Car Crashes and Mass Extinction Events: Communicating about High-Probability Low-Magnitude Risks

People may feel too much outrage about mass extinction events, leading to denial.

There is one important exception to the outrage-increases-perceived-risk rule: denial. Fear can be hard to bear. And when people cannot bear their fear, an emotional circuit breaker is tripped and they go into denial. (The availability of denial is one of the main reasons panic is rare. When we’re at risk of panicking, we usually go into denial instead.) So the women who are most terrified of breast cancer may deny their fear and “not bother” to check for lumps.

At the height of the Cold War, similarly, many people underestimated the probability of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, not because they weren’t concerned but because they found the prospect too awful to contemplate. For an assessment of the role of denial in people’s response to the risk of nuclear war, see my 1986 article with JoAnn M. Valenti on “Scared Stiff – or Scared into Action.” Although terrorist attacks don’t meet the 10% criterion for a mass extinction event, see also the section on denial in my column on 9/11 and my column with Jody Lanard on “Duct Tape Risk Communication.”

Although fear is the emotion that’s likeliest to rebound into denial, to a lesser extent so can anger, hurt, guilt, sadness, and the other emotions that add up to outrage. (See “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication.” ) My 2009 column on “Climate Change Risk Communication,” for example, talks about the many ways climate change activists inadvertently provoke denial in audiences they are trying to inspire into action. I might be more willing to reduce my carbon footprint if the enviros didn’t keep yelling at me that my selfish over-consumptive lifestyle is to blame for overheating the planet.

The key point here: If people are in denial about a risk, treating them as if they were apathetic is bound to boomerang. They’re already finding the risk unbearable. Trying to impress on them how serious it is will only push them deeper into denial.

People may feel futile about preventing mass extinction events, leading to paralysis.

If I’m worried about car crashes, I can wear my seat belt, drive slower and more carefully, buy a safer car, avoid driving late at night when the drunks are out, etc. Ask any driver what precautions are available to reduce the odds of having an accident, and you’ll get a list. We may not do everything on the list, but we know what’s on the list and we know we can always do more if we choose to.

Now ask somebody what he or she can do to reduce the odds of global climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid hit, or a takeover by artificial intelligence.

Activist groups devoted to these issues, like the Global Priorities Project, have answers to that question. They know what they want us to do. Some of their solutions involve small-scale individual actions like reducing our carbon footprint. Others involve collective action like supporting laws aimed at reducing the risk of extinction events. But their lists of mass extinction risk-reducers are a lot more debatable than our lists of car crash risk reducers.

Rightly or wrongly, many, many people are convinced that there is nothing to be done about these mass extinction scenarios. Or if they can think of steps that might help, they’re convinced that something (short-term self-interest, government stalemate, international competition, maybe just human nature) will make sure those steps are never taken. Or even if they can imagine progress being made, they are convinced that nothing they can do individually can contribute in any meaningful way.

In the language of psychology, these are efficacy (“there’s nothing to be done”) and self-efficacy (“there’s nothing I can do”) problems. When people’s senses of efficacy and self-efficacy are low, fatalism and paralysis set in. Sometimes it’s a kind of apathy – people rationally choose not to worry about a problem they consider unsolvable. Sometimes it’s a kind of denial – people can’t bear to worry about a problem they consider unsolvable. Either way, insisting on how serious the risk is won’t help.

People may feel little or no sense of personal responsibility for mass extinction events.

The risk of a car crash is personal. I realize that a crash can happen through no fault of my own; it could be the fault of equipment failure or another driver. Still, when I get behind the wheel I am taking personal responsibility for not crashing my car.

Preventing a mass extinction event, on the other hand, isn’t meaningfully my responsibility. Some mass extinction events, if they happen, won’t be anybody’s fault. Some will be everybody’s fault … which is almost the same thing.

So we reason thusly: “I have a lot on my plate already – tasks that really are mine, tasks I can’t easily shrug off. Why would I voluntarily take even partial responsibility for preventing a pandemic or a nuclear war?”

People may find mass extinction events too unlikely to worry about.

As I’ve already pointed out, we tend to react more strongly to high-magnitude low-probability risks than to risks that are less horrific but likelier. But research by Daniel Kahneman and others has shown that this tendency has limits. Unlikely but possible catastrophes capture our attention more than the statistics say they should, and we perceive them to be likelier than they actually are. But extremely unlikely, just-barely-possible catastrophes stretch the elastic band of credibility past its limits; we round off “extremely unlikely” to “impossible” and refuse to take the risk seriously. That leaves the handful of people who do take the risk seriously isolated and alienated – and sometimes inclined to write articles urging readers to take another look.

In other words, it’s probably easier to get people worried about a possible pandemic that would kill millions of people than a smaller, likelier pandemic that would kill only thousands. But it may be hardest of all to get people worried about a monster never-before-seen pandemic that would kill billions – a mass extinction event.

The point of the Atlantic article and the study behind it was that we may actually be likelier to die in a catastrophe that huge than in a car crash. Leave aside that the study authors used an arbitrary made-up estimate of mass extinction risk to “prove” their point. Even if they had used an indisputable risk calculation, a lot of people would have rationalized it away, reasoning as follows: “They’re talking about a bigger catastrophe than I have ever seen or even heard about. So it has to be really, really unlikely. I’m not going to worry about something that unlikely.”

Most of us carry in our heads a stereotype of somebody who wants to tell us the end of the world is near. He’s a middle-aged man in a dirty robe and a scraggly beard, carrying a hand-drawn sign and accosting strangers on the sidewalk. He’s a nut. We don’t often pause to wonder if he’s right and what precautions we might want to take.

People may feel more outrage about the proposed precautions to prevent mass extinction events than about the events themselves.

In the mid-1980s I was active in the nuclear weapons freeze movement, trying to stop the U.S. from expanding its nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. A significant segment of our audience agreed with us that the U.S.-Soviet nuclear competition posed a sizable risk of a mass extinction event, but worried that abandoning that competition posed a sizable risk of Soviet domination. And to many of them, Soviet domination looked scarier than mass extinction: “Better dead than red.”

Similarly, the Achilles heel of climate change activism is the demand that we abandon our cars, our consumerism, and some measure of our control over our own lives. Our reluctance to give these things up constitutes a powerful reason to believe climate change isn’t a serious risk (at least not a mass extinction risk).

And it doesn’t help that so many climate change activists don’t share our reluctance. People who like strong regulatory regimes and loathe high-consumption lifestyles find it easy – even convenient – to think climate change is a serious risk, even a mass extinction risk; the remedies they propose for climate change would be attractive to them even if there were no climate change. But people who worry about government overreach and enjoy their ATMs and air conditioners are motivated to find reasons to decide climate change isn’t such a big risk after all.

A closely related issue is the impact of risk-benefit tradeoffs on risk perception. Logically, benefit assessment and risk assessment should be independent activities; you figure out how much good the activity does and how much harm it does, and then you can decide which effect is larger. But in practice, benefit perception and risk perception interact. Whichever one preoccupies you distorts your judgment of the other one.

So if I already strongly believe the benefit of X is high, I am motivated to decide the risk of X is low. And if I’m already convinced the risk of X is high, I’m motivated to decide its benefit is low. In risk controversies it’s hard to find anyone advocating the “high-risk high-benefit” position. Almost everybody argues either “high-risk low-benefit” or “high-benefit low-risk.” (I find the stock market refreshing because investors readily understand that the most potentially profitable investments are also the riskiest.)

A lot of mass extinction risks offer sizable current or potential benefits. The many tantalizing soon-to-be-achieved benefits of artificial intelligence make people not want to consider the risk of an AI takeover. The benefits of my highly consumptive lifestyle make me not want to consider its climate change risks. The same phenomenon holds true for lower-magnitude higher-probability risks, of course. Driving has huge benefits, which makes it harder to keep us focused on the risk of car crashes.

And when we change our minds about how beneficial a technology is, we’re likely to revise our view on how risky it is to match. So far the absence of significant benefits from genetically modified food ingredients makes it easy to overestimate GMO risks; lots of people envision genetically modified monsters taking over the world. But diabetics who gratefully rely on genetically modified insulin shrug off any suggestion that that sort of genetic modification could pose worrisome risks. A GM food killer app (no pun intended) with obvious consumer benefits could undermine GM opposition almost overnight.

The usual risk communication task vis-à-vis high-magnitude low-probability risks is calming people’s tendency to overreact. At least that’s what my career has been like.

I distinguish a risk’s “hazard” (how much harm it’s likely to do) from its “outrage” (how upset it’s likely to make people). Based on this distinction, I categorize risk communication into three tasks:

• When hazard is high and outrage is low, the task is “precaution advocacy” – alerting insufficiently upset people to serious risks. “Watch out!”
• When hazard is low and outrage is high, the task is “outrage management” – reassuring excessively upset people about small risks. “Calm down.”
• When hazard is high and outrage is also high, the task is “crisis communication” – helping appropriately upset people cope with serious risks. “We'll get through this together.”

In 40+ years of dividing my time among these three tasks, I have learned that when a client wants me to do precaution advocacy – increasing people’s outrage – it’s usually about a low-magnitude high-probability risk, something more like a car crash than a mass extinction event. When I’m brought in to work on a high-magnitude low-probability risk, on the other hand, my client is usually looking for outrage management help: help reducing people’s outrage, or help telling people about some scary but unlikely possible catastrophe without unduly frightening them, or sometimes help telling them about that possible catastrophe without duly frightening them.

Not always. In my time I have worked to arouse public outrage about pandemics, nuclear weapons, and climate change, three of the mass extinction events that preoccupy the Global Priorities Project. But I only occasionally have a client that wants people to be more upset about high-magnitude low-probability risks. I often have clients that want people to be less upset about such risks. I have worked for scores of corporate clients that sought my help persuading neighbors of an industrial facility that they shouldn’t be so worried about the possibility that the chlorine sphere might explode or the tailings impoundment might collapse or terrorists might crack open the containment vessel.

In 2004 I wrote a website column entitled “Worst Case Scenarios.” My summary of the column read in part:

Most of this long column is addressed to risk communicators whose goal is to keep their audience unconcerned. So naturally they’d rather not talk about awful but unlikely worst case scenarios. The column … explains why this is unwise…. Then the column lists 25 guidelines for explaining worst case scenarios properly. Finally, a postscript addresses the opposite problem. Suppose you’re not trying to reassure people about worst case scenarios; you’re trying to warn them. How can you do that more effectively?

There’s a lot of concrete advice in that column that I haven’t replicated here. Except for the postscript, it’s advice on how to tell people about high-magnitude low-probability risks without scaring the pants off them.

The risk communication seesaw is often a key dynamic in talking about high-magnitude low-probability risks.

When people are ambivalent about a risk, they tend to focus on the half of their ambivalence that isn’t getting enough attention elsewhere in their communication environment. I call this the risk communication seesaw, and it’s a critical aspect of many risk communication challenges. Risk-benefit tradeoffs, for example, are often a seesaw; whichever one you talk about, if I’m ambivalent I’ll probably focus all the more on the other one.

High-magnitude versus low-probability is also often a seesaw. If you’re out there warning me how horrific that possible catastrophe might be, I may respond that it’s too unlikely to bother with. If you’re trying to reassure me about how unlikely it is, on the other hand, I may respond that it’s too awful to live with.

Only ambivalent people react that way, of course. If I have no opinion, I’ll probably accept yours, and focus on whichever aspect of the risk you urge me to focus on, its high magnitude or its low probability. If I have a firm opinion of my own, I’ll almost certainly stay focused on the aspect I started out focused on.

The paradoxical response happens when I’m torn, fully aware of both the risk’s high magnitude and its low probability, and unsure how to reconcile them. If you want to keep ambivalent people calm, your core message should be: “Even though it’s really unlikely, look how awful it is.” Then your audience can use your low-probability information to tell themselves, “Yeah, well, sure it’s awful, but it’s really unlikely!” If they’re less alarmed then you want them to be, on the other hand, switch seats on the seesaw. “Even though it’s really awful, look how unlikely it is,” you should assert, leaving your audience to respond in their heads, “Yeah, but it’s really awful!”

Outrage about high-magnitude low-probability risks is often manipulated.

Organizations of all sorts – from multinational corporations to activist groups to public health agencies – have a stake in arousing outrage about some risks and suppressing outrage about others. That’s not necessarily nefarious. Their goals may be selfish or altruistic (or both). The information they provide may be accurate or false (or somewhere in between). The communication strategies they deploy may be candid or devious (or, again, somewhere in between). As a consultant who has been paid for 40+ years to advise clients on how best to communicate about risk, I’m in no position to complain that there are forces out there choosing their words intentionally to try to get you to have what they consider the “right” risk response.

Think about some of the high-magnitude low-probability risks that various interest groups have warned the public about in recent years:

• The risk that ISIS might pose an existential threat to the United States unless we ramp up our military efforts
• The risk that measles might come roaring back in the United States unless we force hesitant parents to vaccinate their children
• The risk that transgender people might harm our children unless we control which bathroom they use
• The risk that Ebola might spread widely in the U.S. unless we quarantine returning volunteers from West Africa
• The risk that Zika might spread widely in the U.S. unless we do urgent preemptive mosquito control throughout the country
• The risk that temperatures could spike to unlivable levels unless we massively reduce our greenhouse gas emissions

In many of these cases, but not all, there’s some other interest group arguing the other side. You’re not just making up your mind about risks – including the high-magnitude low-probability risks we’re discussing at the moment. There are people trying to make up your mind for you.

Manipulating people’s risk response is a lot harder than it might seem.

Since I earn my living helping clients “manipulate” outrage up or down with respect to specific risks, you surely can’t trust my assurances that what they do isn’t necessarily nefarious. You need to make your own ethical judgments about which risk communication strategies are acceptable and which are not. You may even decide that only truly neutral information is ethical – that no effort to influence other people’s risk response in predetermined directions is honorable, no matter how altruistic its motives. That’s not my view, obviously. But it’s a defensible view.

But maybe you can trust my judgment that influencing other people’s risk response is hard.

The hardest job is getting people upset about a risk they’re already familiar with but not currently upset about – getting them upset enough to take action. Conventional wisdom says that takes at least a generation; that’s how long it took to institutionalize hardhats, seatbelts, and smoke alarms.

• It’s much easier to introduce people to a new scary risk and get them to overreact temporarily – what I call an adjustment reaction – before they put the risk into context and calm down again.
• It’s much easier to teach people a new instance of a risk to which they already have a strong emotional response. For example, almost every pregnant woman worries about birth defects, so it’s no great challenge to get her to worry about Zika, which can cause horrific birth defects. Most of the time what looks like a new fear being aroused is actually a preexisting fear being channeled.
• And perhaps the easiest task of all is getting the mass media, mainstream media and social media alike, to echo the claim that people are overreacting to some new (or newly newsworthy) risk. I have collected hundreds of media stories asserting that the public is panicking with no evidence at all, or at best a panicky anecdote or two in a U.S. population of 319 million.

But actually getting people upset, that’s tough. And once they’re upset, they tend to stay upset – not forever, but for a good while. Getting them quickly apathetic again is tough too.