We confuse exceptions with the rule
People are bad at assessing risk
I read Gid M-K; Health Nerd’s “The Trouble With Risk” in which the author described ways that people are bad at assessing risk:
There’s a primordial fear that we all have whilst swimming in the ocean. As you look down into the murky depths, it’s impossible not to think to yourself, how likely is it that I will get mauled by a shark?
The author describes a flawed perception of risk — that we’re scared of dramatic but unlikely scenarios, while ignoring much more common forms of risk — like simply drowning.
It’s not just “ordinary people” — journalists do it too
A few years ago, there was a sad story in the news of a woman who died after a collision with somebody riding a bicycle in New York City’s Central Park. Following this, the New York Times reported that “deaths expose chaos” in the park.
However, CityLab, in a breath of fresh air, reported that though the number of people biking into lower Manhattan doubled, the rate of pedestrians injured by bicyclists fell.
To bounce off of Gid M-K’s point in “The Trouble With Risk,” not only are people bad at assessing risk, but journalists sometimes focus in on a lone example but report on it as if it’s a trend. It’s an understandable impulse: they seek stories. But like scientists, journalists must be careful not to generalize off of limited observations.
This has dangerous implications
I’m reminded of an article in Wired about the rhetoric of President Trump: “the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration and conflate it with the norm.” In this article, a psychologist says, “You judge the frequency of something based on how easily you can bring it to mind. Creating a vivid image is a great way to make it memorable.”
In the same way that Gid M-K describes how our perception of risk is swayed by fear, Wired shows how politicians can appeal to people’s biases using outliers.
Simply put, we confuse exceptions with the rule.
Let’s look for truth
As a public health professional, I rely on data to help understand what’s going on — to describe what’s normal.
This can be really valuable: it can help offset the confusion between exceptions and what’s normal. And, in health communication campaigns — social marketing designed to change people’s behaviors — communicating what’s normal can make people more inclined to do it, too.
It sounds manipulative, but it’s not — it’s just using data to tell the truth.
