Risk perception

One of the classic problems in the field of public health is that people's perceptions of risk do not remotely correspond to the provable numerical facts. There are a number of cognitive and social-cognitive biases involved. One of the most important is simply familiarity. More than 42,500 American died in car crashes in 2022, which is about twice the number who die of influenza in a typical season. Furthermore motor vehicle crashes are no respecter of age or previous state of health, unlike influenza and other infectious diseases, including Covid-19, that disproportionately kill people who are old or infirm. 

Unless you are a professional tree feller, riding in a motor vehicle is very likely the most dangerous thing you will ever do. (By the way, being a police officer is not a particularly dangerous job. It's more dangerous to be a roofer.) But people give it no thought at all, even if they're afraid of flying. The reason for that is not only that for most of us flying is not as familiar as riding in a car -- we don't do it every day -- we also are not in control. For some reason having agency in a situation makes it feel less dangerous, even though airline pilots are far more skilled, vigilant, and regulated than motor vehicle operators, and flying is vastly safer than driving.

Another example, one which particularly frustrates us, is firearms. There are actually slightly more firearm related deaths in a given year than traffic related deaths, but most of them -- about 56% -- are suicides. The corporate media, and the public, pay little attention to this. Good data on the question is hard to come by, but based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, guns are used defensively by civilians about 70,000 times a year. That's mostly defending against property crimes, and assaults that would otherwise not likely be fatal. 

 This is a complicated question and I don't want to be glib about it, but even though I can't put a solid number on it if you have a firearm in the house it's vastly more likely to end up being used in a suicide than defending against potentially serious or fatal violence. But people don't perceive it that way because again, they're in control of the weapon. It's a bit more likely that you might use it to scare off a burglar but whether you think that's worth it for the risk of suicide is up to you. And as you know if you've been reading the news lately, there have been a lot of killings of innocent people who a homeowner perceived as a threat. That turns out to be murder and people have paid the price for it.

Now, all of these traumatic forms of death are relatively uncommon compared with the inevitable ravages of aging -- heart disease, cancer, dementia. (Infectious disease such as influenza may ultimately carry off people with these conditions but it's misleading to call infectious disease the cause of death in such cases.) We have in fact brought down the rate of traffic fatalities over the years, partly by measures many people object to, though we haven't done so well with firearms. 

Obviously modern society is totally dependent on motor vehicles, and we certainly aren't going to get rid of guns either. The question I'm raising is how we can find ways of living with these dangerous technologies more safely. This requires that people clearly understand the facts and don't get caught up in knee-jerk ideological responses. Oh, by the way: Do not talk on the phone while driving! If it rings, don't answer it!