Friday 28 June 2013

Don't let the news worry you

To put it crudely, we worry more that something might get us not because it's more likely to get us but because it would make better telly. Why does it make better telly and get on the news? Because it's vivid (and perhaps exciting), all of which makes it easier to call to mind. And if it's easier to call to mind, we think there's more about.
Researchers in the 1970s ran dozens of human experiments to discover what influenced people's estimation of risk. They noticed that after a natural disaster people took out more insurance, then with time took out less, because the risk is more salient immediately after a disaster, and people think about it. They called these habits of mind the availability heuristic.
It was found that tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter caused 20 times more deaths. Thus vivid events are recalled not merely more vividly but in the belief there are more of them. In contrast, problems that are common are not surprising and are less likely to qualify as news. Another smoking death? And?
Although we'd be justified in describing this as a reporting bias, the media have no trouble justifying it on the grounds that people want to know about what's unusual and new. There is no way they could report risk proportionately and still be in business. It would mean thousands of times more articles on smoking than on death from measles. But it is a bias nevertheless. The unusual is, by the nature of news, disproportionately in your face, so you might think there's a lot of it about.
One effect is that it's easy to forget how radically reduced many fatal accidents are – the death of child pedestrians for example. In 2008 in England and Wales there were 1,471,100 girls aged between five and nine. The Office for National Statistics says 137 of them died from all causes. One was a pedestrian in a traffic accident. In 2010, there were no pedestrian deaths in this category.
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REMEMBER THAT 'FEAR' EQUALS 'FALSE EVIDENCE APPEARING REAL'