Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [32]
“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of ‘news’ is ‘something that hardly ever happens,’” writes security expert Bruce Schneier. “It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that you should start worrying.”
Repeatedly absorbing disaster images on TV can be particularly damaging. After 9/11, studies showed that the more hours of coverage adults and children watched, the more stress they experienced. In general, TV makes us worry about the wrong things. Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it’s much healthier to read the newspaper than watch TV.
The time to let your emotions run free is when you can’t get good data. Long ago, that would have been all the time. You would have needed to rely on your emotions every minute of every day. “If you’re back in a time before books and statistical research, and you need to know which mushrooms are poisonous, going by rumor and hearsay is a good strategy,” says Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. But when data are available—and they are now more available than any time before—there is no better complement to raw emotion.
David Ropeik, coauthor of Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You, does not totally repress his own instincts. He allows his emotions to help him make decisions. “We’re always going to use our feelings. We’re never going to have all the facts. So we have to use emotions to kind of fill in the blanks,” Ropeik says. “But, and this is the challenge, that can be dangerous. If you go with how a risk feels, and that flies in the face of the facts, you could die.” So Ropeik tries to check himself whenever his feelings clash with known facts. For example, he is emotionally opposed to wearing a bike helmet. He feels strongly that he looks “goofy and stupid” in a helmet. But he forces himself to wear one anyway. He knows his emotions clash with the data, so he suppresses his feelings, just the way he suppresses the desire to eat a piece of chocolate cake (most of the time).
The next time you hear about something that scares you, look for data. Be suspicious of absolute numbers—or no numbers at all. For example, new parents are now inundated with warnings about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the name given to the unexplained death of a baby under age one. Given the enormous stakes, and the ready availability of preventive measures (like putting the baby to sleep on his or her back), these warnings make sense. But it would be much better if the scary pamphlets handed to new parents at the hospital put the risk into perspective. For instance, perhaps the warnings could include language like this: “SIDS is still not well-understood. But it is at an all-time low, partly because parents like you have been following basic precautions described in this pamphlet. Fewer than one baby per 1,000 dies this way (four times as many infants die from birth defects and low birthweight). So you don’t need to get up seven times in the middle of the night to check if the baby is breathing. Just follow these simple rules—and concentrate on sleeping, which will make you a much better parent, with near 100 percent certainty.”
Of course, even when people really do understand the risks, that doesn’t mean they will make low-risk choices. Mileti, one of the nation’s foremost experts on hazards, lives along one of the biggest earthquake faults in North America. I ask him if this is wise. “No, it makes no sense,” he says. But, unlike 86 percent of Californians, Mileti has earthquake insurance. He also has several days