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Article: Be Afraid of Being Very Afraid
The following article appeared in today's Washington Post. While the focus
is on the recent sniper killings in the DC area, I thought it might be of
interest since it provides insight into why people react to fears the way
they do. The original article, at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50659-2002Oct19.html, also
has a table that I have copied below.
----------------
Risk, Summarized
People commonly have misperceptions about what's dangerous and what isn't.
Based on a review of the scientific literature on various risks summarized
in "RISK: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's
Really Dangerous in the World Around You," here are a few examples.
RISKIER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK
. The sun, a natural risk that doesn't evoke great fear, causes 1.3 million
skin cancer cases and 7,800 melanoma deaths in the United States every year.
. Medical errors, anything from mistakes by doctors to misfilled
prescriptions, kill as many as 98,000 Americans a year. And that's just in
hospitals.
. Air pollution indoors, where we spend 90 percent of our time, is often
worse than it is outdoors. Particularly in schools.
. Food poisoning sickens approximately 76 million Americans a year, and
kills 5,000.
RISKS THAT AREN'T REALLY RISKY
. Nuclear radiation, a man-made radiation risk, is a weaker carcinogen than
most people think. It's caused only about 500 cancer cases among the 90,000
survivors of the atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
. Hazardous waste, according to the EPA, is one of the smallest
environmental risks we need to worry about.
. Cell phones can't cause cancer. They don't emit the kind of radiation that
can cause mutations to our DNA and lead to that disease . -- D.R.
----------------------------
Have a good weekend, and sorry of the length of this message.
-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
3050 Traymore Lane
Bowie, MD 20715-2024
jenday1@email.msn.com (H)
-----------------------
Be Afraid of Being Very Afraid
By David Ropeik Would it reassure you to know that your risk of being
killed by a sniper in the Washington area is infinitesimally low -- as of
Friday, about one in 517,422? Probably not.
Is it meaningful to suggest that the risk of being shot by the sniper is
tiny compared with risks you take every day, like driving, jaywalking or
smoking? Of course not.
Is it arrogant to suggest that people who are wearing bulletproof vests or
crouching behind their cars as they gas up are irrationally over-reacting to
the risk of being the sniper's next victim? Of course it is.
Fear, born of that most ancient and genetically embedded imperative --
survival -- is real, and at times far overpowers reason. This is one of
those times.
And yet it is also fair to suggest that fear is, in and of itself, a risk.
Frightened people seeking a sense of safety can make dangerous choices: to
drive extra miles to avoid a location they think is unsafe, to buy a gun
they're not trained to use, or to reduce their physical exercise by staying
indoors or close to home. In fact, just the stress of fear is dangerous. It
raises levels of certain hormones that suppress the immune system, thus
increasing our susceptibility to infectious disease. We have to fear the
sniper, but we also have to fear fear itself.
It's a complicated conflict between our natural, self-protective emotions
on the one hand and, on the other, the risk that our fears might actually
exacerbate the dangers we face.
Psychologists who study this field, known as risk perception, find that
humans tend to fear similar things for similar reasons. Essentially, risks
have unique affective characteristics that cause us to be more or less
afraid, regardless of the facts. But rather than present a dry recitation of
those risk perception factors from the academics who figured them out --
Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischoff, Sarah Lichtenstein or Princeton University
professor Daniel Kahneman, who just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in
economics for his research on why people make seemingly irrational
decisions -- let me introduce you to one of my relatives, who lives in
Silver Spring. He's 49, married, with a daughter in middle school. He lives
two miles from the site of one of the killings. He and his family are
frequent customers of the crafts store where the first shooting took place.
They often eat in a Chinese restaurant near the Home Depot where Monday
night's killing occurred. We spoke Tuesday night about how he and his family
are feeling.
He knows nothing of the academic literature on risk perception, yet he
illustrates many of the factors that experts have identified as the roots of
why we fear even small risks such as death by sniper:
. We are more afraid when we lack control.
It's often more frightening to sit in the passenger's seat than to drive the
car yourself. Any risk seems worse if it feels as if we can't do anything
about it. In the case of the sniper, my relative told me, it scares him that
there seems to be no way to avoid being a victim, short of becoming a
recluse. "Regardless of what you do, you could get shot," he said. "It's not
like there's a neighborhood you can avoid, or you can hold your purse close
to your chest, or avoid the guy who looks drunk . . . the kinds of things
that you can do to make yourself safe from some risks."
. No matter how small a risk may be, it will evoke fear in anyone who
thinks he or she personally could be a victim.
Fear of terrorism in the United States was negligible before Sept. 11, 2001,
in part because nearly all the terrorist attacks that targeted Americans had
occurred overseas. Now that we know it could happen to us, we are more
worried that it actually will. Same with the sniper. "There's no way you can
say, 'It's not me,' " my relative said. "The randomness means everybody's
eligible. The risk may be one in a million or whatever, but you can't
rationally say that you might not be that one."
. The more uncertain we are about a risk, the more afraid we will be.
Again, terrorism is a prime example. Who are the terrorists? What will they
do next, and when, and where? But, my relative noted, at least with
terrorism we have a general idea of who's behind it. The sniper "could be
anybody, anywhere, at any time. We just don't know what's going to happen
next." There might even be more than one. The lack of clues, he said, makes
him frightened. As more clues are found and uncertainty begins to segue into
hope, we can expect people's risk assessments to change as well.
. Risks to children frighten us more than risks to adults.
Asbestos in our kids' schools is more alarming than asbestos in our
workplaces. And you won't find any "Missing Adult" pictures on milk cartons.
The sniper became more frightening to us after he attacked a 13-year-old.
"It got so much worse when he shot that kid," my relative said. Montgomery
County Police Chief Charles Moose reinforced the point when he said,
"Someone is so mean-spirited that they shot a child. I guess it's getting to
be really, really personal now."
. The more aware of a risk we are, the more afraid we are likely to be.
On July 3, 2002, amid media reports speculating that terrorists might attack
on the Fourth of July holiday, FBI statistics showed that handgun purchase
requests were a third higher than normal. There was little or no hard
information that the risk of attack had increased; the pervasive awareness
of the possibility was what provoked the fear. These days, the sniper is
"all anybody's talking about," my relative reported. "It's on all the news,
in all the papers. It's on your mind all the time. You can't not think about
it." Other risks, less well-publicized -- obesity, smoking -- seem to have
faded away. They're not gone. It's just that we're not paying as much
attention to them because they're not on the radar screen of our fears.
. Fear is greater when a risk is new.
Though my relative didn't mention it, this is a major risk perception
factor. Consider the example of West Nile virus. In areas where it shows up,
headlines blare and newscasts scream. It's new, and public fears run high.
But in cities such as New York and Boston, where the disease is established
and kills few people every year, it's no longer new. People there have it in
perspective, and the fear is much lower. The type of threat is part of this
equation. New York had the Son of Sam, Los Angeles the Night Stalker;
Washington's suburbs have never had a series of crimes like this. A serial
sniper is new.
Can these insights make a difference? Will understanding the roots of our
fears make us brave? Hardly. But perhaps by understanding how our natural
human reactions can skew our perception of personal risk, we can avoid
responding in risky ways. We can realize that some responses do more to make
us feel safe than they do to protect us. Driving extra miles to avoid
perceived danger zones increases the probability of our being in a motor
vehicle crash far more than it reduces our chances of being shot. Buying a
gun for protection makes us the owner of a weapon that is both reassuring
and dangerous, a weapon that research shows is far more likely to be fired
for reasons other than self-defense.
There are also economic, social and psychological risks to being too
afraid. Avoiding shopping harms the local economy. Canceled and relocated
events inconvenience thousands of people. Staying indoors deprives us of
exercise and social contact. What do extreme fear and overreaction teach our
kids? And worrying about the sniper distracts us from dealing with risks
that are much more of a threat, such as cancer and heart disease.
Perhaps simply by understanding that it's human nature to react to risks
emotionally -- or overreact, if you want to call it that -- we can measure
our fears against the facts with a little more clarity and perspective. We
can balance the rational against the emotional, and keep in mind that even
if a risk is new, uncertain, makes us feel powerless, dominates our
awareness and feels as if it could happen to us, we shouldn't ignore the
fact that the actual chances of its happening are extraordinarily low.
Perhaps our goal should be to adopt the behavior of many Israelis, who have
learned to cope with the now familiar, and much greater, risk of terrorism
in their lives. My relative can already imagine that happening. "If this guy
kept shooting someone every three days for the rest of the year, what are
you going to do? Are you not going to go outdoors anymore? Stop driving?
Quit your job? There's part of you that doesn't want to deal with the fear,
so you get on with your life."
There is a battle between fear and fact taking place in the hearts and
minds of my relatives and friends in the D.C. area, and all their friends.
It's a cautionary tale for all of us, whether we're facing snipers, West
Nile virus, child abductions or terrorism. Frightened people can make
dangerous choices. Understanding why risks make us so afraid can help us
apply both our emotional and our rational sides to the challenge of making
ourselves safe.
----------------------
David Ropeik is director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for
Risk Analysis and co-author of "RISK: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's
Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You" (Houghton
Mifflin)
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