Anyone who has spent an afternoon in a Victorian cemetery knows that gratitude, not fear, should be the defining feeling of our age. And yet it is fear that defines us. We worry. We cringe. It seems the less we have to fear, the more we fear.
One obvious source of this paradox is simple ignorance. “Most people don’t know the history,” says Fogel. “They just know their own experience and what’s happening around them. So they take all of the great advances for granted.”
But there’s much more to the explanation of why history’s safest humans are increasingly hiding under their beds. There’s the omnipresent marketing of fear, for one. Politicians, corporations, activists, and nongovernmental organizations want votes, sales, donations, support, and memberships, and they know that making people worry about injury, disease, and death is often the most effective way of obtaining their goals. And so we are bombarded daily with messages carefully crafted to make us worry. Whether that worry is reasonable or not—whether it is based on due consideration of accurate and complete facts—is not a central concern of those pumping out the messages. What matters is the goal. Fear is merely a tactic. And if twisted numbers, misleading language, emotional images, and unreasonable conclusions can more effectively deliver that goal—and they often can—so be it.
The media are among those that profit by marketing fear—nothing gives a boost to circulation and ratings like a good panic—but the media also promote unreasonable fears for subtler and more compelling reasons. The most profound is the simple human love of stories and storytelling. For the media, the most essential ingredient of a good story is the same as that of a good movie, play, or tale told by the campfire: It has to be about people and emotions, not numbers and reason. Thus the particularly tragic death of a single child will be reported around the world while a massive and continuing decline in child mortality rates is hardly noticed.
This isn’t a failing of the media so much as it is a reflection of the hardwiring of a human brain that was shaped by environments that bore little resemblance to the world we inhabit. We listen to iPods, read the newspaper, watch television, work on computers, and fly around the world using brains beautifully adapted to picking berries and stalking antelope. The wonder is not that we sometimes make mistakes about risks. The wonder is that we sometimes get it right.
So why is it that so many of the safest humans in history are scared of their own shadows? There are three basic components at work: the brain, the media, and the many individuals and organizations with an interest in stoking fears. Wire these three components together in a loop and we have the circuitry of fear. One of the three raises an alarm; the signal is picked up and repeated by the next component and then another; the alarm returns to the original component and a louder alarm goes out. Fear amplifies. Other alarms are raised about other risks, more feedback loops are created, and the “unreasoning fear” Roosevelt warned against becomes a fixture of daily life.
In part, this is an inevitable condition of modernity. Our Stone Age brains can’t change, we won’t abandon information technology, and the incentives for marketing fear are growing.
But while we may not be able to cut the circuitry of fear, we can at least turn down the volume. The first step is simply recognizing that there are countless individuals and organizations that have their own reasons for inflating risks, and that most journalists not only fail to catch and correct these exaggerations, they add their own. We need to be skeptical, to gather information, to think carefully about it and draw conclusions for ourselves.
We also have to recognize that the brain that is doing this careful thinking is subject to the foibles of psychology. This is actually more difficult than it sounds. Psychologists have found that people not only accept the idea that other people’s thinking may be biased, they tend to overestimate the extent of that bias. But almost everyone resists the notion that their own thinking may also be biased. One survey of medical residents, for example, found that 61 percent said they were not influenced by gifts from drug company salespeople, but only 16 percent said the same of other physicians. It’s as if each of us recognizes that to err is human, but, happily for us, we are not human.
But even if we accept that we, too, are human, coping with the brain’s biases is not easy. Researchers have tried to “debias” thinking by explaining to people what biases are and how they influence us, but that doesn’t work. Consider the Anchoring Rule. The reader now knows that when we have to guess a number, we unconsciously grab onto the number we came across most recently and adjust up or down from it. But if I were to mention that Mozart died at the age of thirty-four and then ask you to guess how many countries have a name beginning with the letter A, your unconscious mind would still deploy the Anchoring Rule and the number 34 would still influence your guess. Not even a conscious decision to ignore the number 34 will make a difference because the directive to ignore it comes from Head and Head does not control Gut. We simply cannot switch off the unconscious mind.
What we can do is understand how Gut works and how it sometimes makes mistakes. “People are not accustomed to thinking hard,” Daniel Kahneman wrote, “and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that quickly comes to mind.” That is the most important change that has to be made. Gut is good, but it’s not perfect, and when it gets risk wrong, people can come to foolish conclusions such as believing that young women are at serious risk of breast cancer while older women are free and clear, or that abandoning airplanes for cars is a good way to stay safe.
To protect ourselves against unreasoning fear, we must wake up Head and tell it do its job. We must learn to think hard.
Very often, Head and Gut will agree. When that happens, we can be confident in our judgments. But sometimes Head will say one thing, Gut another. Then there’s reason to be cautious. A quick and final judgment isn’t necessary to deal with most of the risks we face today, so when Head and Gut can’t agree, we should hold off. Gather more information. Think some more. And if Head and Gut still don’t match up, swallow hard and go with Head.
After the September 11 attacks, millions of Americans did the opposite and chose to abandon planes for cars. This mistake cost the lives of more than 1,500 people. Putting Head before Gut is not easily done, but for fears it can ease, and the lives it can save, it is worth the effort.
So maybe we really are the safest, healthiest, and wealthiest humans who ever lived. And maybe we can significantly reduce the remaining risks we face simply by eating a sensible diet, exercising, not smoking, and obeying all traffic regulations. And maybe we can expect more of this good fortune to extend into the future if current trends persist.