I am attaching for everyone to read a very helpful article I read in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer. Car accidents in 1999 killed 42,000 people, whereas 7,000 or so were killed by terrorists on that horrible day. I was really afraid to fly, but this article really helped me get some perspective. Hope someone else benefits by it.
Rationality not always a factor in our fears
By Stacey Burling
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Why is it that a shark attack or two drives people out of the ocean, but you don't see them screaming at the sight of a bacon double cheeseburger and supersized fries?
Fearing West Nile virus or Lyme disease, we'll fret over a bug bite, but give little thought to flu season, which kills tens of thousands more people.
An airplane ride - especially now - feels more dangerous than the same trip in a car, even though statistics show it's not.
Fear is not entirely rational.
And you wouldn't necessarily want it to be.
When our long-lost ancestors crossed the path of a saber-toothed tiger, it wasn't in their best interest to waste time thinking.
"Fear helps us assess the world, and react, and keep ourselves safe," said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychologist and expert on perception of risk.
Fear has been on many Americans' minds since Sept. 11, when people's perception of their safety was blown to bits. Suddenly, almost everyone feels at least a pang of nervousness at the thought of boarding a plane. We startle at loud noises, watch carefully as planes fly over our houses, eye strangers suspiciously, feel vaguely uncomfortable in crowds or big office buildings.
Are we, in fact, in any more danger now than we were on Sept. 10, when most of us weren't giving Osama bin Laden a thought?
Probably not. Maybe even less. But who knows?
That's why terrorism works. It's scary for some of the same reasons that shark attacks evoke a stronger reaction than obesity, or smoking, or cars. Combine unpredictability with gruesomeness. Add lack of control, stealth, insufficient information, and victims that everyone can identify with, and you've got the recipe for fear.
"The threat of random annihilation is terrifying," said Jeff Greenberg, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who is a proponent of "terror management theory."
Greenberg said he believes people create cultures as a way of living with fear, of dealing with the conflict between our animal instinct to survive and the uniquely human awareness that we all have a 100 percent chance of dying of something. Society makes us feel safe.
Because of that, the terrorist onslaught two weeks ago - an attack not only on people's personal safety but on American culture - was especially frightening.
As Linda Welsh, a psychologist at the Anxiety and Agoraphobia Treatment Center in Bala Cynwyd, puts it, "Most of us live in denial, and this has just taken away all of our defenses."
If you go by numbers, even with four passenger planes going down in a day, far fewer people die flying than driving. In 1999, for example, car accidents killed 42,000 people - more than 20 times the number killed in air and water accidents combined. Horrible as last week's death toll was, stomach ulcers and nutritional deficiencies each kill close to 5,000 people a year, and most of us don't live in dread of them.
But no one goes just by the numbers. Fear has a rational component - and also a quicker, emotional, intuitive component. It is influenced by vivid images (think how powerful the mushroom cloud is 60 years after we dropped the atomic bomb), experiences, your ability to imagine a shark's teeth clamping onto your thigh, perceived changes in the expected pattern.
People tend to react more strongly to new, memorable dangers.
We've all developed rationales for dealing with the background risks of life: a drunk driver on our commute, a fall down the stairs, a cancer diagnosis. When something unusual happens - Ebola, E. coli, killer bees, defective tires - it's more likely to get our attention.
"We often appraise risk inaccurately," said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University who has studied people's willingness to take risks. "You are more at risk climbing a ladder at home than you are in an airplane. One of the problems is, we overvalue unusual events."
Of course, news media attention has something to do with that. Traffic accidents don't make the news like shark attacks. We might fear cars more if newspapers had big headlines like "Man Killed In Idaho On Highway," said Jerilyn Ross, a clinical social worker who directs the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in Washington.
Still, facts don't guarantee rationality.
Martin Franklin, clinical director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, said he thinks rationality often breaks down when it comes to weird, scary things.
Before Sept. 11, a huge terrorist attack was "an extremely unlikely event," Franklin said. "It remains so, and yet there's still the possibility that it could happen. The possible becomes equated with the probable when you're afraid."
Logic can override fears, psychologists said. But people often lack the information they need to put risks in perspective, Jonathan Baron, a Penn psychology professor, said.
Remember the Alar apple scare? Baron said he thinks people would have been calmer if they had known the numbers: The Alar in a bushel of apples had the cancer-causing power of one cigarette.
Speaking of cigarettes, why aren't they terrifying? All smoking-related illnesses combined kill 400,000 Americans a year, according to the American Cancer Society.
The answer is that cigarettes kill slowly, far in the future. And smoking is a choice. People are much more comfortable with risks they choose to take than with risks that are thrust upon them, psychologists said. This is a big reason why many people are more comfortable driving their cars than riding in an airplane.
"People's perceptions of dangers are often much more based on their perception of control rather than their perception of the absolute dangers," said David Carbonell, director of the Anxiety Treatment Center in Chicago.
Unpredictability is another thing that ups the fear ante for most people.
"Uncertainty is probably . . . the number one source of human fear," Temple's Farley said.
That's one of the reasons that two shark deaths spaced relatively close together - or one massive terrorist attack - make us so nervous. Our brains are alert to things that might portend a change in the rules, Slovic, the expert on risk perception, said. Suddenly we're afraid because we're no longer sure we can predict risk.
In a case like this terrorist attack, the math isn't much help.
"It's taken our safety blanket away," said Ross, the anxiety specialist in Washington. "You can't do your normal rationalizing."
So what can you do?
Farley said he thinks it's important for people in a country founded by bold risk-takers not to let terrorists get the better of them. "We do not want to let fearfulness creep into our society," he said.
Psychologists said people can deal with their fears by focusing on the improvements in national security, talking about their fears, exercising, or spending time with people in their communities.
"It's what you tell yourself that scares you," Welsh said.
