"Feelings Come First": How People See Risk

On February 15, 2019, Gary Martin shot and killed five people and injured six others at the Henry Pratt Company’s warehouse in Aurora, IL. According to Mother Jones’ online database, this is the most recent mass shooting in the United States. (By their definition, a mass shooting happens in a public place, the victims are targeted indiscriminately, and four or more people besides the shooter are killed.)

Mass shootings like the Aurora warehouse shooting grab people’s attention and dominate news cycles. It’s easy to understand why. People are naturally drawn to disasters. Their instinct for survival means they want to identify the dangers around them. But if they only focus on these large tragedies, they might lose sight of the smaller tragedies that occur around them every day.

For instance, in the 74 days since the shooting, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we’d expect that 8,000 other people died in other gun violence incidents around the country, 7,800 people died in motor vehicle accidents, and 18,000 people died from alcohol-related causes. Those numbers might surprise you, but that’s not surprising because people aren’t always good an understanding how dangerous (or safe) the world is. 

Understanding risk is complicated. It’s not as simple as looking at the statistics. When most people see a gun, they are immediately aware of the risk. Yet they don’t get that same feeling when they look at a car. Even though a person is just about as likely to be killed in a car accident as they are by a gun. Their natural instincts, the way they feel about certain things, and cultural pressures all factor into how risky they think something is.

When our ancestors evolved, they didn’t have calculators or scientists or the internet to tell them what was dangerous. And most people still don’t need those things to figure out how they feel about risky situations. If you come across an animal with big teeth and claws, you’re not going to sit around to observe whether or not it’s going to try to eat you. You’re going to run, hide, or fight. Our brains have evolved to react in this way because you don’t have time to sit around thinking about what to do when you come face to face with danger.

While this is useful when it comes to staying alive out in the wild, the dangers faced in a civilized society can be more complex. It means people are quick to judge and rely on their feelings even when they have the time to analyze a situation more carefully. And for decades now, scientists have been studying the way people see risk.

“The feelings come first,” Paul Slovic told me in a recent interview. Slovic is a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and has studied risk perception for decades. He told me that feelings are incredibly important when it comes to how people view risk. In a 2005 study, Slovic and his colleagues’ research showed that even when people have statistics telling them how risky something is, most of them still rely on their feelings to determine how dangerous they think it is.

For example, think about a great white shark.

Now think about a cheeseburger (or any other food you love that you know isn’t that good for you.)

You probably have different feelings about sharks and cheeseburgers. Sharks are big and scary. Our favorite foods are delicious and make us feel better and sometimes we just need them to get by. Even if you don’t like cheeseburgers, you probably don’t think they’re very dangerous. Sharks are scarier than cheeseburgers. But a cheeseburger is more deadly than a great white.

It sounds ridiculous, but you know it’s true. Sharks kill very few people every year. A recent Global Burden of Disease study by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showed that bad dietary habits led to about 11 million premature deaths around the world in 2017 alone.

Scientists have identified many factors that make something seem more or less risky. In his 2010 book How Risky Is It, Really?, David Ropeik lists 13 fear factors, such as whether or not people feel they have control or choice in a situation, whether the risk is chronic or catastrophic, and how familiar they are with the risk. For instance, if you go in the ocean, you can’t control whether or not a shark attacks you. However, you can control what foods you eat. If you’re attacked by a shark, you know the results can be disastrous. However, the amount a single cheeseburger contributes to poor health is negligible. People don’t spend lots of time with sharks, but they spend lots of time eating. Combined with the human tendency to make quick judgements, these factors add up to a lot of people being afraid of sharks and no one being afraid of a cheeseburger.

As a result, people aren’t good at identifying what risks they face on a daily basis. They can make decisions without ever considering which option is safer. For instance, if you live in a city with a subway and you have the choice of driving somewhere or taking public transportation, every time you choose the car over the subway you’re taking a bigger risk since trains are far safer than cars. The risk is small, but over the course of a lifetime, these decisions can add up. In 2013, Ian Savage, an economist at Northwestern University, published a study showing that cars resulted in 17 times more fatalities than trains when traveling over the same distance. To put that in perspective, the average American’s lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 103 according to the National Safety Council. If you’re like most people though, those numbers don’t mean much to you.

Since feelings are so important in how people feel about risk, it means they’re not very good at incorporating statistics into how they feel about the dangers around them. Ropeik told me in an interview, “The statistics of a risk are very little part of how we feel about that risk.” 

Suppose someone told you that one item killed 88,000 people in a year and another item killed about 40,000 people in a year. Without context, it’s difficult for most people to know what to make of these numbers. As Slovic says, “Numbers are not enough.” Numbers don’t make people feel much of anything. But a lot of people might look at these numbers and conclude that the first item was more dangerous.

According to the CDC, alcohol kills about 88,000 people per year, and gun violence, including suicides, killed about 40,000 people in the United States in 2017. The odds are that you feel very differently about these numbers now that you know what they represent. Even though alcohol kills more than twice as many people as guns, gun violence is covered much more widely in the media and is a much more controversial topic than alcohol abuse.

Guns are scarier than alcohol to a lot of people for the same reasons that they’re more afraid of sharks than cheeseburgers. A gun shot is more catastrophic than a sip of alcohol. When another person has a gun, you have no control over the situation, whereas you can choose whether or not you have an alcoholic beverage.

But relying solely on statistics is just as dangerous as relying solely on feelings. There are big differences in the issues of gun violence and alcohol abuse that can’t be captured by mortality statistics.

More people use alcohol. And a single drink can’t kill someone the way a single bullet can. People feel that alcohol isn’t as dangerous as guns, because it isn’t. Alcohol kills more people because most people are exposed to alcohol a lot more than they are exposed to guns. More importantly, alcohol abuse isn’t the center of a polarized political debate. 

Ropeik said that when people are members of a group, or tribe, such as a political party, they have a lot of incentives to agree with the opinions of the group. He told me, “We want to maintain loyalty to our tribe so that our tribe recognizes us as a loyal member, and that makes us feel safer. Literally, physically safer in the same part of the brain if you saw a snake or a gun.”

In America, this difference is seen starkly in the differing views liberals and conservatives have about gun control. But when seen through the lens of risk perception, the differences begin to make more sense. According to a 2014 Pew Research poll, a conservative is almost twice as likely (41%) to own gun as a liberal (23%) . And owning a gun would greatly influence how dangerous someone believes guns to be in general. There are several risk factors that would make gun owners believe guns are safer than someone who does not own a gun.

Risk vs. Benefit. An owner of a gun presumably believes that a gun provides some benefit recreationally or for protection. For someone who doesn’t own a gun, the gun offers no benefit and only risk.

Control. Possessing a gun often confers a feeling of control, but someone in the presence of another person who possessed a gun would have a feeling that they were not in control of the situation.

New or Familiar. A gun owner or someone very familiar with firearms would view them as less risky than someone who had very little experience with firearms.

The political nature of the gun issue in the United States means it’s very unlikely that the two sides will see eye to eye anytime soon. “Society is stuck with that,” Ropeik says. “Society is burdened with that. Because the stronger our emotions, the harder it is to make objective, evidence-based choices because the same evidence looks different to different people.” So people are more likely to trust news sources that seem to support their political beliefs.

Gun violence, especially large mass shootings, can dominate news cycles for weeks at a time. People instinctively understand that a lot of people dying at once is more newsworthy than one person dying in a drunk-driving accident or someone committing suicide. 

As Ropeik told me, “The media are people, too.” That seems obvious, but it means that the news media coverage is influenced by reporters and editors’ feelings about risk, and they are just as likely to misjudge the size of a risk (and how newsworthy it is) as everyone else. 

Also, while many people think of the news media as a body that should provide the public with the objective information they need to make informed decisions, in reality it’s a business. “The information media are in the business of getting people’s attention so that they can make money from that attention,” Ropeik said.

These factors can easily combine so that people think certain events are more common and therefore more risky than they really are. Two Gallup polls conducted in 2015 and 2017 showed that about 4 in 10 Americans are very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family will be a victim of a mass shooting. According to the Mother Jones data, only 80 people died in mass shootings in 2018, and only 13 have died so far this year. There are almost 330 million people in America. The fear of mass shootings is far out of proportion to the risk.

The way we see the world is not the way it really is. However, the more we learn about the way we see the world, the closer we can get to seeing reality. When it comes to public health, especially as it relates to controversial topics like gun violence, it is useful to keep this in mind. While our feelings are important and should not be ignored, we can at least remember to take the time and look at the numbers, even if the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Source List

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“Fatal Injury Reports, National, Regional and State, 1981 - 2017.” CDC’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS).

Follman, Mark; Aronsen, Gavin; Pan, Deanna. “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2019: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation.” Mother Jones, updated Feb. 15 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/

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Newport, Frank. “Four in 10 Americans Fear Being a Victim of a Mass Shooting.” Gallup, October 18, 2017. https://news.gallup.com/poll/220634/four-americans-fear-victim-mass-shooting.aspx

“Preventable Deaths: Odds of Dying.” National Safety Council. Accessed April 27, 2019. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/data-details/

Ropeik, David. Phone Interview, March 13, 2019.

Ropeik, David. How Risky Is It, Really? : Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts. McGraw-Hill, 2010.

Savage, Ian. “Comparing the Fatality Risks in United States Transportation across Modes and over Time.” Research in Transportation Economics, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 9–22. http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~ipsavage/436.pdf

Slovic, Paul. Phone Interview, March 5, 2019.

Slovic, Paul, et al. “Affect, Risk, and Decision Making.” Health Psychology, vol. 24, no. 4S, 2005, pp. S35–S40.