french_fries
17-05-2008, 03:22 AM
Think before you leap to conclusions
Dan Gardner
May 12, 2008
IN 2007, researchers at Oxford University asked almost 1500 British women at what age a woman is most at risk of breast cancer. The answer should have come easily. Age is by far the strongest risk factor for breast cancer, so the older a woman is, the more likely she is to be stricken.
But that's not what women said. The correct answer — "80 or over" — was chosen by a minuscule 0.7% of respondents. A mere 1.3% said a woman was most at risk of breast cancer in her 70s. Another 6.9% identified the 60s as the age of greatest risk; 21.3% said the same of the 50s; and 9.3% said a woman was most in danger in her 40s. The most common answer, chosen by 56.2% of respondents, was the most incorrect: "Age doesn't matter."
Breast cancer is hardly an obscure subject. It has been a major concern for at least two decades. There have been public information campaigns. Stories about breast cancer periodically flood the media. And yet, almost every woman surveyed had a deeply flawed perception of the risk.
Unfortunately, this story is far from unique.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, millions of Americans abandoned air travel for cars in the belief that the threat of terrorist hijackings made roads the safer alternative. In reality, air travel is so much safer than driving a car that even an unthinkable wave of deadly plane hijackings would not make roads the safer bet. And so, inevitably, the mass switch from planes to cars caused road deaths to spike. One researcher estimates the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars in the year following the attacks was 1595 — six times greater than the number of people on board September 11's doomed flights.
Why do we so often get risk wrong? The answer begins with the brain.
A fundamental insight of modern psychology is that our judgements are the product of not one mind, but two. There is the conscious mind, of course — the mind that ponders these words and understands how irrational it is to abandon planes for cars in the name of safety. The conscious mind perceives itself to be in sole control, but this is a cognitive illusion.
Most of the work done by the brain occurs beneath the level of consciousness and this unconscious mind is heavily involved in making judgements. The conclusions that issue from this mind do not emerge as articulate thoughts, however. We experience them instead as feelings and intuitions — something just seems right, for reasons we cannot express.
What most distinguishes the two minds is speed. The conscious mind — which I call "Head" — plods along. It takes time and effort to think. But the unconscious mind — or "Gut" — is as quick as a gunshot.
Gut is able to make snap judgements because it does not review all available evidence. Instead, it uses what cognitive psychologists call "heuristics," which are really just rules of thumb. There's the "availability heuristic," for example: the easier it is to think of an example of something, the more common that thing is. Nice and simple. It may not always produce correct conclusions, but it generally worked in the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, when the basic structures of our brains were evolving, which is why it is hard-wired in our brains today.
Gut's speed means it gets first crack in the formation of conclusions. "One of psychology's fundamental insights," writes Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, "is that judgements are generally the products of non-conscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them".
That's an ideal description of how we make judgements. In practice, Head routinely sits back and lets Gut's conclusions go unchallenged. "People are not accustomed to thinking hard," writes Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, "and are often content to trust a plausible judgement that quickly comes to mind".
And that can be dangerous.
Consider what women see about breast cancer in the media. They see Kylie Minogue. They see profiles of young mothers struggling with the disease. They see tragic stories of women killed in the prime of their lives. What they rarely see are the elderly women who are by far the most likely to get breast cancer: one study found that 84% of the breast cancer victims portrayed in American women's magazines were younger than 50 when they were diagnosed, while almost half were younger than 40. In effect, the media portrayal of breast cancer turns reality on its head.
Presented with an abundance of emotional, memorable examples of younger women with breast cancer and few examples of elderly victims, Gut inevitably concludes that younger women are at more risk, while the elderly can relax. It would take hard facts and careful thinking for Head to correct this intuition, but the media rarely present the facts and most people are not in the habit of thinking carefully. And so the Oxford researchers got the results they did.
Psychology and media aside, a third element skewing our perceptions of risk is marketing. Simply put, fear is useful. Fear sells products. Fear wins votes. Fear attracts public attention. And so corporations, politicians, and non-governmental organisations all use fear as a marketing tool — advancing their interests by hyping and even fabricating dangers.
Connect this marketing to the media and the brain and you get the circuitry that increasingly has us — the safest and healthiest humans in history — getting risks wrong and worrying like never before.
In the best of circumstances, this unreasoning fear, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it, steals a little of the pleasure in living. In certain situations, it can kill. Our only defence is to make a habit of questioning our judgements, no matter how plausible they may feel.
We must learn, in a word, to think.
Dan Gardner is the author of Risk: the science and politics of fear, published by Scribe last week.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/think-before-you-leap/2008/05/11/1210444242976.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Dan Gardner
May 12, 2008
IN 2007, researchers at Oxford University asked almost 1500 British women at what age a woman is most at risk of breast cancer. The answer should have come easily. Age is by far the strongest risk factor for breast cancer, so the older a woman is, the more likely she is to be stricken.
But that's not what women said. The correct answer — "80 or over" — was chosen by a minuscule 0.7% of respondents. A mere 1.3% said a woman was most at risk of breast cancer in her 70s. Another 6.9% identified the 60s as the age of greatest risk; 21.3% said the same of the 50s; and 9.3% said a woman was most in danger in her 40s. The most common answer, chosen by 56.2% of respondents, was the most incorrect: "Age doesn't matter."
Breast cancer is hardly an obscure subject. It has been a major concern for at least two decades. There have been public information campaigns. Stories about breast cancer periodically flood the media. And yet, almost every woman surveyed had a deeply flawed perception of the risk.
Unfortunately, this story is far from unique.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, millions of Americans abandoned air travel for cars in the belief that the threat of terrorist hijackings made roads the safer alternative. In reality, air travel is so much safer than driving a car that even an unthinkable wave of deadly plane hijackings would not make roads the safer bet. And so, inevitably, the mass switch from planes to cars caused road deaths to spike. One researcher estimates the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars in the year following the attacks was 1595 — six times greater than the number of people on board September 11's doomed flights.
Why do we so often get risk wrong? The answer begins with the brain.
A fundamental insight of modern psychology is that our judgements are the product of not one mind, but two. There is the conscious mind, of course — the mind that ponders these words and understands how irrational it is to abandon planes for cars in the name of safety. The conscious mind perceives itself to be in sole control, but this is a cognitive illusion.
Most of the work done by the brain occurs beneath the level of consciousness and this unconscious mind is heavily involved in making judgements. The conclusions that issue from this mind do not emerge as articulate thoughts, however. We experience them instead as feelings and intuitions — something just seems right, for reasons we cannot express.
What most distinguishes the two minds is speed. The conscious mind — which I call "Head" — plods along. It takes time and effort to think. But the unconscious mind — or "Gut" — is as quick as a gunshot.
Gut is able to make snap judgements because it does not review all available evidence. Instead, it uses what cognitive psychologists call "heuristics," which are really just rules of thumb. There's the "availability heuristic," for example: the easier it is to think of an example of something, the more common that thing is. Nice and simple. It may not always produce correct conclusions, but it generally worked in the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, when the basic structures of our brains were evolving, which is why it is hard-wired in our brains today.
Gut's speed means it gets first crack in the formation of conclusions. "One of psychology's fundamental insights," writes Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, "is that judgements are generally the products of non-conscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them".
That's an ideal description of how we make judgements. In practice, Head routinely sits back and lets Gut's conclusions go unchallenged. "People are not accustomed to thinking hard," writes Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, "and are often content to trust a plausible judgement that quickly comes to mind".
And that can be dangerous.
Consider what women see about breast cancer in the media. They see Kylie Minogue. They see profiles of young mothers struggling with the disease. They see tragic stories of women killed in the prime of their lives. What they rarely see are the elderly women who are by far the most likely to get breast cancer: one study found that 84% of the breast cancer victims portrayed in American women's magazines were younger than 50 when they were diagnosed, while almost half were younger than 40. In effect, the media portrayal of breast cancer turns reality on its head.
Presented with an abundance of emotional, memorable examples of younger women with breast cancer and few examples of elderly victims, Gut inevitably concludes that younger women are at more risk, while the elderly can relax. It would take hard facts and careful thinking for Head to correct this intuition, but the media rarely present the facts and most people are not in the habit of thinking carefully. And so the Oxford researchers got the results they did.
Psychology and media aside, a third element skewing our perceptions of risk is marketing. Simply put, fear is useful. Fear sells products. Fear wins votes. Fear attracts public attention. And so corporations, politicians, and non-governmental organisations all use fear as a marketing tool — advancing their interests by hyping and even fabricating dangers.
Connect this marketing to the media and the brain and you get the circuitry that increasingly has us — the safest and healthiest humans in history — getting risks wrong and worrying like never before.
In the best of circumstances, this unreasoning fear, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it, steals a little of the pleasure in living. In certain situations, it can kill. Our only defence is to make a habit of questioning our judgements, no matter how plausible they may feel.
We must learn, in a word, to think.
Dan Gardner is the author of Risk: the science and politics of fear, published by Scribe last week.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/think-before-you-leap/2008/05/11/1210444242976.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1