In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki told us to go with the flow. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell advised that we trust our gut. In The Science of Fear, Canadian journalist Dan Gardner warns us to start second-guessing both the media-driven popular consensus and our instincts. Fatally bad decision-making occurs when the gut — the subconscious mechanism of self-preservation that got us through the pre-CNN epochs — identifies a media-amplified image, story, or statistic as a clear and present danger. The resulting inchoate sense of foreboding causes us to grossly overestimate the danger of highly unlikely threats (West Nile virus, terrorist attacks, abduction, plane crashes, shark attacks) and underestimate far more serious, if mundane, threats (car accidents). Our best defense against the media's (mostly) well-intentioned Chicken Littles? Do the math, Gardner tells us, and turn off the television.
Quiz: What Should You Really Be Afraid Of?1. What was the total death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
a. 3,000
b. 4,595
c. 20,000
2. The most recent suicide bombing in the US was carried out by ...
a. a foreign Muslim terrorist.
b. a native non-Muslim terrorist.
c. a foreign non-Muslim terrorist.
d. a native Muslim terrorist.
3. Man-made and naturally occurring pollutants cause what percent of cancer cases?
a. 2 percent
b. 33 percent
c. 62 percent
d. 83 percent
4. Ratio of mad cow disease deaths in England to the number of BBC News stories about mad cow disease:
a. 20:1
b. 10:1
c. 3:1
d. 1:1
5. Ratio of deaths from smoking to BBC stories about smoking deaths:
a. 2:1
b. 1:1
c. 1:2
d. 8,571:1
6. How many people did the early '90s Ebola virus outbreak in Virginia and the 1995 outbreak in the Congo kill, respectively?
a. 3 and 7,035
b. 0 and 255
c. 1 and 824
d. 12 and 11,700
7. Approximate number of deaths caused by 1998 civil war in the Congo:
a. 2.9 million
b. 900,000
c. 100,000
d. 255
8. An American student is 75 times more likely to be killed ...
a. on campus.
b. off-campus.
9. Chances that an asteroid 100 meters across, delivering the explosive equivalent of 3,500 Nagasaki bombs, will hit Earth in the next century:
a. 1 in 5,000
b. 1 in 250
c. 1 in 100
d. zero
10. Age at which breast cancer is most likely to strike:
a. 40
b. 50
c. 60
d. 80+
11. Number of dead at which "compassion fatigue" starts to occur:
a. 40,000
b. 50
c. 2
d. 500,000
Answers 1: B The approximately 3,000 who died in the initial attacks, plus the 1,595 who in the wake of 9/11 decided to drive instead of fly and as a result died in car accidents the following year. 2: b Joel Henry Hinrichs III, a Timothy McVeigh wannabe, blew himself up outside a full football stadium at the University of Oklahoma on October 1, 2005. The media barely covered it — the demographics of the bomber just didn't fit with the current foreign/Muslim narrative. 3: a; 4: C; 5: d; 6: b; 7: A; 8: b; 9: c; 10: d, then c, then b, then a — everyone picks the younger ages, because those are the cases we hear about most. 11: c Psychologist Paul Slovik shows that for any given incident, people are emotionally affected less with each death greater than one, so when you get to genocide-level numbers, they barely register on an emotional level.
