: “The trends in humanity’s political arrangements are also quite positive....” See Adrian Karatnycky, The 1999 Freedom House Survey: A Century of Progress, Journal of Democracy, January 2000. Note that in 1900 not one country anywhere in the world qualified as a full democracy according to modern standards of universal suffrage.
: “A major study released later that year by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia....” See Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century, Human Security Centre, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.
: “In Europe, where there are more cell phones than people and sales keep climbing, a survey found....” See Eurobarometer/nVision, 2006.TWO
: There is only the brain.
: “Psychologists found that when they asked students to eat a piece of fudge....” Like many of the references to the work of psychologists in this chapter and others that follow, this is drawn from Heuristics and Biases, edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman. Along with the earlier edition of the same work—edited by Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman—it is the definitive text on the subject.
: “... if you give it some careful thought....” The answer is five cents.THREE
: “Those who heard the higher number, guessed higher.” For the record, both groups were way off. Gandhi was 79 when he died.
: “... produced an average answer almost 150 percent greater than a low number.” Psychologists Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Paul Slovic found another use for anchoring numbers in a study that asked people to estimate the toll taken by various causes of death. Without guidance, people’s answers were often wildly inaccurate, ranging from one extreme to the other. But when the researchers told people that 50,000 Americans are killed in car crashes each year (a toll which has dropped since the study was conducted), their answers “stabilized dramatically” because they started at 50,000 and adjusted up or down. In later trials, the researchers switched the anchoring number to 1,000 dead from electrocution—with the predictable result that people’s estimates of deaths by other causes dropped enormously.
: “... as even many black men do.” For an explanation and tests of unconscious beliefs which anyone can take, see “Project Implicit” at www. implicit.harvard.edu.
: “There is no ‘just’ in imagining.” Lottery and casino ads that highlight smiling winners are another form of powerful manipulation. The odds of winning big jackpots are so tiny that almost no one will be able think of winners in their personal lives. But by advertising examples of people who struck it big—often with personal details that make their stories memorable—lotteries and casinos make it easy for people to recall examplesof winners. And that ease of recall boosts Gut’s estimate of the likelihood of winning.
: “... only family and friends will hear of a life lost to diabetes.” Much of the work of Paul Slovic cited in this book can be found in The Perception of Risk, a compilation of decades of Slovic’s papers.FOUR
: “... a conference that brought together some of the world’s leading astronomers and geoscientists to discuss asteroid impacts.” The conference papers were compiled in P. Bobrowsky and H. Rickman (eds.), Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society.
: “... while ‘all possible causes’ is bland and empty. It leaves Gut cold.” See Eric Johnson et al., Framing, Probability Distortions, and Insurance Decisions, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 7(1): 35-51.
: “... raising risk estimates by 144 percent.” See Affect Generalization and the Perception of Risk, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 20-31.
: “Beloved grandfathers are not necessary.” One of the stranger demonstrations of the mere exposure effect involves asking people to choose which of two images they prefer. One is a photograph of their face the way it actually is. The other is the same image reversed. Most people choose the face that is reversed. Why? Because that’s what they see every morning in the mirror.
: “... the Penguins’ penalty time rose 50 percent to 12 minutes a game.” Does the black uniform mean referees perceive the team more negatively and therefore judge them more strictly than they otherwise would? Or does the black uniform inspire players to be more aggressive? Both, the researchers concluded. See M. G. Frank and T. Gilovich, The Dark Side of Social and Self-Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sport, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:11, 74-85.
: “... bias in favor of the ‘lean’ beef declined but was still evident.” Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth, How Consumers Are Affected by the Framing of Attribute Information Before and After Consuming the Product, The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1988.
: “Feeling trumped numbers. It usually does.” See Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear.
: “... a good chance I won’t even think about that.” See Robin Hogarth and Howard Kunreuther, Decision Making Under Ignorance, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1995.FIVE
: “... in a way that the phrase ‘almost 3,000 were killed’ never can.” This summary of the life of Diana O’Connor comes from the remarkable obituaries the New York Times prepared of every person who died in the attack. The series ran for months and garnered a huge readership.
: “Only data—properly collected and analyzed—can do that.” The reader will notice that anecdotes abound within this book. My point here is not to dismiss stories, only to note that, however valuable they may be in many circumstances, anecdotes have serious limitations.
: " ’... the deaths of millions is a statistic,’ ” said that expert on death, Joseph Stalin.” Psychologists call this the “identifiable victim effect.” For a discussion, see, for example, George Loewenstein, Deborah Small, and Jeff Strnad, Statistical, Identifiable and Iconic Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 301, March 2005.
: “... empathetic urge to help generated by the profile of the little girl.” Even in relatively unemotional situations—the sort in which we may assume that calm calculation would dominate—numbers have little sway. Psychologists Eugene Borgida and Richard Nisbett set up an experiment in which groups of students at the University of Michigan were asked to look at a list of courses and circle those they thought they might like to take in future. One group did this with no further information. A second group listened to brief comments about the courses delivered in person by students who had taken the courses previously. These presentations had a “substantial impact” on students’ choices, the researchers found. Finally, a third group was given the average rating earned by each course in a survey of students who had taken the courses previously: In sharp contrast with the personal anecdotes, the data had no influence at all.
: “... mattered less than the profile.” Kahneman and Tversky dubbed this “base-rate neglect.”
: “... more about the power of Gut-based judgments than they do about cancer.” For a good overview, see Atul Gawande, The Cancer-Cluster Myth, The New Yorker, February 8, 1998.SIX
: “... go along with the false answers they gave.” Robert Baron, Joseph Vandello, and Bethany Brunsman, The Forgotten Variable in Conformity Research: The Impact of Task Importance on Social Influence, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71:915-927.
: "The correct rule is actually ‘any three numbers in ascending order.’ ” There are other rules that would also work. What matters is simply that the rule is not “even numbers increasing by two.”
: “... more convinced that they were right and those who disagreed were wrong.” Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper, Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979.
: “... when they processed neutral or positive information.” See D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Public Affairs, New York, 2007.
: "... illicit drugs aren’t as dangerous as commonly believed...” A thorough discussion of the real risks of drugs is outside the scope of this book, but readers who wish to pursue it are encouraged to read Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes.
: “... drug education as ‘superficial, lurid, excessively negative....” Why have you never heard of this report? Because the government of the United States successfully buried it. In a May 1995 meeting, according to the WHO’s records—and confirmed to me by a WHO spokesman—Neil Boyer, the American representative to the organization, “took the view that... (the WHO’s) program on substance abuse was headed in the wrong direction.... if WHO activities relating to drugs failed to reinforce proven drug-control approaches, funds for the relevant programs should be curtailed.” Facing a major loss of funding, the WHO backed down at the last minute. Although a press release announcing the report was issued, the report itself was never officially released. The author has a copy on file.
: “Higher perceived risk is always better.” See, for example, the Web site of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov), where documents routinely tout higher risk perceptions as evidence of success but seldom consider whether those perceptions are out of line with reality.
: “... killed far more people than all the illicit drugs combined.” A 2004 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, puts the annual death toll inflicted by alcohol at 85,000; all illicit drugs were responsible for 17,000 deaths. See Ali H. Mokdad, Actual Causes of Death in the United States. 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association 291:1238-1245. Gaps between the two causes of death are even larger in other countries.
: “Not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens.” Kahan’s research and more is available on the website of the Cultural Cognition Project at the Yale University Law School. research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/SEVEN
: “... three-quarters of all Americans would be considered ‘diseased.’ ” See Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, Changing Disease Definitions: Implications for Disease Prevalence, Effective Clinical Practice, March/April 1999.
: “Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.” For a thorough and entertaining look at how the brain is wired for self-justification, see Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.
: “‘One out of eight American children is going hungry tonight.’” See It Ain’t Necessarily So: How the Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality, David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter.
: “... half-truths, quarter-truths, and sort-of-truths.” Another fine example is reported in Michael Siegel, Is the Tobacco Control Movement Misrepresenting the Acute Cardiovascular Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke Exposure? Epidemiologic Perspectives and Innovations 4:12. The author, a professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University, shows how anti-smoking groups promoted smoking bans by ridiculously exaggerating the danger of secondhand smoke. And another: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, activists and officials struggling to convince people that HIV-AIDS was not only a “gay man’s disease” had an unfortunate tendency to spin numbers. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, for example, reported that “women accounted for 19 percent of adult/adolescent AIDS cases in 1995, the highest proportion yet reported among women.” That frightening news made headlines across the United States. But as David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter point out in It Ain’t Necessarily So, the CDC did not include the actual numbers of AIDS cases in the summary that garnered the headlines. Those numbers actually showed a small decline in the number of women with AIDS. The proportion of AIDS cases involving women had gone up because there had been a much bigger drop in the number of men with AIDS. By the mid-1990s, it was becoming increasingly obvious that activists and agencies had been hyping the risk of heterosexual infection in the United States, the U.K. and elsewhere, but some thought that was just fine. “The Government has lied, and I am glad,” wrote Mark Lawson in a 1996 column in The Guardian.
: " ’I hope that means being both.’ ” Many critics of environmentalists have repeated this quotation in a form that cuts off the last several sentences, thereby unfairly making it look as if Schneider endorsed scare-mongering.
: “... may be misleading, but it certainly gets the job done.” Another technique for making uncertain information exciting is to dispense with the range of possible outcomes that often accompanies uncertainty and instead cite one number. Naturally, the number cited is not the lowest number, nor the average within the range. It is the biggest and scariest. Thus, when former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern estimated in 2006 that the costs of climate change to the global economy under a range of scenarios would be 5 to 20 percent, environmentalists—and far too many journalists—cited it as “up to 20 percent” or simply “20 percent.”EIGHT
: “... major U.S. magazines between 1993 and 1997.” See Wylie Burke, Amy Olsen, Linda Pinsky, Susan Reynolds, and Nancy Press, Misleading Presentation of Breast Cancer in Popular Magazines, Effective Clinical Practice, March/April 2001.
: “... disease got nowhere near the coverage proportionate to their death toll.” See K. Frost, E. Frank, and E. Maibach, Relative Risk in the News Media: A Quantification of Misrepresentation, American Journal of Public Health, 1997.
: “... not so exciting and alarming is played down or ignored entirely.” A handy way to spot sensationalism is to look for the words “danger” and “lurk” in the same sentence—as in “Danger Lurks in Unlikely Corners” (USA Today), “Danger Lurks in Yellowstone Park” (Associated Press), “Why Danger Lurks in the High School Parking Lot” (Metro West Daily News of Boston), and my personal favorite, “Dangers Lurk in Dirty Salons, ” a Fox News story about the little-appreciated threat of improperly cleaned nail files and foot baths.
: “... can be distracted by dramatic stories of no real consequence.” A further example: In 1996 and 1997, “flying truck tires” became a major issue in the province of Ontario thanks to a classic feedback loop. Two tragic incidents in which loose tires struck and killed motorists got considerable media attention. The issue became political. Reporting proliferated and even trivial incidents in which no one was endangered made the news. It seemed the roads were in chaos. New safety regulations were passed and, just as quickly as it appeared, the crisis vanished., had the regulations put out a real fire? No. The ministry of transportation didn’t have a comprehensive incident-collection system in place prior to the crisis, but its partial figures showed there were 18 “wheels-off ” incidents and two deaths in 1995, the year the issue started emerge. Given the millions of vehicles on the road, those numbers are tiny. Then, in 1996, the government started to gather better data. The 1996 figures show 41 incidents, and another two deaths. In 1997, there were 215 incidents and no deaths. In 1998, there were 99 incidents. The following year, there were 79, then 87. In 2001, there were 65 incidents and two people were killed. In 2002, there were 66 incidents. In 2003, there were 75 incidents and another person was killed.the panic, tires came loose occasionally and there was a tiny risk to motorists. The same was true during the crisis and afterward. All that changed was the appearance and disappearance of the feedback loop.NINE
: “... so small it can be treated as if it were zero.” The term de minimis comes from the legal maxim de minimis non curat lex—the law does not concern itself with trifles.
: “... saying they followed ‘very closely’ (49 percent) or ‘fairly closely’ (30 percent).” Smart was discovered alive in March 2003. People magazine named her one of the “50 Most Beautiful People of 2005.”
: “This astonishingly good news went almost completely unreported.” See Shannon Catalano, Intimate Partner Violence in the United States, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
: “... debate declined and disappeared virtually unnoticed.” In 1999 and 2000, a panic about “home invasions” swept Toronto and Vancouver after numerous incidents in which criminals burst into homes, brutalized the occupants, and grabbed whatever they could take. In one attack, an 85-year-old woman was beaten so badly she later died. Story followed story and it became common knowledge that home invasions were a terrible new threat that was rapidly getting worse. Few reporters mentioned that there was no definition of “home invasion” and therefore no statistics on the crime. They also didn’t mention that most recognized categories of crime were falling rapidly, which made it hard to believe that this one form of violent crime was soaring. No matter. Everyone knew it was true and in that inflamed atmosphere a bill stiffening sentences was inevitable. It appeared and passed. And with that, the whole issue faded. But then in 2002, Statistics Canada issued a report that used two different definitions of “home invasion” and used those to track the crime using existing data. Under the first definition, the rate of “home invasions” had dipped slightly between 1995 and 2000; under the second definition, it had fallen 22 percent. The report was almost completely ignored by the media.
: “... in newspapers, wrote criminologist Robert Reiner.” See Robert Reiner, Media-Made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford University Press, 2007.
: " ’... rate that was at least six times higher than the actual rate.’ ” See Julian Roberts and Loretta J. Stalans, Public Opinion, Crime and Criminal Justice and Julian Roberts and Mike Hough, Understanding Public Attitudes to Criminal Justice.
: “... the prison population soared from 400,000 in 1980 to 2.1 million by 2000.” The latter half of that explosion coincided with a major decline in crime, and people on both sides of the political spectrum concluded that stuffing prisons to the rafters is an effective way to reduce crime. Most criminologists disagree. In The Great American Crime Decline—the most exhaustive look at the causes of the crime drop of the 1990s—University of California criminologist Franklin Zimring noted that Canada had not followed the American approach in the 1980s and 1990s and, as a result, a canyon opened between the two countries’ incarceration rates: In 1980, the United States imprisoned people at double the rate Canada did; in 2000, the American incarceration rate was six times higher than the Canadian rate. Despite this, Canada’s crime trends over that entire period were remarkably similar to American trends. In the 1990s, Zimring writes, Canada experienced a drop in crime in the 1990s that “almost perfectly matched the timing of the United States decline and [was] about 70 percent of its relative magnitude.” Zimring rather understatedly concludes this fact is “a challenge” to the conventional view that American politicians not only won elections with promises to “get tough” but won the war on crime, too.
: “... to commit another crime after release than other sorts of criminals.” See, for example, Recidivism Released from Prison in 1994, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003.
: “... less frightening than that unadorned number.” See Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, The Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, 2006.
: “... civil servants handling the file. ‘It’s politics,’ he told them.” This was personally communicated to the author by one of the civil servants present.
: “... the research does not mean what people naturally assume it means— that one in five children on the Internet have been contacted by pedophiles. ” It’s hard to believe these agencies are not aware that the statistic they disseminate is leading people to a false and frightening conclusion. A quick Google search turns up countless blogs and Web sites where the figure is cited as proof of the threat posed by pedophiles. It appeared in the same context in an article by journalist Caitlin Flanagan in the July/August 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. And John Walsh cited the figure as proof of the pedophile menace in an interview on CNN: “The Justice Department says that one in five children receive a sexual solicitation over the Internet. And I think all Americans have seen the Dateline stings with all the different type of pedophiles, doctors, rabbis, priests showing up to have sex with children.” As for UNICEF, when I asked a spokesperson for the source behind the agency’s statement, he cited the University of New Hampshire study and provided me with a Web link to it—even though anyone who actually looked at the document would see that it does not say what UNICEF says it does.
: “... the homicide rates today are among the lowest in eight centuries.” Property crime is trickier to track simply because with murders there is usually a corpse and a big fuss, but historians such as James Sharpe of the University of York have investigated the possibility that violent crime was merely transformed into property crime and they are confident that, no, that did not happen. In the seventeenth century, as homicide was plummeting in England, property offenses fell along with it, Mr. Sharpe has concluded. See Manuel Eisner, Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime, in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 30, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2003.TEN
: " ’... only form of cancer which shows so definite a tendency,’ ” the report noted.” See Ronald Bailey, Silent Spring at 40, Reason, June 12, 2002.
: “The research linking smoking to cancer was fairly new...” Suspicions started to mount in the 1940s. In 1950, British scientist Richard Doll studied 20 lung cancer patients and concluded smoking was the only thing they had in common. Doll quit smoking immediately and warned in a paper that the risk of cancer “may be 50 times as great among those who smoke 25 or more cigarettes a day as among non-smokers.” In 1954, a study of 40,000 British doctors came to the same conclusion and the British government officially advised that smoking and cancer may be related. In 1957, the U.S. Surgeon General Leroy Burney stated his belief that smoking caused cancer. In March 1962, the Royal College of Physicians in Britain issued a report saying the same and, shortly afterward, the Surgeon General created a committee that ultimately resulted in the famous declaration of 1964 that smoking kills.
: “... thanks to differences in lifestyle.” Some important lifestyle factors are far from obvious. The risk of breast cancer, for example, is increased by the hormones involved in ovulation. Thus, a woman whose period starts later—perhaps as a result of poor nutrition in childhood—is likely to have a reduced risk of breast cancer. A woman who has her first pregnancy earlier will further reduce her risk. So will a woman who has many babies. Conversely, a woman who received good nutrition in childhood and is in excellent health may start menstruation earlier, which will raise her risk, while a decision to delay having children until later in life, and having only one or two babies, or none, will boost it further. And that description fits most modern Western women.
: “... who didn’t, and so it became hardwired instinct.” Psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff have conducted a series of ingenious exposures demonstrating just how tenacious this feeling is. See “Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and Similarity ‘Heuristics’ ” in Heuristics and Biases. Any contact with a contaminated object taints the thing, no matter how brief the contact, and neither washing nor even sterilization can entirely remove the taint.
: “... on the list actually cause cancer in humans.” For a good overview of these studies and the controversies surrounding them, see Aaron Wildavsky, But Is It True?
: “... are falling but ‘much more so for cardiovascular disease.’ ” See Statistics Canada, Mortality, Summary List of Causes, 2004, released April 27, 2007.
: " ’... it forbids the very steps that it requires.’ ” Another example: Nothing could be more in line with the sentiment of “precaution” than doing a biopsy on a growth. After all, the growth may be benign. Surgery would be an unnecessary risk. So a needle is inserted and some cells removed to make sure it’s cancerous before treatment proceeds. But in removing cells, there is a tiny risk that cancerous cells may be dislodged. These cells may follow the needle track and attach to other tissue. In effect, the biopsy will spread the cancer. This is very unlikely, but it can happen. So if you don’t do the biopsy, you may undergo risky treatments unnecessarily, but if you do the biopsy, you could spread the cancer. What does “precaution” mean under those circumstances?yet another example: Flame retardants are one variety of chemical that routinely turns up in blood tests and environmentalists want many banned on the grounds that they are suspected of increasing the risk of cancer, hyperactivity disorder in children, and other ills. But how did flame retardants get into our bodies in the first place? As the name suggests, flame retardants are chemicals added to consumer items like children’s pajamas and furniture which make them resistant to fire. Some are actually required by law, and for good reason. In 1988, Britain passed a regulation requiring flame retardants in all new furniture. A University of Surrey study commissioned by the government (Effectiveness of the Furniture and Furnishings Fire Safety Regulations 1988) estimated that in nine years the regulation saved as many as 1,800 lives and prevented 5,700 injuries. So does the precautionary principle say the use of these chemicals should be banned or made mandatory?
: “... there would be little left to eat.” The 1996 report was the product of a three-year, peer-reviewed investigation of carcinogens in food. “First, the committee concluded that based upon existing exposure data, the great majority of individual naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals in the diet appears to be present at levels below which any significant adverse biologic effect is likely, and so low that they are unlikely to pose any appreciable cancer risk,” the report states. “Second, the committee concluded that natural components of the diet may prove to be of greater concern than synthetic components with respect to cancer risk, although additional evidence is required before definitive conclusions may be drawn.”II
: “... the 1 in 87,976 annual risk of drowning.” Accident statistics come from the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts, 2007.
: “... attack is probably impossible now.” It was even highly unlikely to succeed at the time. The plot was big and complex and, as with any plot of that nature, there were many points at which a failure would collapse the whole thing—which is precisely what happened to an equally ambitious Philippines-based plot broken up several years before 9/11 and a London-based scheme smashed in 2006. And the 9/11 plot did experience failures, although the terrorists were repeatedly saved by bad official judgment and dumb luck. For a summary, see Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins, Predictable Surprises.
: “... they could inflict the sort of devastation it took armies to accomplish in the past.” A critical caveat about “weapons of mass destruction” is often overlooked. In the Cold War, the term was mainly a synonym for nuclear weapons and was gradually expanded to include other unconventional weapons governed by special international agreements— meaning chemical and biological weapons. So it’s essentially a legal artifact, which helps explain why many “weapons of mass destruction” are not massively destructive and many weapons that don’t qualify as WMDs are. Timothy McVeigh tore an office building in half with a bomb made of fertilizer (which does not qualify as a weapon of mass destruction) while the victims of mustard gas (which is a weapon of mass destruction) typically suffer only agonizing blisters. As for the much-hyped “dirty bomb”—a conventional explosive that also spreads radioactive material—it is usually classed as a WMD because of the radioactive material, but according to the CDC, the levels of radioactivity released by a dirty bomb are unlikely to be high enough to cause severe sickness, let alone death—and so it is the old-fashioned explosive that is the most dangerous part of the device.
: “... referred to terrorism as ‘an existential threat to the whole of the human family.’” Most hyperbole about the threat of terrorism puts it on par with the danger posed by the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. But occasionally, it takes sole possession of the number-one spot, as in former governor of Arkansas and Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee’s description of “Islamofascism” as “the greatest threat this country’s ever faced.”
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 23 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |