Another real-world demonstration of the Good-Bad Rule at work comes around once a year. Christmas isn’t generally perceived as a killer. It probably didn’t even make your list of outlandish ways to die. But it should. ’Tis the season for falls, burns, and electrocutions. In Britain, warns the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RSPA), holiday events typically include “about 1,000 people going to hospital after accidents with Christmas trees; another 1,000 hurt by trimmings or when decorating their homes; and 350 hurt by Christmas tree lights.” The British government has run ad campaigns noting that people are 50 percent more likely to die in a house fire during the holidays. In the United States, no less an authority than the undersecretary of Homeland Security penned an op-ed in which he warned that fires caused by candles “increase four-fold during the holidays. ” Christmas trees alone start fires in 200 homes. Altogether, “house fires during the winter holiday season kill 500 and injure 2,000 people,” wrote the undersecretary, “and cause more than $500 million in damage.”
Now, I am not suggesting we should start fretting about Christmas. Much of the public education around the holiday strikes me as a tad exaggerated, and some of it—like the RSPA press release that draws our attention to the risk of "gravy exploding in microwave ovens”—is unintentionally funny. But compared to some of the risks that have grabbed headlines and generated real public worry in the past—shark attacks, “stranger danger,” Satanic cults, and herpes, to name a few—the risks of Christmas are actuallysubstantial. And yet these annual warnings are annually ignored, or even played for laughs (exploding gravy!) in the media. Why the discrepancy? Part of the answer is surely the powerful emotional content of Christmas. Christmas isn’t just a Good Thing. It’s a Wonderful Thing. And Gut is sure that Wonderful Things don’t kill.
The fact that Gut so often has instantaneous, emotional reactions that it uses to guide its judgments has a wide array of implications. A big one is the role of justice in how we react to risk and tragedy.
Consider two scenarios. In the first, a little boy plays on smooth, sloping rocks at the seashore. The wind is high and his mother has told him not to go too close to the water. But with a quick glance to make sure his mother isn’t looking, the boy edges forward until he can slap his hands on the wet rocks. Intent on his little game, he doesn’t see a large wave roar in. It knocks him backward then pulls him tumbling into the ocean where strong currents drag him into deep water. The mother sees and struggles valiantly to reach him but the pounding waves blind her and beat her back. The boy drowns.
Now imagine a woman living alone with her only child, a young boy. In the community, the woman is perfectly respectable. She has a job, friends. She even volunteers at a local animal shelter. But in private, unknown to anyone, she beats her child mercilessly for any perceived fault. One night the boy breaks a toy. The woman slaps and punches him repeatedly. As the boy cowers in a corner, blood and tears streaking his face, the woman gets a pot from the kitchen and returns. She bashes the boy’s head with the pot, then tosses it aside and orders him to bed. In the night, a blood clot forms in the boy’s brain. He is dead by morning.
Two lives lost, two sad stories likely to make the front page of the newspaper. But only one will prompt impassioned letters to the editor and calls to talk radio shows, and we all know which one it is.
Philosophers and scholars may debate the nature of justice, but for most of us justice is experienced as outrage at a wrong and satisfaction at the denunciation and punishment of that wrong. It is a primal emotion. The woman who murdered her little boy must be punished. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t a threat to anyone else. This isn’t about safety. She must be punished. Evolutionary psychologists argue that this urge to punish wrongdoing is hardwired because it is an effective way to discourage bad behavior. “People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited,” writes cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.
Whatever its origins, the instinct for blame and punishment is often a critical component in our reactions to risks. Imagine there is a gas that kills 20,000 people a year in the European Union and another 21,000 a year in the United States. Imagine further that this gas is a by-product of industrial processes and scientists can precisely identify which industries, even which factories, are emitting the gas. And imagine that all these facts are widely known but no one—not the media, not environmental groups, not the public—is all that concerned. Many people haven’t even heard of this gas, while those who have are only vaguely aware of what it is, where it comes from, and how deadly it is. And they’re not interested in learning more.
Yes, it is an absurd scenario. We would never shrug off something like that. But consider radon. It’s a radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer if it pools indoors at high concentrations, which it does in regions that scientists can identify with a fair degree of precision. It kills an estimated 41,000 people a year in the United States and the European Union. Public health agencies routinely run awareness campaigns about the danger, but journalists and environmentalists have seldom shown much interest and the public, it’s fair to say, has only a vague notion of what this stuff is. The reason for this indifference is clear: Radon is produced naturally in some rocks and soils. The deaths it inflicts are solitary and quiet and no one is responsible. So Gut shrugs. In Paul Slovic’s surveys, the same people whose knees shook when they thought about radiation sources like nuclear waste dumps rated radon—which has undoubtedly killed more people than nuclear waste ever could—a very low risk. Nature kills, but nature is blameless. No one shakes a fist at volcanoes. No one denounces heat waves. And the absence of outrage is the reason that natural risks feel so much less threatening than man-made dangers.
The Good-Bad Rule also makes language critical. The world does not come with explanatory notes, after all. In seeing and experiencing things, we have to frame them this way or that to make sense of them, to give them meaning. That framing is done with language.
Picture a lump of cooked ground beef. It is a most prosaic object and the task of judging its quality shouldn’t be terribly difficult. There would seem to be few, if any, ways that language describing it could influence people’s judgment. And yet psychologists Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth did just that in an experiment disguised as marketing research. Here is a sample of cooked beef, the researchers told one group. It is “75 percent lean.” Please examine it and judge it; then taste some and judge it again. With a second group, the researchers provided the same beef but they described it as “25 percent fat.” The result: On first inspection, the beef described as “75 percent lean” got much higher ratings than the “25 percent fat” beef. After tasting the beef, the bias in favor of the “lean” beef declined but was still evident.