Rumors spread panic for a reason

We are told, but are unmoved by, statistics showing that the most dangerous part of air travel is the drive to the airport. So we fear airline travel after a random airplane goes missing.

According to Myers, however, our fears are often out of sync with the facts. The American National Safety Council reported that in the last half of the 1990s, Americans were, mile for mile, 37 times more likely to die in a vehicle crash than on a commercial flight.

How do common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, the chance of being there at the wrong time would be about one in 1 million or more.

Rothschild calculated the risk of a traveler who took four flights every month dying as a result of terror attacks. If hijackers managed to destroy one plane a month, he argued, this frequent traveler had a one in 540,000 chance of being killed. At one plane a year, the risk was less than one in 6 million. In contrast, the risk of being killed in a US car accident in any given year is one in 7,000, dying of cancer one in 600 and dying of heart disease one in 400.

So, Myers asks, why do we intuitively fear the wrong things? Why do smokers fret about flying? Why do we fear violent crime more than clogged arteries? Why do we fear terrorism more than accidents?

Myers suggests four influences on how we gauge risk. First, we fear what our ancestors feared, which includes confinement and heights, and therefore flying.

Second, we fear what we cannot control. Driving we control; flying we do not.

Third, we fear what is immediate. We are indifferent to the toxicity of smoking because we live more for the present than the future. Likewise, the dangers of driving are diffused across many moments to come.

Fourth, we fear what is most readily available in memory. Think about the knifings and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 contrasted with thousands of safe car trips that have largely extinguished our anxieties about driving.

Probabilities don't matter writes Myers. The human mind has trouble grasping the infinitesimal odds of it being a plane you will be on that is attacked. Although images rule, we should fear that next cigarette a great deal more than being stabbed in Kunming.

The author is a fellow at the Institute for Analytic Journalism.

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