Is Fear Killing You?
Just how good is your grasp of risk? Much of the economic mess we are in today is due to our perception of risk – our personal certainty about the outcome of any action.
Billions of people who were absolutely certain about the oil price, the safety of owning property and the security of money in the bank were wrong. Millions of people in South Africa who bought generators in January 2008 were wrong. "Everyone says so" is not a reliable measure of risk.
On a more human scale, we all know people who have been dead wrong about “I can quit any time”, “I’m sober enough to drive” and “What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. This really should make us think twice about our ability to make good decisions based on gut feel.
These days, it seems like everything is risky – it’s hard enough to get a job, but now you have to worry not only about your own work and decisions, but the work and decisions of executive management. Will the company be in existence tomorrow, or will the MD abscond with all the funds. Or get arrested.
The human brain is exquisitely adapted to respond to risk. Our biases reflect the choices that kept our ancestors alive. But we have yet to evolve similarly effective responses to statistics, media coverage, and fear-mongering politicians.
Fear is not a detached computation of the odds - it’s a lightning-fast risk assessment performed by your reptilian brain, which is ever on the lookout for danger. The amygdala sends out an alarm message, and before you have a chance to think your system gets flooded with adrenaline.
Emotions are decision-making shortcuts; they were designed for a world in which dangers took the form of predators, not pollutants. Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible—but may not be anymore.
1. We fear snakes, not cars
You can’t separate risk and emotion.
Ancient threats like spiders and snakes cause fear out of proportion to the real danger they pose, while experiences that should frighten us—like fast driving—don't. The instinctive response to being approached rapidly is to freeze. In the ancestral environment, this reduced a predator's ability to see you—but that doesn't help when what's speeding toward you is a car.
2. We fear spectacular, unlikely events
Fear skews risk analysis.
Because fear strengthens memory, catastrophes such as earthquakes, plane crashes, and terrorist incidents completely capture our attention. As a result, we overestimate the odds of dreadful but infrequent events and underestimate how risky ordinary events are.
Television and Movies make improbable events appear common. Many people choose to drive rather than fly these days, but driving is far more dangerous than flying – and is even more dangerous on longer journey when we drive tired or at night.
3. We fear cancer but not heart disease
We underestimate threats that creep up on us.
Humans are ill-prepared to deal with risks that don't produce immediate negative consequences, like eating a hamburger or smoking cigarettes. As a result, we are less frightened of heart disease, obesity and global warming than we should be. A small risk taken regularly adds up and accounts for unplanned pregnancies, AIDs infections and car accidents.
4. It’s not reckless driving if I’m behind the wheel
We prefer that which (we think) we can control.
If we feel we can control an outcome, or if we choose to take a risk voluntarily, it seems less dangerous. Many people report that when they move from the driver's seat to the passenger's seat, the car in front of them looks closer and their foot goes to the imaginary brake.
The false calm that a sense of control confers, and the tendency to worry about dangers we can't control, explains why when we see other drivers talking on cell phones we get nervous but we feel perfectly fine chatting away ourselves.
5. We speed up when we put our seat belts on
We substitute one risk for another.
Research shows that in fact vehicles most likely to go out of control in poor road conditions are those with four-wheel drive. Buoyed by a false sense of safety that comes with the increased control and sitting higher, drivers of four-wheel-drive vehicles take more risks.
People have a preferred level of risk, and they modulate their behavior to keep risk at that constant level. Features designed to increase safety—four-wheel drive, seat belts, or air bags—wind up making people drive faster. Or to put it another way"If you drink a diet soda you can have ice cream for dessert.
6. We balance benefit against risk
The combination of thinking and feeling is dangerous
When risky decisions are weighed in a rational way, benefits like getting rich overnight, fitting in and feeling good NOW can outweigh real risks. As a result, promoting reasoned decision-making can backfire.
The initial response is fear and avoidance, then unfortunately the brain kicks in with analytical “reassurances” that the desired result is almost certain, while the worst case scenario only happens to other people.
7. Why young men will never get good rates on car insurance
The "risk thermostat" varies widely.
Genes influence impulsivity, which in turn affects the risks people take. Testosterone inclines males to take more risks than females, but age and situation matter as much as gender.
More importantly, risk taking is normally specific to certain activities. A person with physical confidence in themselves will go sky diving but avoid public speaking. A stockbroker takes massive business and financial gambles daily, but can’t chat up a girl without dangling his car keys in front of her to hedge his fear of rejection.
8. We worry about teen marijuana use, but not about teen sports
Risk assessment cannot be divorced from values.
If the risks of smoking marijuana are coldly compared to those of playing high-school rugby, parents should be less concerned about pot smoking. Alcohol and tobacco are also more likely to beget addiction, give rise to cancer, and lead to harder drug use.
We value physical fitness and the lessons teens learn from sports, but disapprove of unearned pleasure from recreational drugs. So we mentally magnify risks associated with activities society rejects, which leads us to do things like arresting marijuana smokers.
9. We love sunlight but fear nuclear power
"Natural" risks are easier to downplay.
The word radiation stirs thoughts of nuclear power and X-rays but every day we're bathed in radiation that has killed many more people than nuclear reactors: sunlight. People feel more comfortable with a plant-based insecticides, although they can be more toxic. When a case report suggested that lavender and tea-tree oil products caused abnormal breast development in boys, the media shrugged and activists were silent.
Nature has a good reputation and we think of natural as benign and safe. But malaria's natural and so are deadly mushrooms. Conversely, not everything man-made is dangerous and deadly.
THE THING TO FEAR, IS FEAR ITSELF
Worry is bad for your health. The more we learn the more we realise how much we don't know. If anything makes a human being anxious, it's uncertainty.
Research shows that the more people were exposed to media portrayals of disaster, crime and violence (even terrorist attacks, wars and Tsunamis happening thousands of miles away), the more anxious and depressed they become - revving their anxiety into overdrive.
Chronically elevated stress harms our physiology, interferes with the formation of bone, lowers immune response and resistance to diseases like AIDs. Chronic fear responses increase the likelihood of clinical depression and diabetes, impair our memory and our fertility, and contribute to long-term heart damage and high blood pressure.
Fear kills you in more ways than your health. Most religious doctrines are based on our human fear of the unknown. Many repressive political systems evolve out of fear of other social groups, other races, other cultures and even other genders. Governments and leaders seize power on the promise they will control the unknown and keep us safe.
It's impossible to live a risk-free life: everything we do increases some risks while lowering others. But if we understand our innate biases in the way we perceive and manage uncertainty, we can adjust for them and genuinely stay safer.
So what risks are YOU most afraid of?
Dianne Volek is CEO of InterComm South Africa (www.intercomm.co.za). She has a degree in Psychology and Communication, and a lifelong interest in human behaviour. InterComm recently launched InterCommerce, a small business portal with free resources for South African entrepreneurs. Risk is inherent to entrepreneurship - the site explore this and other topics in its online management magazine.