Humans Don’t Accurately Evaluate The Chances Of Rare, Large Events
The Key To Understanding Lottery Spending & Police Shootings
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the flaws inherent in the human animal.
I recently wrote a column about many humans’ innate predilection to submerge their personal identity into that of a group and their willingness to abandon reason and blindly follow the leader of their self-identified group.
Today, I’m thinking about humans’ inability to intelligently and accurately, evaluate the risk of a potentially highly positive or highly negative event happening to them.
I’m talking about appreciating the incredibly small chances of winning the lottery, being in a plane crash, becoming an A-list celebrity, playing for the NBA, being shot, being hit by lightning, etc.
Huge Consequences Fool People Into Thinking Something Is More Likely
Hearing that someone has experienced a rare major event fools us into thinking that the the risk of the same thing happening to us is massively greater than it really is.
Many people greatly over-estimate the possibility of suffering a harm or a benefit from a very rare event because of (1) the number of times they hear about it happening to someone, plus (2) the massive level of loss or benefit from that event.
Multiplier:
- Moderate Benefit/Harm Multiplier — 10X
- Substantial Benefit/Harm Multiplier — 75X
- Massive Benefit/Harm Multiplier — 250X
I think the formula might be something like this:
The above Multiplier Of The Benefit/Harm TIMES
The Number Of Times Per Month You Hear Of That Event Happening To Someone TIMES
The Actual Likelihood Of It Happening =
The level of hope/fear that that event might actually happen to you
The Harm From This Error
Much of the time this inability to realistically evaluate the risk of major but unlikely events is relatively harmless.
We know that the odds of picking winning lottery numbers are so infinitesimal as to be essentially, practically, zero, yet we buy lottery tickets anyway because
- (1) every week the media tells us the names of people who did win the lottery, and
- (2) the prize is huge.
Well, a few bucks down the well. Most of us will survive that unless it’s a lot more than just a few bucks.
But the consequences from humans’ inability to properly evaluate the probability of a large but rare event that happened to someone actually happening to them can be greater than just losing a few dollars on some lottery tickets.
Pursuing The Wrong Career
High school kids see the huge salaries that are paid to NBA players and that makes them think that they to have a realistic chance to become an NBA player when, in fact, the odds of any high-school basketball player actually making it into the NBA are incredibly small.
The problem with this miscalculation of the odds arises when the child abandons his/her real opportunities to have a real career for the fantasy of an NBA future.
Consider all the young people who see the Academy Awards or the Grammys and think that they will find fame and fortune if they spend the next ten or twenty years struggling to break into the entertainment business when their actual chances of success there are barely above zero.
By the time they figure out that it isn’t going to happen, the opportunities of their youth are long gone.
Fear Of Flying
Today, the media reports every negative incident involving commercial aviation. Two planes almost touch wing tips on a taxiway in Boise, Idaho — it makes the national news. A cowling tears off the engine of a commercial jet. It makes the national news.
Suppose one such event is reported on the national news every day for three weeks, twenty-one such incidents.
By the end of that three-week period, millions of people will be afraid to board a commercial airplane. Do they know the total number of planes that traverse taxiways every day? Do they know the total number of air miles flown every day? Do they understand that 21 is the numerator of a fraction with a denominator that is at least in the tens of millions?
No, but they think that there is a material chance that it might happen to them anyway.
Media Reports Exacerbate This Human Flaw
Publicity about a few rare events happening to someone is why people often think that criminals are running wild when, in fact, crime in that community is down, or that voter fraud is rampant when, in fact, there is almost no voter fraud in the U.S.
But humans’ inability to evaluate large numbers and small possibilities of the same thing happening to them that happened to someone else can cause even greater damage than the loss of a few bucks on lottery tickets or deciding not to fly to Lubbock for your Aunt Sally’s birthday party.
Creating A Culture Of Fear
My high school had a driver’s education class. Part of the course was to show us grisly pictures of bodies mangled in horrible crashes in order to emphasize the terrible things that can happen to bad drivers.
Suppose that over two or three days they showed kids hours and hours of bodies mangled in auto accidents, followed up with dire warnings that these sorts of terrible injuries were waiting for them on the road every day; that they had to be vigilant every second because every car on the road was potentially out to kill them.
And suppose they followed all that up with daily national and local news stories reporting every serious auto collision someplace in America.
Now, imagine how that would affect how those kids would drive.
The Consequences Of Police Officers’ Fear Of Being Shot
Police cadets are shown hours of videos of officers being shot on the job. They are constantly warned that that can happen to them. Every officer-involved shooting makes the local news and often the national news.
After all that, is it any wonder that some uniformed officers are trigger happy?
Recently, an officer was several feet away from his parked cruiser when an acorn fell onto the car’s roof. The officer interpreted that noise as a gunshot. He radioed that he was under attack, and he fired TWO clips of bullets into his own patrol car. Somehow he managed to miss the prisoner he had handcuffed in the backseat.
We could fill pages with reports of officers shooting people holding a cell phone or firing thirty or forty rounds at a single person standing a few feet away or turning a car holding a sleeping man into Swiss cheese.
If you are told again and again and again that danger waits for you around every corner. If you are shown hours of videos of police officers like you who have been shot on the job. If every day the news reports one or two or three police officers being shot at or shot, of course some percentage of cops are going to be trigger-happy.
That very small risk of being shot seems like it’s a very big risk because we humans cannot make a realistic threat assessment involving a very tiny chance of encountering a very large event that we are repeatedly told has happened to someone else.
In Fact, Rare Events Are Almost NEVER Going To Happen To You
Becoming an NBA player, winning the lottery, being in a plane crash, being run over while having a cup of coffee in a Starbucks, being shot, are all huge events that are extremely unlikely to happen to you, but the massive nature of the event times the number of reports of that event happening to someone magnifies your fear of it far beyond the actual probability that it will happen to you.
The odds that you are going to become an NBA star, an A-list celebrity, win the lottery, experience a plane crash, be run over while sitting inside a coffee shop, be shot, be struck by lightning, be hit by a meteor, etc. are all incredibly, incredibly small, but the huge consequences to you of such an event plus the fact that you have been told over and over again that the event happens every day to somebody magnifies your mind’s evaluation of that tiny, tiny risk to the point where you walk around thinking that riches or great injury might actually be near when, statistically, you could live twenty lifetimes without actually experiencing either one.
A Survival Mechanism?
Maybe humans overestimation of risk is a survival mechanism meant to keep the species alive and reproducing. But we really don’t need any help doing that, do we?
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
