Know This First: Risk Perception Is Always Irrational. [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://undark.org/article/know-this-first-risk-perception-is-always-irrational/

"... (Examples of risk perception mistakes.)

For anyone outside the emotions that produced these choices, it’s hard not to feel frustration at hearing about them. It’s hard not to call them ignorant, selfish, and irrational, or to label such behavior, as some do — often with more than a hint of derision — “science denialism.” It’s hard, but it’s necessary, because treating such decision-making as merely flawed thinking that can be rectified with cold hard reason flies in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

In fact, the evidence is clear that we sometimes can’t help making such mistakes. Our perceptions, of risk or anything else, are products of cognitive processes that operate outside our conscious control — running facts through the filters of our feelings and producing subjective judgments that disregard the evidence. The behavioral scientists Melissa Finucane and Paul Slovic call this the Affect Heuristic; it gives rise to what I call the risk perception gap, the dangers produced when we worry more than the evidence says we need to, or less than the evidence says we should. This is literally built in to the wiring and chemistry of the brain. Our apparent irrationality is as innate as the functioning of our DNA or our cells.

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The evidence from decades of research in a range of fields is convincing. If the definition of “rational” is “thinking based on facts or reason and not on emotions or feelings” (Merriam-Webster), then humans are decidedly not rational. The truth is closer to what Charles Darwin observed as he stood at a puff adder exhibit in the London Zoo, nose pressed against the glass, knowing he was safe but unable to keep from flinching whenever the snake struck: “My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.”

Somehow, though, we continue to deny the evidence and cling to our anthropocentric faith in human intellectual power and the myth of our ability to use dispassionate, objective analysis to know “the truth.” In that belief, we sniff with superiority at those whose perceptions of risk don’t match the facts, as though we’re smarter because we can see what those science-denying dummies can’t.

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A very worthy reminder.