares us the most? Psychologists like
Slovic, Lichtenstein and Fischoff
have done studies about the public perception of risk. The public,
they argue, will assess the danger of death from disease as equal to
death by accident as being equal, but disease is 18 times as likely to
kill you as a gun or a car or certainly a policeman. Death by
lightening seems less likely to those in their studies than the risk of
death from botulism, although lightening is
52 times more likely to get you.
"The Lesson is clear:" Says psychologist Daniel Kahnemann. "estimates
of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself
biased toward novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what
the public is interested in, but are also shaped by it"
Rare
and unusual occasions make good press in the competitive news and
entertainment game and when the supply runs low and the demand high, the
more commonplace or quotidian may be dressed up for the prom. Have you
turned on CNN recently?
"The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality"
says
Kahneman, understating the obvious. People make judgements and
assessments of risk by consulting their emotions and not by examining
the numbers. A scary and unusual or gruesome thing looms larger than
the Flu which may be millions of times more likely to kill you than
Ebola. That
Tylenol overdose
accounts for 33,000 hospitalizations every year and hundreds of deaths
simply doesn't enter the equation when we hyperventilate about the
"risk" of Ebola or international terrorism or disease-carrying Mexican
immigrants. And we don't feel fear when taking it or even read the
label.
Enter
affect heuristics,
the snap judgement mode under which we asses risk based on quicker,
emotionally biased and less accurate calculation. .As Psychologist
Jonathan Haidt said:
"The emotional tail wags the rational dog."
If this doesn't seem pertinent to you, consider the studies of
Antonio Damasio
with people who do not, usually because of brain damage or
abnormality, display "appropriate" emotional responses. They tend not
to make decisions as well or as beneficially as others. Indeed one's
feelings do seem to enter into decisions we think of as truly rational.
Asked to assess risk Vs. reward for specific technologies, one's
feelings toward technology seem to determine the outcome. If you don't
see genetic engineering as having any benefit at all, if you see danger
in using Ammonium nitrate from the factory over nitrates from manure,
it's probably because of your bias against or lack of knowledge about
science. If you tend to overlook real dangers from nuclear power, you
probably already enjoy and understand technology and science.
Is
this a terrible thing? Does it spell some disaster in that humans
cannot expect to make the right decisions based on objective reality?
The public, says Slovic, actually makes finer distinctions than the
experts who assure us that you won't get Ebola from a certain person or
by breathing the same air. Finer distinctions between random,
unpredictable fatalities and fatalities, like automobile accidents, that
come from voluntary decisions. From this he concludes that we should
resist the "rule" of experts.
Others look at examples
where relying on experts might have prevented popular excess, popular
emotion from entering into public policy as with the expensive fiasco in
1989 about Alar and apples, where people were so afraid of apple juice
they were taking it to toxic waste dumps and making terribly
unreasonable claims of conspiracy based on nothing. Popular sentiment
quickly snowballed or cascaded out of hand and beyond the universe of
fact and reason.
Some psychologists like Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein speak of an
Availability Cascade,
A mechanism through which biases flow into public policy, a
self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of
collective beliefs, when explaining things from the Love Canal incident
which somehow didn't kill us all or even some of us, yet had a colossal
affect on public policy and public spending. Does it explain
demonstrations that insist that "
we can't go to the movies any more"
because there was an isolated shooting? In truth, choking on milk duds
poses a greater risk but our minds see some qualitative difference
between those deaths.
Can it be part of human nature
that we either ignore small risks because they are small risks -- or
invest them with incredible imminence and attach tremendous fear to the
point where we abuse the innocent, the non-dangerous as though we were
running from a burning theater with evey man for himself? We ignore or
we panic and there are no other choices.
So perhaps
we're overreacting in a predictable and intrinsically human way when we
see immense danger from someone who might have been exposed to Ebola but
who, we are assured, isn't contagious? Are we asking ourselves for
something we are not really capable of: a rational nature? We evolved
in a world where overreacting or reacting without much thought can save
our lives but doesn't do much harm if the danger was less than expected.
So if this is not exactly a critique of pure reason, I'm still not
arguing that we should or even can throw out our inbred nature and I'm
suggesting that we accept the ape even while we keep him under close
supervision.
