Title of Article: How Do We Perceive Risk?

Author: David Ropeik

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On Sunday, December 16, 2012, two Topeka Kansas police officers were shot to
death while investigating a suspicious vehicle, a Mississippi man was shot to death in
a road rage-related incident, and five other shooting deaths were being investigated
in New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. Eight people murdered by guns in one day.
Wow! Eight people, that's pretty scary. But you probably didn't hear anything
about them, nor about most of the other 15,000 Americans shot to death in 2012.
That is a lot of people and it's very surprising that 15,000 people, only from
America, were shot and killed! How do we let that happen? Why not? And
why are we hearing so much more about the shooting two days earlier of 26 people
in Newtown, Connecticut? I would think it would be because of the amount of
people in such a small area that were killed just by one person, but I still
kind of wonder why we don't hear about all of the other people shot and
killed. The complex and nuanced answer tells us a lot about the emotional way we
perceive and respond to risk, both as individuals and as a society.
Part of the reason the Newtown tragedy was so upsetting was because 20 of the
victims were defenseless young children. Pictures of the victims perfectly capture
their innocence and tender age. Hearing President Obama read their names in his
address in Newtown was heartbreaking. It is so unbearably tragic.
But where does that very real pain come from? Most of us don't know any of these
kids or anyone in Newtown. I can make a connection because I actually do
know a teacher who lives in Newtown, but luckily she works at another
school. They are as strange to us as the eight people shot to death last Sunday, for
whom most of us feel no such pain. I disagree with this statement. I feel that it
shouldn't matter the age of the victim any murder is terrible to hear about.
I don't see why it should matter who the victim is if they were killed by
another human in such a terrible way as being shot. Why is this particular gun
crime so heart-rending to people around the world?
Shared Dangers
The common pain comes, in part, from the fact that humans are innately more
sensitive to anything that threatens or harms children than if the same risk only
imperils adults. A risk to "future generations" is a risk to us all, a risk to the species.
That makes a risk to kidsany kidsa shared danger that feels particularly
threatening. Although I do see how this might be true, for me it isn't. I feel
that Anyone being murdered is so terrible that it can't get any worse. I feel
that it is just as threatening if an adult is killed because they are the
people who provide and protect the children. Without the adults there is
still the same threat to the species.
Other research into the psychology of risk perception has found additional factors
that compound the emotional power of the Newtown shootings. One of them is the
matter of scale and time frame. A risk that causes a lot of suffering or death in one

place at one time, like the Sandy Hook shootings, is a "catastrophic" risk, and they
worry us more than if the victims are spread out over space and timea "chronic"
risklike those eight gun murders last Sunday. I agree with this except for the
part about being spread out over a distance. I feel that the only thing that
matters with this psychological part is the time that the amount of murders
happened in. For example if there were 100 murders in a year, that
wouldn't be as emotional as 100 murders happening in a single day.
That's one reason why plane crashes scare us more than the much more likely risk of
dying in a car crash. Another, pertinent to what happened in Newtown, is that risks
beyond our control frighten us more than if we feel we have some power over the
circumstances. Those innocent young children, and the six heroic staff members at
the school who were killed as well, had no way to protect themselves against the
guns and the multiple 30-bullet clips Adam Lanza used to slaughter his victims.
Powerlessness makes any risk feel scarier, and it's hard to think of a clearer example
of a defenseless victim than a 6-year-old cowering in front of a maniac in combat
clothes with a loaded semi-automatic rifle.
A Distinguishing Factor
You can hear this risk perception psychology in the way we have been responding to
the Newtown massacre. The demand for gun control is now more intense than after
any of the eight other mass gun murders in the United States in 2012. And the
National Rifle Association, absolutist opponents of any limits on guns even after all
those other mass murders, now says "the NRA is prepared to offer meaningful
contributions to help make sure this never happens again." As Connecticut
Representative John Larson said, "the loss of innocence and the age of the children"
distinguishes this tragedy from so many others.
President Obama emphasized the psychological factor of "catastrophic" risk in his
statement the day of the massacre. "Since I've been President, this is the fourth time
we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass
shootings," he said. "Whether it's an elementary school in Newtown, a shopping mall
in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurorawe're going to
have to come together to take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this."
Our sense of control will also play an important role in how we feel about
Newtown.
Consider, too, how the desire for control is influencing people's reactions to Newtown.
Some gun rights advocates have said that the way to protect kids in school is to arm
teachers. The parents of a sixth grader in Utah sent him to school Tuesday with an
unloaded handgun and ammunition so he could protect himself, and to give him
and his parentsa reassuring sense of control. Bullet-proof back packs are selling
briskly. And in the face of possible future limits on the availability of assault rifles
guns, gun sellers report that those weapons are flying off the shelves.
Our sense of control will also play an important role in how we feel about Newtown
because of something called the cultural cognition of risk. Research has found that
we shape our views so they agree with those in the groups with which we most
closely identify. That way the group embraces us as a member in good standing,
which is a key consideration for social animals like us that depend on our group and
larger community for protection and well-being. (This is why various forms of social
rejection, including the fear of flopping as a public speaker, always make the top ten
"most afraid of" lists.)

Cultural Subtleties
Cultural cognition has found that people organize themselves into subconsciously
defined groups based on our preferences for how society ought to operate. One of
those groups, which researchers call individualists, prefer to live in a society that
maximizes individual freedom and choice. Another is known as communitarians, who
prefer a society that operates under more of a "we're all in this together" sort of
approach. They advocate sacrificing some individual freedoms for the greater
common good.
Regarding Sandy Hook, communitarians are likely to be more upset by the tragedy
because that gut-wrenching feeling motivates them to fight more strongly for societal
limits on individual gun rights, a communitarian view. Individualists, on the other
hand, while still grieving the loss of the children, are likely to feel differently about
Newtown because they don't want to magnify threats to individual rights or move
away from the freer society that they prefer.
The massacre in Newtown needs no psychological deconstruction to explain why it
feels so awful. But the lessons we can learn are informative because they illuminate
how our attitudes about risk are informed not just by the facts, but how we feel about
those facts. As valid as our feelings are, they sometimes contribute to personal
choices and social policies that respond more to feelings than to facts, and that can
challenge our ability to make the healthiest choices for ourselves and our kids,
whether the risk is guns, climate change, food poisoning, or anything else.

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