Head vs. Heart

Is fact or emotion the ruler in public safety and homeland security decisions?

Since when was an emotional argument won by logic? -Robert A. Heinlein

Angelina Jolie published an oped in The New York Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s Executive Order restricting travel from certain countries. Jolie writes, “The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders. Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”

Jolie is absolutely correct that policies should be based on facts. And facts undoubtedly support her position that a travel ban on select refugees is not justified. Some of the more eye-popping statistics are:

• For 30 of the 41 years between 1975–2015, no Americans died due to terror attacks by foreigners or immigrants.
• Since 9/11, your chances of dying in a given year due to terrorism are 1 in 20 million.
• You are more likely to be killed by your furniture falling on you, or in a car crash, or every day street crime.
• Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack by a refugee are 1 in 3.64 billion.
• Your chance of being killed by a terrorist who is an illegal immigrant is 1 in 10.9 billion.

However, Jolie and others like her overlook that policies are mostly wrought out of a political process, and that politics is based on perception, not facts. In an often-cited example, the odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are 1 in 98 for a lifetime; and air and space transport (including air taxis and private flights), the odds were 1 in 7,178 for a lifetime.

Despite this, we feel safer driving a car because we have more personal control. Also, plane crashes are so rare and catastrophic as to be huge media events, grabbing people’s attention and making them more sensitive to the potential danger of flying. In comparison, car accidents are everyday and most often minor events, making their combined effects less noticeable.

When faced with someone who’s afraid of flying, would the above statistics comfort those who are cowering in their airplane seats deathly afraid of being stuck, powerless, inside a giant metal tube that’s about to take off into the blue yonder? Would shaming them about their irrational intransigency in the face of facts convince them of the error of their fears?

No, “facts” don’t have the power to change one’s risk perception because our perception is based on how we feel and what we believe about certain situations and groups.

These beliefs are partially driven by evolutionary psychology; our brains have evolved to quickly determine friends or foes based on whether someone looks physically similar to us or not, a useful adaptation when hunter and gatherer groups competed fiercely for scarce resources. Unfortunately, this tendency also makes us tribal, driving us to regard those who look similar to us as friends and those who don’t as potential foes that we should be afraid of.

These beliefs are also formed by the prejudices and preconceptions that we learn as children before we develop any cognitive tools to gauge the legitimacy of the stories that we hear. While we may forget them as we grow up, they have already formed the subconscious basis of our worldview through which we perceive all situations.

Studies upon studies have proven that we dismiss facts when they don’t agree with our worldview. Moreover, we dismiss facts and even our own worldview when they go against the judgment of a social group that we belong to. “In a fascinating study, Cohen (2003) manipulated message content and the supposed source of a message. When people were not given the position of their political party, they used their own beliefs as a source of information to guide their judgments. However, when informed how their political party voted or passed judgment, people went along with their political party, regardless of the message content and its relation to their own beliefs.”

All this goes to show that a sterile (and often laced with a sense of superiority) presentation of facts is powerless to affect people’s subconscious worldview and respective social identities. Worse, don’t guilt-trip people with facts. It’s not only ineffective but also condescending.

What’s important is to package those facts into stories that can counter the ingrained perceptions that people carry with them. Convert the facts into narratives that speak to people on a personal level and make it easier to feel a sense of shared social identity with others.

Maybe it’s not statistically justifiable to be afraid that refugees from the select majority Muslim countries would suddenly turn into terrorists and do harm to homeland security. However, the fear that they might do so is nevertheless real. Is that fear driven by our tribalism, prejudices, and irrational preconceptions? Yes, of course they are. But that doesn’t mean that they are not real. Don’t discount that fear and try to dismiss it with numbers and stats. Validate that the fear exists and acknowledge its legitimacy. Admit that they have the right to feel afraid when they see ISIS drowning people or slicing peoples’ heads off because they are non-Muslims. Acknowledge that they have a right to want to see the government do something to protect them.

Whether the government is effective or not is a different conversation. Don’t confuse the people’s right to feel fear with the effectiveness of a policy. And if a policy — whether based on fact or statistics — act to lessen the fear that people feel, then it could even be argued that it’s a good policy. What I am saying, ultimately, is that facts are not necessarily superior mechanism for policy-making than public perception. In fact, Homeland Security professionals ignore public perception of fear at their own peril if they dismiss them as irrational. After all, perception is reality.