Why are you so afraid of one-in-a-million events like shark attacks, child abductions, or dying in a plane crash? Why are you so willing to believe elaborate scenarios about possible future weather events from the same people that they can’t even accurately predict tomorrow’s weather? Have you ever stopped to realize that many of the almost hysterical fears of “Pop” also once alarmed you (fears such as BSE, acid rain, dangerous silicone breast implants, road rage, SARS? or bird flu) miraculously disappeared in a single moment? be replaced by others who have now disappeared or will soon disappear in the same mysterious way? Why are you so afraid? Simply put, it’s because of your caveman brain.
Consider this: psychological testing has shown that you have a brain that somehow believes that a piece of fudge shaped like dog poop really is dog poop. You have a brain that will use the first suggested available number to estimate something that has absolutely nothing to do with that number. You have a brain that concludes that elaborate predictions about the future are more likely to come true than simple ones. You have a brain that concludes that things that are easier to remember are more likely to happen again. And more importantly, you have a brain that is constantly subject to the machinations of interested parties and fears traders who have a vested interest in keeping you in fear.
As Daniel Gardner explains in his book The science of fearWhen it comes to evolutionary psychology, try to imagine the development of the human brain by comparing the last 2,000,000 years of human development to a 201-page book. Two hundred pages would cover the entire time our species spent as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age. The last page would cover our time in agrarian society, a period that began just 12,000 years ago (the first settlement appeared about 4,600 years ago). The last paragraphs of that final page would cover the last two centuries of the world we live in now. We are cavemen.
Now take a look around you. How could a cavewoman, at a lower but decisive level of her brain, not be frightened by everything she sees in this strange and complex world of bears? Her head was designed to roam the savannah, not to deal with most of what bombards her here. That is why your instinct remains the dominant force in decision making. And that is the force that skews our perception of the world around us. The gut instinctively reacts and lights up quickly and lives in lightning-fast time that we do it, the head just can’t keep up or can’t get through. That is why we now live in a nation of worry, in a society obsessed with risk. No matter that our head is trying to tell us that we live in a much safer and healthier time than previous generations enjoyed, our instincts block this out and only fixate on what it sees to be the opposite on the evening news. You eagerly await the next fear to cling to, real or imagined. Needless to say, Gut never has to wait long.
There are many complex psychological mechanisms at play during this ongoing conflict between Gut and Head. Three that can be highlighted here are:
The availability heuristic. If examples of something can be easily remembered, Gut tells us that it must be common. If there is a brutal murder in City X, Gut convinces you that you too are at high risk because you can easily remember it. After all, you “saw” it on television. It doesn’t matter that Head is trying to tell you how small the chances are that you are in danger. And memory is skewed; The more recent, emotional, and vivid the events, the more likely they are to be remembered, and therefore, according to Gut, the more likely they are to happen.
Confirmation of bias. Once a fear is in place, we filter what we see and hear in a biased way that ensures that our fears are “proven” justified. Gut doesn’t want to be misled by reasonable arguments or reassuring statistics to the contrary. The gut is bad with numbers. You like a good story.
Group polarization. When people who share fears gather in groups, they become more convinced that their fears are correct and their views are even more extreme. Once a fear is generalized, so to speak, the distortion about what should be scary and what should not be insurmountable. We are social animals and what others think matters to us. That is why we do not need reasons to believe in risks and problems that “everyone knows” to be true. We don’t want them.
Seen in this context, we deceive ourselves when we think that we are evaluating the evidence and making decisions about risks by calculating rationally. Experts are wrong to think that they can alleviate risk fears simply by making the facts public. Gut doesn’t listen to reasons. And, as we will see, the experts cannot be trusted.
We overestimate the likelihood that things that appear on the evening news will kill us and we underestimate those that do not. It does not matter that diseases related to smoking or obesity kill far greater numbers than catastrophic events, accidents, terrorism, and murders. Gut watches them over and over again on television (or other media), becomes obsessed with the stories related to them, and thus indirectly contributes to what then becomes a fear feedback loop. Our biased perception is easy to explain once we understand that Gut is in control while Head is asleep at the wheel. The head cannot erase the intuition. It cannot change how we feel. And how we feel is the essential part of the calculation here: fear sells. Instinct buys.
Is there something sinister or conspiratorial about selling fear? Not really. After all, self-interest is the natural state of humanity. The news industry and new media do not hide their desire to make money, nor do they need it. And it doesn’t stop here. Fear is also a fantastic marketing tool for companies, consultants, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, activists, and NGOs, all of whom are competing with each other, fighting for influence, and selling in fear. For example, it is standard practice for companies selling cleaning products or alarm systems to increase your awareness of the risks you take by not using their products. What politician has not seized the opportunity to exaggerate a real or imagined danger regarding an issue that his political opponent has not addressed? Law enforcement and security officials are naturally averse to risking your funding by minimizing security risks to you. Scientists need funding too and, well, no problem, no funding. NGOs and other groups have political agendas to promote. Would you hesitate to sow fear if it helped you achieve your goals?
What can Head do to help alleviate this bear bias problem? Not much really. Many of the problems we face today are so complex that we, as individuals, are not in a position to adequately understand them. Since we simply don’t have enough time or energy to research them ourselves, we must rely on the experts to do it for us. And these experts are generally biased, they probably belong to one of the various groups mentioned above. And we are often as biased as the experts. Interestingly, showing fear on particular issues has become a way of expressing cultural identity or making a political statement. I find it amusing that looking to the future and imagining what can go wrong has become a kind of parlor game for intellectuals, for example. And sadly, another problem is that questioning things that “everyone knows to be true” takes a lot of effort and stamina that many of us just don’t have.
So why are you so scared? Your caveman brain wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s too bad too many of your inner caveman’s risk perception buttons are being pushed by someone else.
