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Check your cognitive biases
One of the major findings in cognitive science, the study of the human intellect, is that we are driven far more by anecdotes and images and narratives than we are by data. We evolved in a world that didn’t have data. We had to rely on our own memory and on hearsay and conventional wisdom. And we know that that can lead us astray, especially in an age of mass media, where an image can be broadcasted all over the world and can lodge in our consciousness. So we read of a shark attack and we stay away from Cape Cod. As someone who spends summers in Cape Cod, that’s been great for me. I can get a table at a restaurant without a reservation because all the tourists are scared away because of one fatal shark attack in the last 80 years, that made viral YouTube videos everywhere and made the news everywhere. The fact that every summer people get killed in car crashes, didn’t succeed in keeping people out of their cars, but the gory image of the shark attack did.
And a lot of our understanding of the world works that way. We see a report of a school shooting, and we think that our kids are in mortal danger. We have them go through active shooter drills, terrifying them, whereas they are much more likely to get killed by other means, by car accidents, by run of the mill homicides, that don’t consist of rampage shooters.
Many people think that deaths in war have gone up. Whereas they’ve gone drastically down from about 22 per a hundred thousand war deaths a year in the early fifties, to one per a hundred thousand per year today. Rate of crime, violent crime has gone down, rate of hate crimes has gone down, rate of violence against women has gone down, rate of bullying against children has gone down. Contrary to most people’s understanding because they read of the outrage in the paper and they conclude this must be really, really common.
Don’t be misled
Data of course aggregate what happened with what didn’t happen and what doesn’t happen doesn’t make news. We often have no idea in how much of the world, fortunately, things don’t happen. Wars don’t start there. There aren’t famines. There aren’t epidemics. And since a country that is not having an epidemic doesn’t give us a nice image, it tends to fly above a level of consciousness. That’s why it’s essential to base your understanding of the world on trends and data, rather than images and anecdotes. You can be systematically misled into magnifying rare, but gory events and make really poor decisions.
One example is that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly. They thought they’d be the victim of the next fatal hijacking and so they would drive instead. Probably, the accidental death rate went up, because driving 12 miles gives you the same risk as flying from the East Coast to the West Coast. Take a lot of people out of planes, put them in cars, more people get killed. That’s like dumb decision-making, to let your image of the twin towers, keep you out of a plane.
In general, we should be- distrust our own gut feelings, our own first impressions. We should not base our decisions on something that we read in the paper that morning or even that month, but go to the data. Often, the direction of the trends is very different than the impression that you get from the news. There’s a saying, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines,” and that’s wise advice in every walk of life.