The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [15]
Oprah Winfrey, in a program on road rage in 1997, used the same approach. First she transmuted familiar occurrences into a huge new danger. “We’ve all been there. It starts out with the tap of the horn, an angry gesture, a dirty look ... ,” she declared. Then she proceeded to recount a few actual incidents in which the outcome was a shooting or fistfight. That expressions of annoyance almost never intensify to a shooting or fight was beside the point. “This is a show that affects so many people,” she said, and then cleverly produced an impressive but ultimately meaningless number. “This woman’s biggest offense was pulling out of her driveway ... countless millions of you have done that,” she said in the course of introducing someone who had been attacked by another driver.2
Journalists in the print media used a slightly different tactic. Call it the foreshadowing anecdote. After relaying the gory details of a particular instance of highway violence, they asserted that the given example “raises the overarching question of road anarchy” (Time) or represents “just the latest case of ‘road rage’ to gain national attention” (USA Today). A page-one story in the Los Angeles Times in 1998 declared that “road rage has become an exploding phenomenon across the country” and depicted the Pacific Northwest as a region particularly “plagued by a rise in road rage.” Only after wading through twenty-two paragraphs of alarming first-person accounts and warnings from authorities did the reader learn that a grand total of five drivers and passengers had died in road rage incidents in the region over the previous five years.3
An average of one death a year constitutes a plague? The only other statistical evidence the reporter managed to muster was from a study released in 1997 by the American Automobile Association. Cited habitually in stories about road rage, the AAA study afforded reporters an opportunity to declare that incidents of road rage had “been rising 7% a year” (Los Angeles Times), or as People magazine put it, “more than 50 percent since 1990.” I found only one article that put the AAA’s findings in proper perspective: a piece in U.S. News & World Report noted that, of approximately 250,000 people killed on roadways between 1990 and 1997, the AAA attributed 218 deaths, or less than one in a thousand, directly to angry drivers. And of the 20 million motorists injured during that period the AAA attributed less than 1 percent of those injuries to aggressive driving.4
Big percentages do not necessarily have big numbers behind them. The dramatic “up more than 50%” statistic in the AAA study derived from the difference between two relatively modest figures: the number of traffic incidents that involved major violence in 1990 (1,129) compared to 1996 (1,800). An increase of 671 incidents in fifty states over seven years is hardly “a growing epidemic” (USA Today’s description of road rage). Nor does it warrant the thousands of stories about road rage that appeared in print and on radio and television—coverage that helped produce the 671 figure in the first place. The AAA derived their estimates from newspaper, police, and insurance reports, all of which are influenced by hype. The more talk there is about road rage, the more likely are newspaper reporters, police officers, and insurance agents to classify as examples of it incidents that they would have ignored altogether or catalogued differently in the past.5
Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the Pygmalion effect, in deference to George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, Liza comes to appreciate that, as she puts it to Colonel Pickering, “the difference between a flower girl and a lady is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.” Posits Liza, during an exchange