Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [30]
Overcoming the trust deficit requires some ingenuity. But it can be done. The easiest way to mesmerize the brain is through images. Anecdotes, as any journalist or advertiser knows, always trump statistics. That’s why lottery advertisements feature individual winners basking in the glow of newfound wealth. “Ramon Valencia celebrates Father’s Day by winning a cool $1 million!” reads a California Lottery announcement. Probabilities pale in comparison to Ramon Valencia, father of four, from La Puente.
Usually, people think in binary terms: either something will happen or it won’t. Either it will affect me, or it won’t. So when people hear they have a 6 in 100,000 chance of dying from a fall, they shelve that risk under the label “won’t happen to me,” even though falling is in fact the third most common cause of accidental deaths in the United States (after car crashes and poisoning). It would be much more powerful to tell people about Grant Sheal, age three, who fell and cut himself on a vase while playing at home in February 2007. The toddler died from his injuries. Or about Patryk Rzezawski, nineteen, who fell down and hit his head that same month while walking near his home. He was pronounced dead at the scene. These deaths are almost always described in news accounts as “freak accidents,” despite the fact that they are relatively common.
When people imagine good things happening to them, they become more prone to take risks—regardless of the odds. In human brain imaging studies, part of the brain called the “ventral striatum” is highly active in gamblers and drug addicts. Within this region, something called the “nucleus accumbens” lights up when people just anticipate winning money. When this region is activated, people have a tendency to take more risks. So all a casino has to do is get you to anticipate winning—even if you never actually experience it. This might explain why casinos ply gamblers with minirewards like cheap food, free drinks, bonus points, and surprise gifts. Anticipating those rewards can activate the nucleus accumbens, which in turn can lead to more risk taking.
Another part of the brain lights up when people imagine losing. The “anterior insula” is active when people calculate the risk of bad things happening—like disasters. This region also shows activation when people are anticipating upsetting images. So it makes sense that insurance advertisements might encourage risk-averse behavior (i.e., buying policies) by activating the anterior insula through scary images.
This isn’t to say people need to be terrified into planning for disasters. Subtlety can work too. In Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, lines etched into a large renovated factory mark how high the Potomac River has risen in previous floods. At the Starbucks next door, one of the photos on the walls shows floodwaters surrounding the café and a man in a yellow rain slicker canoeing past. There are creative ways to institutionalize memory in everyday life.
In fact, it’s important not to overwhelm people with a warning that’s too frightening. Eric Holdeman ran King County’s Office of Emergency Management in Washington state for eleven years. He has found that there’s a fine line between getting people’s attention and losing them to a sense of futility. In 2005, an organization in his state issued a big report about what would happen if a massive earthquake occurred on the Seattle fault. The fault could deliver a 7.4 earthquake. But the report’s authors deliberately