Role of the Media in Promulgating Fear and Worry
Scaring Us Senseless
By NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEBThe New York Times
July 24, 2005
The truth is that neither human beings nor modern societies are wired to respond rationally to terrorism. Vigilance is easy to muster immediately after an event, but it tends to wane quickly, as the attack vanishes from public discourse. We err twice, first by overreacting right after the disaster, while we are still in shock, and later by under-reacting, when the memory fades and we become so relaxed as to be vulnerable to further attacks.
Terrorism exploits three glitches in human nature, all related to the management and perception of unusual events. The first and key among these has been observed over the last two decades by neurobiologists and behavioral scientists, who have debunked a great fallacy that has marred Western thinking since Aristotle and most acutely since the Enlightenment. That is to say that as much as we think of ourselves as rational animals, risk avoidance is not governed by reason, cognition or intellect. Rather, it comes chiefly from our emotional system. Patients with brain lesions that prevent them from registering feelings even when their cognitive and analytical capacities are intact are incapable of effectively getting out of harm's way. It is largely our emotional toolkit, and not what is called "reason," that governs our capacity for self-preservation.
Second, this emotional system can be an extremely naïve statistician, because it was built for a primitive environment with simple dangers. That might work for you the next time you run into a snake or a tiger. But because the emotional system is impressionable and prefers shallow, social and anecdotal information to abstract data, it hinders our ability to cope with the more sophisticated risks that afflict modern life. For example, the death of an acquaintance in a motorcycle accident would be more likely to deter you from riding a motorcycle than would a dispassionate, and undoubtedly far more representative, statistical analysis of motorcycles' dangers. You might avoid Central Park on the basis of a single comment at a cocktail party, rather than bothering to read the freely available crime statistics that provide a more realistic view of the odds that you will be victimized.
This primacy of the emotions can distort our decision-making. Travelers at airports irrationally tend to agree to pay more for terrorism insurance than they would for general insurance, which includes terrorism coverage. No doubt the word "terrorism" can be specific enough to evoke an emotional reaction, while the general insurance offer wouldn't awaken the travelers' anxieties in the same way. In the modern age, the news media have the power to amplify such emotional distortions, particularly with their use of images that go directly to the emotional brain.
Consider this: Osama bin Laden continued killing Americans and Western Europeans in the aftermath of Sept. 11, though indirectly. How? A large number of travelers chose to drive rather than fly, and this caused a corresponding rise in casualties from automobile accidents (any time we drive more than 20 miles, our risk of death exceeds that of flying). Yet these automobile accidents were not news stories - they are a mere number. We have pictures of those killed by bombs, not those killed on the road.
As Stalin supposedly said, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Our emotional system responds to the concrete and proximate. Based on anecdotal information, it reacts quickly to remote risks, then rapidly forgets. And so the televised images from bombings in London cause the people of Cleveland to be on heightened alert - but as soon as there is a new tragedy, that vigilance is forgotten.
The third human flaw, related to the second, has to do with how we act on our perceptions, and what sorts of behavior we choose to reward. We are moved by sensational images of heroes who leap into action as calamity unfolds before them. But the long, pedestrian slog of prevention is thankless. That is because prevention is nameless and abstract, while a hero's actions are grounded in an easy-to-understand narrative. How can we act on our knowledge of these human flaws in order to make our society safer?
The audiovisual media, with their ability to push the public's emotional hot buttons, need to play a more responsible role. Of course it is the news media's job to inform the public about the risk and the incidence of terrorism, but they should try to do so without helping terrorists achieve their objective, which is to terrify. Television images, in all their vividness and specificity, have an extraordinary power to do just that, and to persuade the viewer that a distant risk is clear and present, while a pressing but underreported one is nothing to worry about.
Like pharmaceutical companies, the news media should study the side effects of their product, one of which is the distortion of the viewer's mental risk map. Because of the way the brain is built, images and striking narratives may well be necessary to get our attention. But just as it takes a diamond to cut a diamond, the news industry should find ways to use images and stories to bring us closer to the statistical truth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who teaches risk management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets."
Only Thing There is to Fear is More Unchecked News
by Leonard Pitts, Jr.Los Angeles Business Journal
August 26, 2002
Last year, you will recall, the filler of choice was sharks. A summer of highly publicized close encounters of the toothy kind left many of us convinced great whites had it in for us. The beasts were implicated in a series of maimings, bitings, muggings, car-jackings and insider training scandals. No less an authority than Time magazine even declared 2001 "The Summer of the Shark." Actually, it turned Out to be "The Summer of Terror Targeting America While the FBI Fumbled for Clues Like Ray Charles in a Dark Room."
But let's go with that shark thing, shall we? According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, there were 76 shark attacks. That's for the entire year, throughout the entire world -- and only a fraction were fatal. Plus, that number represented a slight down tick from the previous year. Surely the sharks are still biting this summer, but they've been all but ignored by the news media. Sharks are so 2001. We've moved on.
Welcome to the "Summer of thc Kidnapped Kid." Time hasn't run that headline yet, but I'm expecting it any week now. It's the only thing missing from a summer during which we have been inundated with stories of children snatched from the bosom of home by persons unknown. And we are dutifully unnerved. Look, I'm not trying to belittle the suffering of those who have lost loved ones to kidnappers. Or, for that matter, those who have been attacked by sharks.
No, my only purpose is to suggest that there's been an unintended byproduct of the all-news-all-the-time culture. Namely, that an industry whose chief product used to be information has instead begun manufacturing a new thing: hysteria. Or maybe it's been that way all along. Certainly, there was no shortage of screaming, panic-stricken headlines back in the days when Bill Hearst and Joe Pulitzer were the men in charge. Maybe some news magazine of the time even felt moved to declare 1908 "The Summer of the Suffragette."
Still, the gatekeepers of electronic news face a challenge undreamt of in the days when paper was the only news medium. Namely, they must feed a beast that is never sated, find a way to constantly fill endless hours of airspace. Even when there is slow news or no news. So they get creative. They use stories they might not otherwise use, stories that might once have been dismissed as having limited national interest. They repeat, repeat and repeat. They discover trends that may nor may not actually exist. And in the process, they create impressions that may or may not have any basis in fact.
There's nothing wrong with being aware that this child or that one has gone missing, nothing wrong with learning what precautions to take to safeguard children you love. But there is also nothing wrong with questioning hysteria, with seeking to understand whether the place news media are leading us to is one to which we really ought to go.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
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