This is the second part of my article on The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t–and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Daniel Gardner.  If you have not read Part I of this article, please do so: The Science of Fear – Part I.  Part I describes the reasons behind our fears and Part II will discuss relevant risk numbers and how they relate to current events.

How Likely Is It?

Most of our exposure to dangers or risk in the media leaves out a crucially important factor.  What is the likelihood of it actually happening to you?  If you are told taking a new kind of birth control increases your risk of breast cancer by 20% compared to an existing type, that may sound bad but you have learned nothing useful.  If the existing risk is 0.10% and the risk of the new type is 0.12% (increasing from 1 in 1,000 to 1.2 in 1,000), that is essentially irrelevant if there is any advantage of taking the new type.  For example, fewer side effects or greater convenience.  In either case this risk is very low and the difference is probably less than the margin of error anyway.  You simply cannot make reasonable decisions about behavior without knowing actual baseline risks.

What is a Significant Risk?

In addition to knowing the actual risk you have to decide if that risk crosses any kind of threshold and what if any behavioral change you should take in response to it.  If you don’t take the time to understand the actual situation, you are doomed to be ruled by irrational fears.  Some risk is worth a response and some is not.  It depends upon the likelihood of the event happening and the cost of altering behavior in response.  You aren’t going to get that from media stories or what other people think.  Your caveman brain is simply not equipped to intuitively deal with risk in our modern and connected world.  Here is my personal view of various levels of risk.

• 25.0% (1 in 4) If I am at 25.0% risk of something dangerous, I consider that an enormous risk that requires action.  If I live to be very old, say 100, my lifetime risk of cancer is probably somewhere around 25.0%.
• 1.0% (1 in 100) Let’s say my annual risk of some danger is 1%.  To me that’s a pretty significant risk and if there are things I can do to reduce it, I will.  High mountain climbing might fall into this category.  I’ve read that around 3% of Everest climbers die on the attempt.  Even if I was capable of climbing Everest I wouldn’t because that risk is too high.  But there are people to whom that risk is worth it.  It is still relatively low and 97 out of 100 will come back alive.
• 0.1% (1 in 1,000) This is getting to the point where I personally don’t expend much thought about it.  Obviously if there is an easy way to avoid it without much cost or crimping my style, then I would.  Things like violence (not murder but assault) at school fall into this range.
• 0.01% (1 in 10,000) This is the level where some risk management experts (or legal institutions) starting talking about de minimis.  This means too insignificant for concern.  This level is de minimis for me.  This is in the range of the annual risk for dying in a car accident in the U.S.  I wouldn’t avoid driving anywhere at any time as a result of this risk and most people I know don’t either.  But, I fasten my restraints because they are no cost to me to do so and they also reduce the risk of injury which is far more likely than death.
• 0.001% (1 in 100,000) or 0.0001% (1 in 1,000,000) These are so microscopically unlikely I wouldn’t waste 1 second of my life worrying about them and I don’t think anyone else should either.  And yet you may be surprised at what falls into these categories or are even more unlikely.

Risks

32.0% – Rate of overweight children in U.S.
3.0% – Risk of death from climbing mount Everest
2.0% – Rate of women aged 50 having breast cancer
0.016% – Annual U.S. risk of childhood cancer
0.013% – Annual U.S. risk of death in a car accident
0.010% – Annual U.S. risk of death from the flu
0.0047% – Annual U.S. risk of being murdered
0.0028% – 2009 death risk from swine flu
0.0001% – Annual U.S. risk for accidently suffocating in your own bed
0.0001% – Annual U.S. risk for dying in terrorist attack
0.00007% – Annual U.S. risk of teenager or child being abducted by a stranger and killed or not returned
0.00006% – Annual U.S. risk of being murdered at school (e.g. Columbine)
0.0000013% – Annual worldwide risk of shark attack

Factoids To Make You Think

• There are probably 1,000,000 naturally occurring chemicals in foods and 50% of them are carcinogenic in lab tests
• If terrorists took down a commercial airliner in the U.S. every single week and you took a plane trip once a month, you would still be more likely to die driving to the airport than on the airplane.
• If you bought a lottery ticket on Monday, you would be 2,500 times as likely to die before the Saturday drawing than you would be to win the drawing.
• You are 30 times as likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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In my previous article Unconscious Decision Making, I sang the praises of unconscious intuition in regards to its superior ability in complex decision making.  A couple of months ago in a two-part article Should You Trust Your Intuition?, I described areas where intuition both works well and areas where it doesn’t work so well.  Two of those not so well areas were risk and probability.  Our intuition about risk stinks.

Irrational and unfounded fears have long been topics of interest to me.  I like to dig deeper into the numbers and probabilities.  My Amazon recommendations have included a book called The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t–and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Daniel Gardner for what seems like a year. I recently noticed the $25 hardcover was bargained priced for under $7 so I bought it.

I absolutely loved this book.  It is crammed full of meaningful numbers, statistics, and probabilities.  Virtually every page and sometimes every paragraph references research, experiments, or actual numbers relevant to the topic being discussed.  It is a treasure trove of data about risk and for that reason alone is very valuable.  But that’s not the best thing about this book.  I’ve encountered similar data before, albeit not all in one place.  What I really liked about this book is that the author does an outstanding job of explaining the evolutionary psychology and sources of our fears.  He has a number of fairly in-depth chapters that dissect various areas of risk like health, crime, and terrorism.  This isn’t a dry book of numbers, instead it is a very well written and researched explanation of why we fear things that we shouldn’t.  I highly recommend it.

In Part I, I will describe some of the reasons why we make so many mistakes in our intuitive calculations of risk and thus fear things that we shouldn’t or ignore risks to which we should pay attention.  In The Science of Fear – Part II, I will provide some of the numbers and probabilities that I find relevant to current events.

The Emotion of Fear

Fear is an important emotion that had extremely important survival value in the world in which our brains developed.  Much of that value is now being misdirected.  The emotional makeup of fear is now a big part of what leads to our miscalculation of risk.  Further, those with economic or political value to be gained, use the emotion of fear to influence us.  It’s easy to motivate people by scaring them.  So to truly understand and react to risk in a reasonable manner, we must approach it in a cold and calculating way.

This might lead some to think the certain unlikely events are being treated dismissively or unsympathetically.  This is not the case.  The fact that extremely unlikely events happen to people is undisputed.  If something awful has happened to you or to someone you love, and this article describes something similar as “unlikely”, please don’t take it personally.  You have my deepest sympathy.

Even something that only happens to one in one million people every year is going to generate an average of one case per day in the United States.  The fact that unlikely events happen to someone does not mean they are any more likely to happen to you or me.  A lady once won two different mega-million dollar lotteries.  The odds against it were calculated to be one in seventeen billion (three times the population of the world).  The fact it happened to someone somewhere, does not mean I should change my behavior on the assumption it could happen to me.  That would be foolish.  We all have a precious limited number of minutes on this earth and I for one don’t intend to waste them on misperceived dangers.

Two Minds

Gardner talks a lot about the gut (unconscious) and the head (conscious) and the battle between the two over fear.  Unfortunately most people are ignorant of the numbers and the head is doomed to lose from that fact alone.  However, even when the head knows the numbers, it often does not overrule the gut.  The rules of thumb used by our brains are just too hardwired to completely overcome.  The best it can do is modify the decision of the gut, but it will still not modify to nearly the degree that logic would indicate.  Further, if the gut is reacting to something particularly emotionally compelling, the head will have almost no influence.  Regardless, the only hope we have is to understand the probabilities and do our best to act in accordance with the actual risk.  We need to become good with numbers.

The Example Rule

Our caveman brains developed in a world in which we knew very little about anything that was not directly experienced by us or our small band of local hunter-gatherers.  So our brains developed a useful, but not perfect, rule of thumb.  The more easily something was able to be recalled the more likely it was to occur.

One scary emotional experience, such as being chased by a lion which leaped out of the tall grass, would be seared into our brain and would be instantly recalled when we were in a similar situation.  We would be afraid there might be  lions lying hidden in the grass and rightfully so.  Seeing someone in our tribe being chased by a lion would also be easily recalled, if not quite to the same degree as being chased oneself.  Finally, we learned of many dangers by listening to the stories others in our tribe told. The more frequently we heard similar stories, the more easily they were recalled.

In this manner the most common and/or most dangerous local experiences were the most easily recalled and considered most likely.  It was a good rule of thumb.  But imagine if cavemen in a cave in Europe were there were no lions, watched daily television news (just go with me on this) of lions leaping out of grass and devouring people on African savannah?  These dramatic experiences might make them so afraid of strange monsters hiding in the grass, that they would be afraid to venture into their own grasslands and hunt the food they needed to stay alive.

Brains that developed rules of thumb that worked well when we were geographically and socially isolated to our own local environments, must now deal with information they get from living in an electronic tribe of six billion members.  An extremely rare risk of say 1 in 1,000,000 per annum is going to happen every single day on average in a population of 350,000,000 in the U.S.

If the TV or internet video blasts nonstop dramatic pictures of those events into our brains, those brains are going to be fooled into thinking something of virtually no risk is actually a high risk.  When extremely unlikely shark attacks are the subject of almost daily reporting in the media, our caveman brains assume that sharks attacks are a common danger.  Studies that question people on the probability of dangerous events show exactly that; they think unlikely events are actually likely.  Since the head can’t completely overrule the gut, even when we are aware the risk is not that great, we can’t get rid of the fear and we will behave irrationally.  We may actually stay out of the water or just not enjoy the experience because instead of relaxing, we are on the lookout for sharks.

The Typical Rule

We are pattern seeking animals.  We hold in our minds patterns of things that we believe typically go together.  This enables us to make snap judgments that are often right or contain some degree correspondence to reality.  But they can also be completely wrong.

We like to tell stories.  Stories are a basic part of our social environment.  When we hear a story with what we believe to be typical components strung together into a compelling narrative, we tend to believe it likely to happen.  Experiments have shown that creating a narrative of combined events that logically is much more unlikely than any of the components individually, may be considered more likely by the subjects of the experiment.  This is exactly opposite of the actual probabilities.

So when marketers want to sell us lockdown security for our homes or the government wants to take away our liberty or privacy in the name of “homeland security”, they will weave plausible sounding and compelling narratives that are extremely unlikely.  Our brains react exactly the same as in the experiments.  We buy it.  This is also why we can be in continual fear of expert predictions of future doom scenarios.  Historically these predictions turn out less accurate than monkeys throwing darts.

The Good-Bad Rule

What feels good must be good.  While that works much of the time, sometimes it does not.  Smoking a cigarette makes a smoker feel better so it must not be that bad for him.  Sugar tastes good and that means I should eat more of it.  Experiments have shown that experiences that are associated with positive emotions are considered less dangerous than those associated with negative emotions, regardless of the real risks.

The Familiarity Rule

You tend to like what is familiar.  The more times you hear a song (within reason) the more you like it.  The more familiar you are with something, the better it makes you feel and the less dangerous it seems.  The less familiar you are with something, the more dangerous it seems.  I guess this is why sitting on a couch drinking beer and eating pizza every night doesn’t seem particularly dangerous, while at the same time a vision of an airplane flying into a tall building makes you afraid of terrorists  The lifestyle danger is almost guaranteed to harm you and the terrorist danger is essentially non-existent.

Mothers will not let their children walk to McDonalds because they are worried about extremely unlikely stranger danger, but they seem to have no problem feeding them killer French fries once they have “safely” driven them to the restaurant.  Europeans will march in a protest against genetically engineered foods that hundreds of millions of Americans eat every day without so much as a case of indigestion, and then go sit in a cafe and smoke a cigarette and talk about the poisonous American food.

The Herd Rule

This one is very simple.  We fear things that others fear.  We are influenced by and to some degree follow the herd.  This makes sense.  If the rest of the hunting party believed there were lions in the grass, it would be wise to follow their lead.  This doesn’t work out so good when other people are afraid of terrorists or stay inside because of West Nile Virus.

Our brains no longer judge risk accurately in this strange world we have created for ourselves.  Therefore, it is important that each one of us carefully examines actual real-world risk and then acts accordingly.

To be continued in The Science of Fear – Part II

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“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly” –Robert F. Kennedy

What person do you know who has achieved something great who has not taken risks?  The willingness to take risks and the skill to make intelligent decisions between risk and irresponsibility will to a large degree determine the level of achievement that you will attain.  Your biggest risk is not the possibility of failing, it is not trying. Burn this thought into your brain: The one sure way to guarantee failure to achieve your dream, is to play it safe.

“The comfort zone is seductive. We all desire comfort. It’s human nature. However, too much comfort does not serve us well. An inability to step out of your comfort zone will profoundly limit your performance.” –Jim McCormick

Within each one of us lies great potential.  The way you explore that great potential is to take risks.  Taking a risk will tell you what works and what doesn’t. If you fail the first time then you know what not to do next time.  Any particular attempt is not failure.  Failure is  staying down after you fall down.  If you get up and try again you will ultimately succeed.  Thomas Edison tried 2,000 times before successfully creating the electric light bulb.

Watch a child learn to walk.  They struggle and they fall.  Then they bounce back up with a smile on their face and they try again.  They are not afraid to fall and somehow intuitively know it is part of the learning process.  Failure is a key to learning.  It is the fastest route to success because you learn far more from your failures than you do from your successes.  I read once that embracing and amplifying risk is the best way to learn.  What an incredibly positive way to look at risk!

“Why is it that we do not see the process of reaching our goals as having steps similar to the ones a child must take in order to learn to walk?  We will stumble and fall in the learning process, but success can only be reached when we are prepared to take those steps, all of them, even the ones where we fail.  The real win is the confidence and experience we acquire which translates into new opportunities for growth, enjoyment and expansion in all areas of our life.” –Bob Proctor

Many people do what you do and so the only way you are going to stand out from the crowd is by doing things differently.  That means taking risks.  Most people don’t take risks because they are afraid, and fear comes from ignorance.  You are afraid of what you haven’t done before and what you don’t know.  How are you going to learn enough not to be afraid anymore unless you step up to the edge and take that first leap of faith?  Fear is simply the unknown and courage is making the decision to learn something new.

Being trapped by fear and refusing to take risks my lead to a safe, boring and mediocre life.  But you will never thrive, learn, love, or grow if you stay in that trap.  You must test and stretch your abilities by taking risk.  But what is risk anyway?  What are you going to lose?  Something you never had to start with cannot be lost.

Imagine seeing that girl across the room who you know intuitively would be the girl of your dreams.  But you are so afraid of rejection that you don’t approach her.  You just can’t take the rejection.  Yesterday you were not with her.  Tomorrow you won’t be with her if you don’t take the risk.  How is that worse?  You lose nothing by asking and you just might gain your lifelong soul mate if you do.

You will seldom lose anything of value by pursuing your dream and if you do you can simply replace it.  You might need a source of income, but you don’t need one particular source of income.  You might need a place to live, but you don’t need one particular place to live.  You might need relationships, but you don’t need one particular relationship.  You might need support, but you don’t need one particular instance of support.

So if you take a risk and walk away from a job, why on earth do you believe you will not be able find another source of income?  If you take a risk and move to another city, what are you really risking?  If doing something that lies deep within your soul causes you to lose a friend or other relationship so what?  Do you want relationships with people who don’t want you to be your authentic self and live your dreams?  Do you think you cannot form other and even better relationships?  Life is growth so step out and grow!

“Remember, it makes no difference whether your goal is starting a new business, buying or building a new home, getting a new automobile, a new position at work, setting a sales record, or getting an honors mark in school. Whatever it may be, you must step out and boldly pursue it. Keep reminding yourself that you have tremendous reservoirs of potential within you, and therefore, you are quite capable of doing almost anything you “set your mind to.” All you must do is figure out how you can do it, not whether or not you can.” –Bob Proctor

Success compounds and it will compound to great heights if we will only let it.  Success requires taking risk.  Taking risk requires courage.  Courage is strengthened by the knowledge that the fear you are feeling is a result of the unknown.  When you step up and take the risk it becomes known and you no longer fear it.  As Bob Proctor said in the quote above, you can do almost anything, you just have to figure out how.  The “if” is not in question.

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in
which you really stop to look fear in the face.” –Eleanor Roosevelt

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What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Check out this article by Jonathan and Advance Life Skills for some additional information about risk: How do You View Risk?