295: “. . . to err is human, but, happily for us, we are not human.” In a series of experiments, psychologists Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross gave Stanford University students booklets describing eight biases identified by psychologists. They then asked how susceptible the “average American”is to each of these biases. The average student at Stanford? You? In every case, the students said the average student is quite susceptible, but they are much less so. The researchers got the same results when they ran a version of the test in the San Francisco International airport. In more elaborate experiments, Pronin, Lin, and Ross sat people down in pairs and had them take what they said was a “social intelligence” test. The test was bogus. One of the two test-takers—chosen randomly—was given a high score. The other was given a low score. Then they were asked whether they thought the test was an accurate measure of social intelligence. In most cases, the person who got the high score said it was, while the poor guy who got the low score insisted it was not. That’s a standard bias at work—psychologists call it the “self-serving bias.” But then things got interesting. The researchers explained what the “self-serving bias” is and then they asked whether that bias might have had any influence on their judgment. Why, yes, most said. It did influence the other guy’s judgment. But me? Not really.
301: “. . . much more confident of those outcomes than the Thomas Friedman of 1985 really was.” In 2005, four out of five Canadians agreed that “the world is not as safe a place today as it was when I was growing up.” Particularly extraordinary is that 85 percent of Canadians born during or prior to the Second World War agreed with this statement: Thus, almost everyone who grew up in an era characterized by the rise of totalitarian nightmares, economic collapse, and world war agreed that the world today is more dangerous than that. (See Reginald Bibby, The Boomer Factor, Bastian Books, Toronto, Canada, 2006.)
301: “. . . they tend to focus on the negative side of things, for some reason. . . .” Just as it is possible to look into the future and imagine horrible things happening, it is possible to dream up wondrous changes. Vaccines for malaria and AIDS would save the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Genetically engineered crops could bring an abundance of cheap food to the world’s masses. Hyperefficient forms of alternative energy may make fossil fuels obsolete and radically mitigate climate change. In combination, they may usher in an unparalleled Golden Age—which is as likely as some of the more outlandish scenarios in Catastrophist writing.
304: “. . . satisfied and they changed ‘century’ to ‘hour.’” The full, terrifying title is Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—On Earth and Beyond. Much of the book is purely speculative. Rees notes, for example, that if nanotechnology got out of control and became self-replicating it could turn the world into “gray goo.” This is far beyond any technology humanity has invented or will invent for the foreseeable future, Rees acknowledges, and the only thing making it even a theoretical possibility is the fact that it doesn’t violate any laws of physics. As British science writer Oliver Morton wrote in reviewing Rees’s book, “if we’re to take the risk seriously, we need something more to gnaw on than the fact that it breaks no laws of physics. Neither do invisible rabbits.”
Bibliography
ESSENTIAL READING
Gilovich, Thomas, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman (eds.), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1982.
Lichtenstein, Sarah, and Paul Slovic (eds.), The Construction of Preference, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006.
Slovic, Paul, The Perception of Risk, Earthscan, London, UK, 2000.
Sunstein, Cass R., Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005.
Sunstein, Cass R., Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Allen, Arthur, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, Norton, New York, 2007.
Bazerman, Max, and Michael D. Watkins, Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2004.
Best, Joel, Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001.
Bobrowsky, Peter, and Hans Rickman, Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society, Springer, New York, 2007.
Bourke, Joanna, Fear: A Cultural History, Virago Press, London, 2005.
Buss, David M. (ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2005.
Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Mariner Books, Boston, MA, 2002.
Clarke, Lee, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2006.
Clarke, Richard A., Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Free Press, New York, 2004.
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1983.
Dunbar, Robin, Louise Barrett, and John Lycett, Evolutionary Psychology, One-world Publications, Oxford, UK, 2005.
Flynn, James, Paul Slovic, and Howard Kunreuther (eds.), Risk, Media and Stigma: Understanding Public Challenges to Modern Science and Technology, Earthscan, London, UK, 2001.
Fogel, Robert William, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700- 2100, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2004.
Furedi, Frank, Culture of Fear, Continuum, London, 1997.
Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, MA, 2005.
Glassner, Barry, The Culture of Fear, Basic Books, New York, 1999.
Goklany, Indur M., The Improving State of the World, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2007.
Herman, Arthur, The Idea of Decline in Western History, Free Press, New York, 1997.
Jenkins, Brian Michael, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2006.