Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [16]
However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies such as genocide or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. I think this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action.
I shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.
BACKGROUND AND THEORY: THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFECT
Risk management in the modern world relies upon two forms of thinking. Risk as feelings refers to our instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, quantification, and deliberation to bear on hazard management. Compared to analysis, reliance on feelings tends to be a quicker, easier, and more efficient way to navigate in a complex, uncertain, and dangerous world. Hence, it is essential to rational behavior. Yet it sometimes misleads us. In such circumstances we need to ensure that reason and analysis also are employed.
Although the visceral emotion of fear certainly plays a role in risk as feelings, I shall focus here on the “faint whisper of emotion” called affect. As used here, affect refers to specific feelings of “goodness” or “badness” experienced with or without conscious awareness. Positive and negative feelings occur rapidly and automatically; note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the word joy or the word hate. A large research literature in psychology documents the importance of affect in conveying meaning upon information and motivating behavior. Without affect, information lacks meaning and will not be used in judgment and decision making.
FACING CATASTROPHIC LOSS OF LIFE
Risk as feelings is clearly rational, employing imagery and affect in remarkably accurate and efficient ways; but this way of responding to risk has a darker, nonrational side. Affect may misguide us in important ways. Particularly problematic is the difficulty of comprehending the meaning of catastrophic losses of life when relying on feelings. Research reviewed below shows that disaster statistics, no matter how large the numbers, lack emotion or feeling. As a result, they fail to convey the true meaning of such calamities and they fail to motivate proper action to prevent them.
The psychological factors underlying insensitivity to large-scale losses of human lives apply to catastrophic harm resulting from human malevolence, natural disasters, and technological accidents. In particular, the psychological account described here can explain, in part, our failure to respond to the diffuse and seemingly distant threat posed by global warming as well as the threat posed by the presence of nuclear weaponry. Similar insensitivity may also underlie our failure to respond adequately to problems of famine, poverty, and disease afflicting large numbers of people around the world and even in our own backyard.
THE DARFUR GENOCIDE
Since February 2003, hundreds of thousands of people in the Darfur region of western Sudan, Africa, have been murdered by government-supported militias, and millions have been forced to flee