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A couple recent examples of fear mongering

Ok, so these have nothing to do with dogs, but since I just completed a series that highlights the media's proneness to fear-mongering, I thought I would pass along a couple of other examples that have come up as I was writing this series - -unrelated to dogs -- but I think relevant nonetheless.

The first is a story that ran just about everywhere earlier this year including the ABC Nightly News and the New York Times. The story involved our "economy in tatters" that has led to a major increase in eating SPAM in the US.

While much of what was said is true -- the media completely failed to note the actual scale of the impact. Yes, sales of SPAM was up 50%. So yes, the union workers in Austin, MN were working a lot of overtime to keep up. But what does 50% mean?

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I attended a presentation by Harry Balzer, a national expert on Food Trends in the US and he talked about this topic. According to Balzer's numbers (which would be as accurate as any that exist), every 12 weeks in the US -- for about the past 40 years -- about 1% of the US population will buy Spam. So, when in the first quarter of 2009, sales increased 50%, that meant that 1.5% of the US population bought Spam.  So while yes, what the media reported was technically true, what it failed to note was that in spite of the "economy in tatters", 98.5% of the people in the US STILL are not buying Spam.

Perspective is everything.

Secondly, last night on the Daily Show, John Stewart had a great segment on the media scare over H1N1 and then the SUBSEQUENT scare over the safety of the vaccine.  It really is a good piece that shows how much fear mongering the media is responsible for in all areas of our lives. You can watch the segment below.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Doubt Break '09
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

My biggest fear is what will happen if there ever is a disease that we really should be afraid of comes out. After major fear mongering over things like the Avian Flu and now H1N1, it sure seems like the public will ignore it as another fear-mongering tactic by the media even if it is the next Bubonic Plague. I'm pretty certain I will.

We Need to Be Better than this (Part 8 of 8)

his is the 8th and final installment of my 8 part series on Daniel Gardner's book, the Science of Fear.

Over the past two weeks, I've posted on a lot of different aspects of Daniel Gardner's book The Science of Fear.  I really encourage you to go out and buy the book.  It's a great read.

In the first installment, I talked about the focus of the book -- and how Gardner feels that we live at the savest time in the history of our planet and yet, we still live in fear.

In the second installment, I discussed the basic tenents from the book centered around how we thing -- particularly when it comes to our two different mental processes, head and gut.

In part three, I noted how the power of crowds, particularly confirmation bias and group polarization, can increase our fears.

In part four, I noted how the media, corporations, and politicians help to create, and prey on our fears.

In part five, I provided a recent example of how a trade organization, and the media, collaborated on some numbers to create a "fearful" story out of something that actually could have been a pretty positive story.

In part six, we discussed how pit bulls have become a part of a larger theme when it comes to media coverage.

In part seven, I discussed how making decisions based on our gut, instead of using our head, can often make us less safe because we don't properly evaluate risks.

And we, as a society, need to be better than this.

It is crucial for us to begin to make better decisions and be better at evaluating risks. We need to be smart enough to force our head to do its job and help us to evaluate information, instead of leaving gut to do all the work. We need to approach statistics with skepticism, and think about the statistics that are quoted to us by the media to figure out what the real numbers are -- and not just be swayed by statistics without denomenators and empty percent changes.

We need to use our head to be sure we are not easily swayed by twisted numbers, misleading language, emotional images and unreasonable conclusions.

When we go onto the internet, we need to look at arguments on both sides of a situation -- and not use confirmation bias to just find information that supports our own views. We also need to be sure our groups and organizations allow for open dialogue and dissenting viewpoints so we don't allow for group polarization -- or as I like to call it, group think.  And we should be very wary of groups that do not allow dissenting opinions.

I hope you enjoyed this series and found it valuable.

Why making decisions on emotional fear matters (Part 7 of 8)

This is part 7 of my 8 part series on Daniel Gardner's book, The Science of Fear.  The ideas from the first part of this post are paraphrased (unless quoted) from Gardner's book.  The dog examples are my own.

In the months following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, people dramatically changed their travel habits. Night after night, people watched the dramatic and tragic video footage of two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center, and all of the media coverage, and coverage of politicians talking about the "War on Terror" that followed.

Because of this, people became scared to fly. So as the following year progress, people continued to choose driving instead of flying for their vacations and to visit family. It is easy to understand why people were fearful.

The problem of course is that flying is statistically significantly more safe than driving. So much safer in fact, that the most dangerous part of most flights is the drive to the airport.  According to Gardner:

"The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars even if the threat of terrorisim were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking anc crashing one passenger jet a week in the US, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1 in 135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking -- a trivial risk compared to the annual 1 in 6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash....

But car crashes aren't like terrorist hijackings. They aren't covered live on CNN. They aren't discussed by pundits.  They don't inspire Hollywood movies and television shows. They aren't fodder for campaign politicians.  And so in the months following the September 11 attacks, as politicians and journalists worried endlessly about terrorism, anthrax and dirty bombs, people fled the airports to be safe from terrorism and crashed and bled to death on America's roads.  And nobody noticed."

According to one US researcher, the number of people who died in the year following 9/11, directly from the shift from planes to cars, was 1,595.

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The 9/11 example is an extreme, and powerful example, of what happens when we ignore statistical risk analysis, and let our gut, not head, make our decisions. When gut makes the decision, we often follow the Example Rule, or the Rule of Typical Things, and make decisions that not only do not make us safer -- but often make us less safe.

In the months following the an attack by a 'pit bull' on a young girl in Omaha, NE, there was a huge media storm surrounding 'pit bulls'.  People demanded that "something" needed to be done.

In spite of recommendations by experts in the field of animal behavior, animal control, and animal law, the city councilors of Omaha decided to "do something" to squelch the moral panic about 'pit bulls' in their community. At that point, true risk analysis was worthless. Something had to be done.

So Omaha passed an ordinance that put harsh restrictions on owners of 'pit bulls' -- with a series of criteria responsible owners would need to follow in order to keep their dogs in the city -- while ignoring the fact that the real problem owners would not comply with the law.  It just used a huge number of resources to focus on owners who were never a problem in the first place. It was poor risk analysis.  But it appeased the masses.  And cost the city $75,000 more dollars to enforce.

Meanwhile, the city is facing some real issues. The city is above the national average in most crime categories.   And their murder number has climbed from 33 in 2006, to 41 in 2007 and 42 in 2008. If the city was going to spend $75,000 more on enforcement -- for true public safety -- it seems like the police force would be a good spot to start.

But it didn't. Because gut made the decision. And not only did the new law not make people safer, it made them less safe. Through the first 6 months of 2009, the first year of the ordinance, the city saw a 37% increase in dog bites over the previous year -- because their city council made a decision based on gut, not head.

What has happened in Omaha is not unique -- it is just an example of how poor decisions, based on what one Denver city council person who was on the council when the city passed its initial ban in 1989 called the hysteria of the moment, are made when we let gut make the decisions, not head.  The examples are everywhere.  Denver has spent millions of dollars supporting their breed ban in spite of no evidence that the ban itself has been effective.

Cincinnati, OH passed a breed ban in 2003, and soon after began using their police force enforce the ban -- in spite of the city being among the leaders in the nation in violent crime.

In the United Kingdom, where their breed ban was rushed through quickly after a major attack in the area, has seen a dramatic increase in dog bites -- ranging from 50% nationwide to 150% in some areas -- following the passage of their law.

In Aurora, CO, they passed a breed ban and saw a 26% increase in dog bites over a 2 year period following the passing of the ban.

Not only were people in these cities not safer from dog bites -- they were actually LESS safe from them -- after passing their ill-advised laws. Additionally, several of the cities were pulling resources from their police force  (or resources that COULD have been used for the police force) in order to enforce a law that was much less statistically dangerous than the many areas the police force helps.

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Like the 9/11 example, it is easy to see how people can become fearful after a major, dramtic event that replayed over and over by the media. And how our gut, following the Example Rule of the recent event, would lead us toward a path of a dramatic change in our legislation, or behavior.  Whether this be fear from a terrorist attack, or a smaller fear, such as that of a singular out-of-control dog that attacked.

But if we don't allow our head to step in and really analyze the data, and assess the true risk, we pose a risk to endangering ourselves because we let gut make an ill-advised decision. Not only do we risk not making ourselves safer -- but we make ourselves MORE at risk.

Making smart, educated, well-thought-out decisions matter.  And the more we understand how our gut assesses risk, and how our head can over-ride it if we let it, the better, and safer, we'll all be.

Pit Bulls As Overarching Media Themes (Part 6 of 8)

This is part 6 of my 8 part series on Daniel Gardner’s book, the Science of Fear.

 

On May 4, 2006, Alan Hill of Independence, MO was seriously wounded when he was attacked by three ‘pit bulls’.  The dogs were known to be aggressive and the caretaker of a property where the dogs stayed purposefully let the dogs out just “to see what would happen.”

 

Over the course of the next 6 months, the Kansas City Star newspaper ran no fewer than 124 stories about ‘pit bulls’ (which is the equivalent of 2 articles running every 3 days for six months. Many were editorials. Many were news stories. The news stories covered everything from cities discussing breed bans to a few additional bite incidents. A couple of the bites were major – but many were simply stories about dogs that scratched someone. One TV news station’s lead story on a Friday night consisted of one of their camera men SEEING a pit bull – and the video they showed is a shaky video of a photographer trying to capture a pit bull on film as the dog slinks away into a wooded area afraid.

 

As the stories mounted, cities throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area began discussing potential bans on pit bulls. The newspaper was there to cover it. The more the Star covered these stories, the more of a moral panic there became – which led to more articles by the media.  The feedback loop was in full force.

 

Articles from the newspaper showed a clear bias about what cities should do about pit bulls – they all must go. Headlines included:

 

“Lee’s Summit stalls on dog regulations”

“Independence poised to approve ban”

“Incidents prove pits must go”

“Action on dogs delayed”

“Efforts across the area to put new limits on pit bulls will continue tonight”

“Olathe stands by its dog law; given second chance to ban pit bulls, council declines, going against the trend in other cites.”

 

The last one is especially damning because at the time, 19 area cities had discussed a potential ban on pit bulls, and only 3 had chosen to move forward with breed specific restrictions.

 

To put the 124 articles in six months into perspective, in the year prior to the attack on Alan Hill, the Star ran only 16 stories about ‘pit bulls’ – with several of those being articles that cast them in a positive light.

 

Over the years, similar things have happened in cities around the country. The media will virtually ignore ‘pit bulls’ for years at a time, but then, when one attack occurs, the media will begin to write all kinds of negative articles about these types of dogs. 

 

In Omaha, in the 12 months prior to June 24, 2008, KETV ran 19 news stories about ‘pit bulls’ (about 25% of which were about Mike Vick).  On June 24^th, a three year old girl was attacked by a ‘pit bull’, and in the 12 months that followed, the news station ran 62 news stories.

 

In The Science of Fear, Gardner notes that in many cases, one big event may lead to the formation of a larger narrative. Whenever a story fits into an existing storyline, it is generally strengthened by the larger story.  If a story isn’t part of a larger narrative – or worse, if it contradicts the narrative – it is far less likely to see the light of day.

 

Gardner uses the media publicity about Road Rage as an example:

 

“In 1998, Time magazine declared, “It’s high noon on the country’s streets and highways. This is road recklessness, auto anarchy, an epidemic of wanton carmanship.”  Road rage. In 1994, the term scarcely existed and the issue was nowhere to be seen. In 1995, the phrase started to multiply in the media, and by 1996, the issue had become a serious public concern.  Americans were increasingly rude, nasty and violent behind the wheel; berserk drivers were injuring and killing in growing numbers; it was an “epidemic”.  Everyone knew that, and by 1997, everyone was talking about it.  Then it stopped. Just like that.  The term road rage still appears now and then in the media – it’s too catchy to let go – but the issue just vanished about the time Monica Lewinsky became the most famous White House Intern in history.”

 

The feedback loop was broken, and the media moved on to the new interest among the American public.  Ironically, there appeared to be no real reason for the heavy emphasis on road rage. From the book:

 

“’Headlines not withstanding, there was not – there is not – the least statistical or other scientific evidence of more aggressive driving on our nation’s roads,’ concluded journalist Michael Fumento in a detailed examination of the alleged epidemic published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1998. “Indeed, accidental, fatality and injury rates have been edging down. There is no evidence that ‘road rage’ or an aggressive-driving ‘epidemic’ is anything but a media invention, inspired primarily by something as simple as alliteration: road rage.’”

 

 

In the late 1970s, society had begun to take an interest in the cruel sport of dog fighting in the US. Media reports began to increase as reports of law enforcement raids on dog fighting rings began to pop up. 

 

In July, 1987, Rolling Stone Magazine did a remarkable and graphic report on teenagers, inner city gangs, violence and abuse of ‘pit bulls’ entitled “A Boy and his Dog in Hell”.  On July 27^th of 1987, Sports Illustrated ran a cover article – complete with a picture of a teeth-baring pit bull (pictured left) with the headline “Beware of this Dog.”

 

In the same month, Time Magazine ran an article entitled “Time Bomb on Legs”.  The article may have been the worst of the articles that ran. From Karen Delise’s book The Pit Bull Placebo:

 

“Horror Author Stephen King could not have created a more frightening monster than this portrayal of the Pit bull. The second sentence of this article reads: “never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than the dark form and savage face (of the pit bull). The rest of the article descends even further, vilifying the Pit bull as a creature that revels in the “frenzy of blood-letting,” and described as “lethal weapons” with “steel trap jaws” and as “killer dogs” and the new “hound of the Baskervilles.” An unproven, unreferenced claim of Pit bulls biting with 1800 psi is even included.” 

 

(My note, since, science has shown us that pit bulls indeed bite with the same relative bite force as other medium sized dogs – at about 320 psi).

 

In this same month, in 1987, People magazine ALSO ran an article on ‘pit bulls’ entitled “An Instinct for the Kill”.

 

By the end of August, 1987, the larger narrative of ‘pit bulls’ as “aggressive killers” was begun. It didn’t matter much of the information included in the articles wasn’t really true – and that many of the claims were as outrageously wrong and unsubstantiated as the 1800 psi statements.  It didn’t matter there were literally thousands of examples of ‘pit bulls’ as household pets that existed. It didn't matter if statistically and scientifically the fear they were creating was not valid -- much like in the "road rage" example. All that seemed to matter was that a type of dog, with a very “cool” sounding name, ‘pit bulls’, made for very dramatic magazine articles, very dramatic covers and increase sales.

 

It is almost no wonder, with the media coverage of the time that created a moral panic, that over the next 18 months, some of the country's post notable bans on pit bulls came into existance -- Denver, Kansas City, KS, and Miami -Dade County all passed their breed bans in 1989 -- and all exist today, in spite of the wealth of science and research that has shown that there is little scientific reason to ban particular breeds of dogs, and evidence that shows that such bans are not effective.

 

And yet, the narrative began – and it is a narrative that continues to this day. It’s the same narrative that leads to stories that normally wouldn’t be “newsworthy” on their own making it into the headlines because it supports the larger narrative.

 

It’s the same narrative that allows a news station in Mobile, AL to report on only 6 of the city’s 80 dog bites throughout the year – but in every incident where a breed of dog was mentioned, the breed was a ‘pit bull’ – even though they did not lead the list of biting breeds and made up only a small percentage of the total bites.

 

It’s the same narrative that allows media outlets in places like Kansas City and Omaha to create even larger local narratives whenever a singular incident gives them the opportunity to.

 

And it’s the larger narrative that relies on the feedback loop to continue to create fear, and then have the public fear come to them in terms of more viewers/readers, that leads them to create even more stories about ‘pit bulls’ that feeds the cycle.

 

It’s time to end the narrative.

Dog Bites and Insurance - The Science of Fear (Part 5 of 8)

This is part 5 of a series I’m doing centered around the book the Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner. Today, I’m not going to talk specifically about the book, but about an example that pulls a lot of the pieces together in the first part of the book that I discussed last week.

 

A couple of weeks ago, the Insurance Information Institute issued a press release – and the first line of the release read: “Man’s best friend is sinking its teeth into homeowners insurance costs. Dog bites account for one-third of all homeowners insurance liability claims…”. The fairly short release goes on to report that the number of claims have gone up 9% from 2007 to 2008 and how the average cost per claim has gone up 28% since 2003.

 

Dozens of media outlets picked up on the story – with all of them focusing on these key statistics.

 

Now interestingly, in spite of the 9% increase in claims from 2007 to 2008, the number of total claims is actually down 6.5% from the 2003 numbers. Meanwhile, while the costs of the average claim have gone up over the past 6 years, the average claim costs have actually gone up each year LESS than the average of medical costs in this country - which have been rising at around 8.7% a year over the past decade (this would calculate out at about 65% since 2003 -- more than double the rate of increase for dog bites). 

 

So the headline could be that the number of claims are down and the cost of the claims are going up less than the price of all medical costs.

 

But this isn’t the route that the Insurance Information Institute (who would have a vested interest in pumping up these numbers) or the media (who has a vest interest in creating fear) chose to go with this information. They reported all of the bad news…but without putting it in the perspective by reporting the good.

 

Meanwhile, it is also interesting to see the focus on one-third of all homeowners liability claims are from dog bites.  While technically true, the sin of omission is present here as well. The reality is that liability claims make up a very tiny portion of overall claims – at only 6% of all total claims. Thus, while dog bites make up 33% of all LIABILITY claims (true), they make up only 2% of all claims -- something that wasn't reported.

 

Meanwhile, 37% of the US Households own dogs – the equivalent of 43 million homes.  Out of those homes, only .03% (that’s 1 out of every 3,000) of the nation’s 43 million dog owning households had a liability insurance claim last year.

 

So:

 

1)   The VAST majority of dogs (2,999 out of every 3,000) are owned safely by their owners,

2)   The number of dogs that are responsible for liability claims is going down (in spite of the number of dogs being owned increasing),

3)   The dollar amount of insurance claims for dog bites are trailing overall cost increases for health care.

 

And yet, that wasn’t even close to the headline.

 

It’s just interesting to see a press release from a group with a financial interest in creating fear, picked up by the media almost as-is without looking up any of the other information, that when most people read their Gut will follow the Example Rule and say, wow, that seems about right, because I know or read about someone recently who was bitten by a dog, and the media, completely avoiding the denominator, runs the story without putting the overall risk into perspective.

Yeah, it happens every day in all areas of the news – particularly in dog bites. We must be smart about how we analyze the information we consume so we can weed through it and come up with smart, rational conclusions on our own. Too often we don’t.

Politicians, the Media and Corporations are Scaring us to Death (part 4 of 8)

This is part four of a series I’m doing on Daniel Gardner’s Book, The Science of Fear.

 

As a society, we have left ourselves very open to fearing things we shouldn’t fear. Often, we let our gut rule our decision-making without much interest in doing the research necessary to squelch our own fears. Then, even when we actually WANT to analyze the data, and determine the risk, we often lack the basic math skills to truly do so. So we become open to being misled into being fearful. And often, we are.

 

So who would lead us down the road of being fearful even if the fear was not justified?  Well, sadly, anyone who may profit from our fears.

 

People who sell security alarm systems often lead us to be fearful of crime – because the more people who fear crime, the more people who will by their products..

 

Pharmaceutical companies often lead us to be fearful of diseases that they just happen to sell the treatments for in what many experts refer to as “disease mongering”.

 

Even special interest groups and not-for-profits often lead to creating fear in order to get more funding and/or donations. (It should be noted that a large number of the websites dedicated to defaming particular breeds of dogs tend to be run by dog bite lawyers).

 

Politicians also have a vested interest in creating fear.

 

H.L. Mencken once wrote that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence, clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”  Mencken penned this line in 1920 at the height of the first Red Scare.

 

Gardner notes that in most cases those that promote fear are sincere – for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. “Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.”

 

In the book, Gardner provides a good example:

 

In 1991, an American activist group named the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) released a report claiming “one out of eight American Children” had gone hungry at some time in the previous year. The report garnered widespread press coverage despite being fatally flawed by an unrepresentative survey sample and questions drafted too broadly to be meaningful. On the most precise question – “Did any of your children ever go to bed hungry because there was not enough money to buy groceries: -- just one third of those counted as “hungry” said “yes.” That alone should have cast doubt on the validity of the report, but almost every new story about the report passed along the statistic as if it were unchallengeable fact. (Someone at CBS Evening News not only accepted the study as hard fact, but misread it in an almost comical fashion – which resulted in Dan Rather leading off the newscast by announcing “A startling number of American children in danger of starving. Dan Rather reporting. Good evening. One out of eight children is going hungry tonight.”

 

Many of these groups take the approach that their intentions are honorable and why worry about the accuracy of information used to advance a worthy cause?  Surely what matters is raising awareness and getting action.

 

That attitude is all too common and the result is a parade of half-truths, quarter-truths and sort-of-truths. In the mail, I got a brochure from the government warning me that “car crashes are the number one cause of death for Canadian children!”  That was true – as far as it goes. But the brochure doesn’t mention that the rate of fatal car crashes is steadily falling and is now lower than it was generations ago (the number of fatalities dropped 37% between 1986 and 2005, despite rising numbers of people on the roads. Nor does it say that car crashes became the number-one killer only because the toll inflicted by other causes (notably infectious diseases) declined more rapidly…..Sins of omission are far more common than active deceit in fear marketing.

 

The media – for their part – have become an active participant in the fear-marketing.  Reporters have become increasingly asked to do more with less time. As such, they commonly do not read the full studies of the reports they write about – only what they read in the press release. If a statistic is given, like, 1 in 8 children went hungry this year due to lack of money for food, often the methodology is never discussed or questioned – and in fact, other media outlets often use the original report as a source, and the number gets passed around as fact even though the number may or may not have much legitimacy. Gardner gives an excellent example when it comes to a statistic given about the number of online pedophiles being around 50,000 that no one could verify the source of the information that alone is worth the book purchase price.

 

It should also be noted though that media are far from victims of their low staffing and people feeding them mis-information.  They benefit from the fear-mongering as well as fear increases attention to the media that writes about it – and Gardner dedicates an entire chapter to the media’s role in promoting fear.  According to Gardner:

 

"The power of images to drive risk perceptions is particularly important in light of the media’s proven bias in covering causes of death. As Paul Slovic was among the first to demonstrate, the media give disproportionate coverage to dramatic, violent and catastrophic causes of death – precisely the sort of risks that lend themselves to vivid, disturbing images – while paying far less attention to slow, quiet killers like diabetes….overall the picture of traumatic injury and death presented by the news is “grossly” distorted, with too much attention paid to ‘events with high visual intrigue.’

 

The information explosion has only worsened the media’s bias  by making the information and images instantly available around the world – turning even extremely rare events – even one in a million events  -- into things that happen multiple times a day.

 

“As a result, the producers who put together the news have a bottomless supply of rare-but-dramatic deaths from which to choose….remove all professional restraints – that is, the desire to portray reality as it actually is – and you get the freak show that has taken over much of the media.”

 

The end result is that we have a lot of different images of strange, rare, dramatic deaths in our memory banks.

 

“It fills our memories with examples of dramatic causes of death while providing few examples of mundane killers – and so when gut uses the Example Rule, it will tend to over estimate the risk of dramatic causes of death while underestimating others.”

 

One other factor that Gardner blames the media for is the lack of perspective it gives readers/listeners.  He calls it “denominator blindness.” The media often tell people that “X people were killed” but rarely include the “out of Y number.” When we are blind to the denominator, we are blind to the real risk.  It is one of the “sins of omission” Gardner refers to earlier.

 

What drives the media’s sensationalism seems to be plain old self interest. Fear creates interest….and interest means more newspapers are sold and more people are watching the news…which is good for the media.  And as there are more and more media options, and viewership becomes more fragmented, we can only assume that the sensationalism will continue to grow as the media works harder to gain eyeballs. This creates a complete feedback loop: the media reflects society’s fear, but in doing so, the media generate more fear, and that gets reflected back again.  This can eventually lead to cause a strange eruption that sociologists call a moral panic.

 

I’ll talk a little bit more about the media when the series resumes next week, but tomorrow, I’ll provide a recent example of how all of these elements came together in the dog world just two weeks ago.

We fear in crowds (Part 3 of 8)

This is part 3 of a 8 part series I’m writing based on the Daniel Gardner book the Science of Fear.

 

While very much of what we fear is because of how we’ve internalized fear, we are social creatures, and what we fear, and how much we fear it, is usually shaped by those we surround ourselves by.

 

One such situation is the idea of confirmation bias. The idea here is that once we have a belief system in place, we tend to screen what we see and hear in a biased way that ensure our beliefs are “proven” correct.

 

This is one of the more dangerous things about the internet and search engines like Google.  While they are very useful in helping us find information that we are looking for -  but only valuable in helping us find what we type into it. For example, if someone has the belief that pit bulls are aggressive, they would likely go into Google, type “pit bulls aggressive” into the web browser. With such a search, they would no doubt find a wealth of information at their finger tips that would confirm this thought. Even though there is much information out there that would point to pit bulls NOT being aggressive, this information may go virtually ignored because of confirmation bias and the seeker ignoring information that didn’t ‘prove’ them right.

 

For this same reason, people who think ‘pit bulls’ are bad may go to the CDC Report from 2000, flip to the chart on page 2 that shows ‘pit bulls’ lead in dog bite fatalities, and “confirm” their belief, while someone with the opposing viewpoint will look at the conclusions of the study on page 1 that clearly states the problems with how the study was conducted as points to dog bite fatalities as being a non-breed-specific issue.  It's the same 5 page document. Easy to understand. And yet, because people enter into it with their own bias, they may come away with completely different views of the same document.

 

One of other things that psychologists have discovered is that people are vulnerable to something called group polarization – which means, when people who share beliefs get together in groups, they become more convinced that their beliefs are right and they become more extreme in their views. This is one reason why many proponents of pit bull bans end up having such extreme views of how ‘bad’ pit bulls are (especially when they do not allow for open conversation and opposing viewpoints).  They have let confirmation bias and group polarization take them down a road where they have such strong, opposing views of ‘pit bulls’ and never give an ounce of thought to other points of view. In fact, science shows that when people have a strong opinion of a topic, even when we stumble across evidence that runs contrary to our points of view, we tend to belittle and even ignore the information -- even if the information is rationally or scientically sound.

 

The power of group think can be even more powerful than you’d think. In many scientific studies, they have shown that people will answer questions incorrectly – even if they know the answer to be incorrect – if everyone in the room answered the question incorrectly too because of the fear of being different from the rest of the crowd.

 

In one very basic test, people were asked to sit in a cubicle and answer the question about which geometric shape was larger. In the beginning, when the test subject would respond as the 1^st or 2^nd subject to respond, they would get the answer correct.  However, one slide was presented with five lines on it and people were asked to note which line was longer. The obvious answer was line number 4. However, when the first person answered it, they answered it as number 5. Then the second person did.  Then the third.  Then the fourth. When it was the test subject’s turn to answer, 1/3 of the test subjects answered the question incorrectly even though they knew the right answer because they conformed to the consensus of the other, planted, participants. Group think can be very powerful indeed.

 

If it can lead 1/3 of people to follow the pack when their answer is obviously wrong, what type of power can the power of the pack have when the correct answer is even less obvious?

 

There is one final element that needs to be understood is the reaction humans have to risk. Humans perceive risk and benefits on the opposite end of the spectrum. So if something is perceived as being beneficial, it is generally seen as low-risk. If something is seen as risky, it is usually also perceived as being bad.

 

The combination of these things often leads us to what Gardner calls probability blindness.  When people get caught up in powerful visuals, their gut gets these feelings of things being “risky” and as major threats.  The feelings end up sweeping away the numbers. According to Gardner:

 

"The irony is that probability blindness is itself dangerous. It can easily lead people to overreact to risks and do something stupid."

 

This often leads people to create new, often costly programs.  “If it saves just one life, it’s worth it” is something we often hear. Even if likelihood of such an event is improbable, and the solution is quite costly, people will often clamor for the solution. This is true even if the high costs could also be used save even more lives from more likely problems. 

 

"The idea here is that regulations can inflict economic costs and economic costs can reduce health and safety.  We have to account for that if we want to be rational about risk. We rarely do of course. As political scientist Howard Margolis describes in Dealing with Risk, the public often demands action on a risk without giving the slightest considerations to the cost of that action."

 

Our inability as a culture to assess risk and probability is even furthered by the reality that as a country, we’re really not very good with numbers.  Most people – even many well educated ones – have difficulty answering fairly basic math problems.  In Canada, only 55% of people in one study were able to answer the question of how many millions are there in a billion. In one test using college students, they asked “If person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of person A, what is B’s risk?  Only 74% of college-educated people got the question right.

 

In another question, “imagine if we roll a fair, six-sided die 1,000 times. Out of 1,000 rolls, how many times do you think the die will come up with an even number?  Only 61% of people got that question right.  In another, they asked “In the Acme Publishing Sweepstakes, the chance of winning a car is one in 1,000, what percent of the tickets of Acme Publishing Sweepstakes win a car?  Only 46% of those asked got this right.

 

When a nation’s university educated elite have such a weak grasp of the numbers that define risk, is it any wonder that our ability to assess risk, and make sound decisions based on the actual data, is at risk of going wrong?  And is it any wonder that when we don’t have the ability to assess the numbers (or the numbers are only partially given to us), that Head cannot correct Gut’s emotionally based decisions.  And so without Head’s involvement, Gut can get decisions very, very wrong.

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In 1997, 58 year old minister Wilbur Billingsly was attacked by a pit bull in a back ally in Denver. While the dog had bitten three people over the course of the past three years, citizens rallied together insisting that the all pit bulls were aggressive and the city must ban the breed.  City council president Cathy Reynolds recalls the months following the attack and refers to it as “the hysteria of the moment.  It was emotional, there was no way you could stop it.”

 

That year, Denver passed a ban on pit bulls – a ban that has costs the city millions of dollars.  Numbers didn’t matter. The power of the mob -- enhanced by group polarization created a situation where “something had to be done”. The people had probability blindness, and the law was passed. The people, and the city, overreacted to a situation and created an irrational law that has done nothing to improve the public safety in their city. If they had thought about the risk rationally, and spent the millions dollars elsewhere, how many lives would have been saved because they were dealing with REAL risks, and not just perceived ones? 

 

Probably a lot

 

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These theories are real – and play a role in decision-making every day in different areas of our lives.  And they’ve led to many cities passing bans on dog breeds in spite of so much rational evidence against the idea. The decisions were based solely on the strong emotion….the hysteria of the moment. 

 

Tomorrow we’ll discuss who’s driving the hysteria.

Knowing How We Think (Part 2 of 8)

This is part two of a eight part series on the book, the Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner. Most of part two is based on scientific information in the book.  I don’t site most of his sources here – but all of the ideas from this are solely from Gardner’s book and not my own.

 

In order to understand most of the premises of the book, it is essential for us to understand a few basic premises on how the brain works.

 

According Gardner, there are two primary ways for us to process information:  Head & Gut.

 

Head is our conscious thought. Head is our best source of making rational decisions because it is analytical.  It has the ability to process information and make rational decisions. But it has limitations. In order to make good decisions, head has to be educated on the topic.  It has to have a good knowledge on the basics of math, statistics and logic. Without this, head can make bad decisions. Head also is slow to process information.

 

On the other hand, there is Gut. Gut is our unconscious mind. Its defining quality is speed – it has the ability to make snap decisions and sound the alarm instantly. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, you’ve read a lot about our natural system to make snap judgments and decisions.

 

Now, scientifically, gut gathers its information differently than head. It’s subconscious – so we by definition don’t have control of how it intakes information – and how it processes it for our snap decisions. Thus, to understand half of how we process information, we have to understand how our subconscious mind processes information. In Science of Fear, Gardner lays out three solid, scientific ways that gut processes information.

 

The Anchoring Rule

 

The Anchoring Rules is essentially the idea that whenever we are uncertain about a number – gut grabs ahold of the nearest number it can find and use that as a base. While our head will make adjustments to the number, usually the adjustments “tend to be insufficient, leaving people’s final estimates biased toward the initial anchor value” (psychologists Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gliovich.

 

Marketers and pollsters use the anchoring rule all the time. If you go to the grocery store and there is a sign that says “Limit 12 per customer” or “Buy 18 for your cupboard” – it turns out, physcologically, that what the sign says is completely insignificant, only the number matters. Gut will use the anchoring rule and look at the number and adjust downward with the people seeing the “12” buying fewer items than the people seeing the “18”.

 

Pollsters use this also. Say you’re the head of an environmental group and want to show that the public wants supports spending a considerable amount of money to clean up a lake. According to Gardner:

 

"You do this by conducting a survey that begins with a question about whether the respondent would be willing to contribute some money – say $200 – to clean up the lake. Whether people say yes or no doesn’t matter. You’re asking the question to get the figure $200 into people’s heads.  It’s the next question that counts: you ask the respondent to estimate how much the average person would be willing to pay to clean up the lake.  Thanks to the Anchoring Rule, you can be sure the respondent’s Gut will start at $200 and adjust downward, arriving at a figure that will still be higher than it would have been if that figure hadn’t been handed to gut. In a study that did precisely this, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Jack Knetsch found the average guess about how much people would be willing to pay to clean up the lake was $36. But in a second trial, the $200 figure was replaced with $25. When people were asked how much others would be willing to pay to clean up the lake, the average guess was a mere $14."

 

This is the anchoring rule at work.

 

The Rule of Typical Things

 

The rule of typical things is the fact that our gut often makes snap decisions based on what it deems to be “typical”. As always with intuitive feelings, we tend to go with these judgments of what is “typical” even when it flies in the face of logic and evidence.  Also, the rule is only as good as our own knowledge of what is, indeed, typical.  Here, Gardner provides an example:

 

"One belief about a typicality that is unfortunately common in Western countries, particularly in the US, involves black men: The typical black man is a criminal and the typical criminal is a black man.  Some people believe this consciously.  Others who consciously reject this stereotype nonetheless believe it unconsciously – as even many black men do.  Imagine someone who believes this – consciously or not – walking down a city sidewalk. A black man approaches. Instantaneously, this person’s gut will use the Rule of Typical Things to conclude that there is a good chance this black man is a criminal. If head does not intervene, the person will experience anxiety and consider crossing the street. But even if Head does put a stop to the nonsense, that nagging worry will remain – which may produce the uneasy body language black men so often consider on sidewalks."

 

The other interesting thing about the Rule of Typical things is that it generally favors outcomes that make good stories or good hypothesis. As phsychologists Kahneman and Tversky wrote, “A detailed scenario consisting of causally linked and representative events may appear more probably than a subset of those individual events.”

 

This biased belief in causally linked ideas is often why people are more likely to believe a good story than one individual fact.

 

The Example Rule

 

One of gut’s most basic rules is that the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more likely that something is. Note one important distinction here. According to the research, it is not the examples themselves that influence gut’s judgment, nor even the number of examples that are recalled, it is merely about how EASILY these examples are recalled.

 

The example rule is particularly good for us at helping us learn from the very worst sort of experiences. Say someone is involved in a tragic automobile accident, or, the fear of a rattle snake recoiling near us, or someone is attacked by a dog. These threats can often contain a very lasting effect because when they happen, the amygdale, a tiny section of our brain, releases hormones that temporarily enhance memory function, and the memories of the event are vividly encoded and the memories last.

 

The example rule is very biased.  It turns out that recent, emotional, vivid or novel events are all more likely to be remembered than common, every day events. So often, using the example rule, we can more easily recall very odd incidents than we can very common ones that don’t stick out in our minds as much – which often makes us dramatically overestimate the commonality of such an event.

 

Over the last 20 years, how we are exposed to visually striking images has very much changed how we internalize the Example Rule. Where only a generation ago, we would read about dramatic events in newspapers, or newscasters would explain them to us on television, now, we are flooded by dramatic visual images that shape how easily we can recall examples of dramatic events. Over the last 2 decades, there has been a huge growth in 24-hour cable news networks, newspapers have dramatically increased the use of pictures, and the internet with high speed downloading capabilities makes it almost instant that we can see dramatic pictures of tragedies from around the globe.  And this shapes what we view is dangerous.  According to Gardner:

 

“Occasionally there will be particularly horrible incidents in which many people will die.  And thanks to the torrent of instantaneous communications, we will all know about it. So, should we fear these things? Inevitably, gut will attempt to answer that question using the Example Rule. The answer will be clear: Yes. Be afraid.  One of the most consistent findings of risk-perception research is that we overestimate the likelihood of being killed by things that make the evening news and underestimate those that don’t. What makes the evening news?  The rare, vivid, catastrophic killers….Most sociologists trace the beginnings of the Western Countries’ obsession with risk and safety to the 1970s. That was when the near-exponential growth in media began and the information floodwaters started to rise.”

 

Over the coming days, we’ll look at examples of these rules in action and what is driving the overall coverage of these fears.

 

The Science of Fear - (Part 1 of 8)

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading a great new book by Daniel Gardner entitled the Science of Fear, How the culture of fear manipulates your brain..

In the book, Gardner, a journalist by trade, writes about how in spite of us living in the safest time-period in human history, we still live in a culture largely driven by fear.

Our average life expectancy in the United States is about 78 years.  In 1950, it was 68.  In 1900, it was 48.

We live longer than we ever have in our history – and we’re healthier too.  And yet, as a society, we mostly live in fear.  Why is that?

Gardner spends the early part of the book talking about the science behind our fear.  He talks about how our mind takes in, processes, and recalls information. He talks about how story-telling has evolved with the human species and how that plays into our ability to remember.   He discusses how many of our decisions are based on emotion (fear is a very powerful emotion), how group-think can adjust how we perceive things, and how many different entities – politicians, corporations, the media – often create and prey on our fears because it is profitable to do so.

Gardner covers a lot of different topics: terrorism, disease, chemicals, crime.  He never discusses dogs – but the correlations are very easy to translate to how we’ve grown to fear dogs, particularly certain breeds of dogs – and how our emotional fears have overcome rational thought in how we deal with them.

Over the course of the next 7 days, I’m going to talk about some of the ideas from the book – and provide examples from the dog world of how this has played out in the world of canine legislation.

Meanwhile, don’t take my word for it, go out and buy a copy and read the book. It’s a great read - it’s informative and includes great storytelling – and worth the time. Gardner draws on a large volume of scientific studies to tell the story of how we process and analyze fear. Even if you could care less about canine legislation, the book will completely change how you view information – and you’ll be a better, more analytical person because of it – on that makes more of their decisions based on factual information vs making purely emotional decisions.

For the first couple of days I’m going to talk more about the book and the ideas from the book. In the last couple of days I’m going to get more into how this pertains to the dogs (although some of that will be sprinkled in along the way).

 I hope you enjoy this little series. I think it will be good stuff…and I hope you agree.

Good article on media reporting of 'pit bulls'

A lot of bad news to report on the blog so far this week, and I feel like the blog needs a pick-me-up. 

Earlier this week, Best Friends posted a great article on their website about the number of mis-reported bites and attacks that are reported by the media....including how stories about 'pit bulls' get a lot greater distribution vs bites by other breeds, and how often times the media will talk about 'pit bull attacks' on young children that end up with mere scratches.

The net result is an irrational fear of 'pit bulls' that is created by the media reporting.  The article is really well-written and a great read (and not just because it talks about me -- but because it provides a succinctness that I don't provide). 

Here's the start:

With the dog cowering in its kennel behind him, the reporter recounts a 'pit bull attack' that left a toddler in Redondo Beach, CA hospitalized. In an interview, police sergeant Phil Keenan describes the attack. "The child and the pit bull were in the living room. The child either touched the tail or grabbed the tail of the pit bull. The pit bull turned around and bit the child."

In the video, in just over two minutes, they repeat the term 'pit bull' about ten times.

The message is clear. This wasn't just a dog, presumably, like the viewers' dogs. It was a pit bull. This dog is different.

But the message falls apart when you see the dog in the video. It isn't a pit bull. It is a mixed breed dog. It could have some German Shepherd in it. Maybe some Lab. It might even have some of one of the pit bull breeds in it. As with most mixed breed dogs, it's hard to tell.

Read the rest here.

I'll be posting a bit more on this subject in the coming months....