July 24, 2005
I WAS visiting London last Thursday when a second wave of attacks hit the city,
just two weeks after the traumatic events of July 7. It is hard to avoid
feeling vulnerable to this invisible enemy who does not play by known or
explicit rules. Of course, that is precisely the anxiety that terrorists seek
to produce. But its opposite - complacency - is not an option. The truth is that neither human beings nor modern societies are wired to
respond rationally to terrorism. Vigilance is easy to muster immediately after
an event, but it tends to wane quickly, as the attack vanishes from public
discourse. We err twice, first by overreacting right after the disaster, while
we are still in shock, and later by under-reacting, when the memory fades and
we become so relaxed as to be vulnerable to further attacks. Terrorism exploits three glitches in human nature, all related to the
management and perception of unusual events. The first and key among these has
been observed over the last two decades by neurobiologists and behavioral
scientists, who have debunked a great fallacy that has marred Western thinking
since Aristotle and most acutely since the Enlightenment. That is to say that as much as we think of ourselves as rational animals,
risk avoidance is not governed by reason, cognition or intellect. Rather, it
comes chiefly from our emotional system. Patients with brain lesions that prevent them from registering feelings even
when their cognitive and analytical capacities are intact are incapable of
effectively getting out of harm's way. It is largely our emotional toolkit, and
not what is called "reason," that governs our capacity for
self-preservation. Second, this emotional system can be an extremely na_ve statistician,
because it was built for a primitive environment with simple dangers. That
might work for you the next time you run into a snake or a tiger. But because
the emotional system is impressionable and prefers shallow, social and
anecdotal information to abstract data, it hinders our ability to cope with the
more sophisticated risks that afflict modern life. For example, the death of an acquaintance in a motorcycle accident would be
more likely to deter you from riding a motorcycle than would a dispassionate,
and undoubtedly far more representative, statistical analysis of motorcycles'
dangers. You might avoid Central Park on the basis of a single comment at a
cocktail party, rather than bothering to read the freely available crime
statistics that provide a more realistic view of the odds that you will be
victimized. This primacy of the emotions can distort our decision-making. Travelers at
airports irrationally tend to agree to pay more for terrorism insurance than
they would for general insurance, which includes terrorism coverage. No doubt
the word "terrorism" can be specific enough to evoke an emotional
reaction, while the general insurance offer wouldn't awaken the travelers'
anxieties in the same way. In the modern age, the news media have the power to amplify such emotional
distortions, particularly with their use of images that go directly to the
emotional brain. Consider this: Osama bin Laden continued killing Americans and Western
Europeans in the aftermath of Sept. 11, though indirectly. How? A large number
of travelers chose to drive rather than fly, and this caused a corresponding
rise in casualties from automobile accidents (any time we drive more than 20
miles, our risk of death exceeds that of flying). Yet these automobile accidents were not news stories - they are a mere
number. We have pictures of those killed by bombs, not those killed on the
road. As Stalin supposedly said, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a
statistic." Our emotional system responds to the concrete and proximate. Based on
anecdotal information, it reacts quickly to remote risks, then rapidly forgets.
And so the televised images from bombings in London cause the people of
Cleveland to be on heightened alert - but as soon as there is a new tragedy,
that vigilance is forgotten. The third human flaw, related to the second, has to do with how we act on
our perceptions, and what sorts of behavior we choose to reward. We are moved
by sensational images of heroes who leap into action as calamity unfolds before
them. But the long, pedestrian slog of prevention is thankless. That is because
prevention is nameless and abstract, while a hero's actions are grounded in an
easy-to-understand narrative. How can we act on our knowledge of these human flaws in order to make our
society safer? The audiovisual media, with their ability to push the public's emotional hot
buttons, need to play a more responsible role. Of course it is the news media's
job to inform the public about the risk and the incidence of terrorism, but
they should try to do so without helping terrorists achieve their objective,
which is to terrify. Television images, in all their vividness and specificity, have an
extraordinary power to do just that, and to persuade the viewer that a distant
risk is clear and present, while a pressing but underreported one is nothing to
worry about. Like pharmaceutical companies, the news media should study the side effects
of their product, one of which is the distortion of the viewer's mental risk
map. Because of the way the brain is built, images and striking narratives may
well be necessary to get our attention. But just as it takes a diamond to cut a
diamond, the news industry should find ways to use images and stories to bring
us closer to the statistical truth.