You are sleeping, you do not want to believe
Scientific advice may suggest how dangerous things are - like smoking cannabis, taking ecstasy and horse riding - but risk is not all about numbers. (…)
The tables tell us, among myriad morbid details, that through a variety of causes 23 people drowned in the bath in 2008, 108 died from “inhalation of gastric contents” and five starved to death. (…)
There is evidence that the more we try to protect some people from the risks they take, the more danger they seek.
This is known as risk homeostasis and acts like a personal thermostat, so that if someone gives you an airbag, you feel more at liberty to put your foot down. (Funnily enough, one psychological trait among the young is a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of bad things happening. They think the chance of HIV-Aids is far greater than it really is. But does that stop unprotected sex?)
There can also be confusion between the probability of a harm occurring and the severity of that harm. So if a chief scientist says nuclear power isn’t risky, he might mean it’s highly unlikely to go wrong. Someone else might think, “but if it does…”
photo { Ryan Robinson }
