Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [26]
Less than one year after Katrina, a research team from the Harvard School of Public Health interviewed 2,029 people who live in high-risk hurricane zones in eight states. They asked them what they would do if government officials said they had to evacuate before a major hurricane. Incredibly, with the images of the Superdome still on rotation on the evening news, one quarter said flat out that they would not leave. An additional 9 percent said they weren’t sure what they would do. So that means a third of people interviewed admitted they may not evacuate before a major storm.
Even more surprising was their reasoning: the number one rationale, given by 68 percent of those surveyed, was that they thought their homes were well built enough to survive a storm. Mobile home owners were no more likely to say they would evacuate. Like campers tucked into polyester tents in the deep woods, we seem to derive a false sense of protection from even the flimsiest shelter. And, as suggested by the early Katrina data, income did not predict behavior. In fact, the groups most likely to say they would ride out the storm were homeowners (39%), whites (41%), and long-term residents (45%).
Even in times of calm, we trend toward arrogance. About 90 percent of drivers think they are safer than the average driver. Most people also think they are less likely than others to get divorced, have heart disease, or get fired. And three out of four baby boomers think they look younger than their peers. People have a tendency to believe that they are, well, superior. Psychologists call this the “Lake Wobegon effect”—after the fictitious Minnesota town invented by Garrison Keillor, who described it as a place “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
The Lake Wobegon effect may be warped, but it helps us deal. We can process horrible events more readily if we assume we will be exempt from future suffering. Shortly after 9/11, a survey of a thousand Americans found that they thought they had a 21 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist attack within the next year. That’s way too high. But it’s nowhere near as high as the 48 percent chance that they assigned to the rest of us.
Hurricanes are especially tricky because we have to respond to them before things get ugly. We have to evacuate when the skies are clear and blue. Going back to the dread equation, it’s hard to imagine the violence to come. Without any tangible cues, denial comes easily. But as coastal cities get bigger and bigger, people have to evacuate earlier and earlier. The infrastructure is not set up for a fast exit, so ten-and twenty-hour traffic jams are becoming common—making people even more reluctant to leave on a sunny day, forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the actual storm.
Experts are vulnerable to the same biases, by the way. Subtle cues set a background mood that makes us more or less cautious. The stock market, perhaps the ultimate laboratory for studying the human risk equation, offers a particularly fascinating example. Five years ago, two business-school professors, David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway, were curious about what effect the weather has on stock trades. So they gathered weather data for twenty-six international cities from 1982 to 1997. Then they compared stock returns for each city on each day. What they found is remarkable: sunshine strongly correlated with daily stock returns—in ways that couldn’t easily be explained by any other factors. If it was sunny in the morning, stocks were more likely to go up.
Risk analysts call these nuanced emotional judgments “affect”—or, as Slovic puts it, “faint whispers of emotion.” Slovic has tremendous respect for affect. It is at once “wondrous and frightening.” Wondrous because, once upon a time, making decisions based on such subconscious atmospherics would have made great sense. In small communities