TAG | fear
What have we learned since the H1N1 scare took hold over the last several months?
Now that the incidence rate of the disease is steadily decreasing, looking back it seems that our collective fears outweighed the extant danger. I think that there is an important message here, namely, that we as individuals or as a society often miss the mark when it comes to perceiving danger. Psychologists use the term “heuristics” or aids in learning, in this case erroneous heuristics, to examine our biases when it comes to seeing danger. Let me review two of these biases in regard to the H1N1 scare.
#1 Bias; Discounting the Habitual.
As humans, we have heightened sensitivity to novel events, particularly those drenched in threat. Luckily though, as our bodies would not survive in a constant state of high alert, we adapt. Soon, constant exposure to a particular stimulus gradually becomes just another piece of the cognitive puzzle in our world of tonic stimulation. Our ability to discount recurrent bombardments of stimuli may be problematic however, when dealing with events laced with danger, as we tend to also habituate to their level of associated threat.
In my home province of Quebec, fifteen people will die today as a result of downplaying threat. In fact, 15 people died yesterday, the day before and throughout the year yielding a total of over 6500 annual deaths directly attributable to the particular threat of smoking. I don’t believe that any newspaper, TV station or any media outlet led their reporting with this fact. One could only image the media attention if 15 people per day were to die of global warming or radiation poisoning from the tailings of an uranium mine. Tobacco-related deaths are simply not news anymore, but smoking remains a significant and real danger.
