Perception vs. Reality, Part 3

Related to fearing the wrong things is the mistake of giving unwarranted influence to the wrong things. When Gerald Ford was president of the United States he went skiing a few times. Sometimes he fell while skiing. Reporters and comedians, many of whom probably couldn't ski a bunny slope, made a big deal about how his “lack of coordination” made him a poor president. One late night comedian got a lot of mileage out of a claim that Ford could not walk and chew gum at the same time.

Nobody mentioned exactly how President Ford's alleged coordination problems interfered with his ability to make good decisions as president. Would the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time have solved the country's economic problems? Reduced crime? If the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time was so important, how did a president who could not walk at all get us through most of World War II? (In fact, Ford was a former college football player and one of the more athletic presidents in U.S. history. His falls while skiing would not have been unusual for most skiers.)

Ford's alleged clumsiness had nothing to do with the characteristics needed in a good president. The people paying attention to that were allowing emphatic trifles to distract them from the real issues.

Physical appearance is another characteristic given too much influence in our society. Starting with the 1960 presidential elections, television has played a major role in United States politics, and with that came an emphasis on appearance. Kennedy was good looking and defeated Nixon. Then later Nixon, to win the presidency shaved twice a day since his heavy beard gave a bad appearance on TV. There is, as far as I know, no connection between good looks and good judgment. Yet the better-looking candidate has an advantage in our elections, at least if he is a man. People often think of a man's looks as reflective of his ability. The opposite may be true among female candidates since many people think of beautiful women as mindless. Both perceptions are wrong. We should try to judge politicians on their honesty and ability, not on their looks.

Finding reality in spite of our perception can be difficult. I have touched only on some of the more obvious problems. Other perceptual difficulties can be more subtle. We've all seen optical illusions such as the Mueller-Lyer figure which has two lines of identical length. The only difference is the figures on the ends of the lines. One line looks longer than the other. You can look it up if you're not familiar with this, sorry I can't get a good representation to appear in this blog.

We also have mental illusions that cause poor perception. These are just as prevalent as the optical illusions. For example, suppose you are tossing a coin. It is a fair coin and you are tossing it fairly. You know that the probability of heads on any given toss is 50%. It has just come up heads four times in a row. What is the probability that it will come up tails next toss? We have a natural inclination to expect a string of tails to balance out the number of times it has come up heads. That is wrong and is known as the “gambler's fallacy.” In fact the probability of heads is 50%, regardless of previous results. There is no cosmic law forcing it to come up heads and tails an equal number of times. It is a normal statistical fluctuation to occasionally get several heads in a row. In fact there is a 12.5% chance of getting the same result four times in a row with a fair coin toss! Put another way, if a large number of people each toss a fair coin four times, about 12.5% of them will get the same result all four times.

Cognitive scientists have been studying such mental illusions for several years now. What they have learned can be helpful as we try to overcome our perceptual problems. One book on the subject is Inevitable illusions by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.1

Impressions can be wrong. The wise person will make decisions based on reality, not perception and external appearance. We will serve ourselves well in all aspects of life if we just take a little time and ask ourselves, “Am I looking at what is important, or am I allowing spectacular trivialities to divert my attention from the less obvious but more important issues? Does my perception of this situation really reflect reality, or is there something important I’m missing?”

1Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions, How Mistakes of Reason Rule our Minds, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1994 Be aware that there are some mathematical errors in the book. I consider the chapter on Bayes law to be particularly bad.

Perception vs. Reality, Part 2

Last time I described a case in which a young woman received treatment for her obvious injuries while her boyfriend died because his injuries were not obvious. The perception was that she needed medical attention while he did not. That erroneous perception cost his life. Most perception problems are not so severe but still cause trouble.

We have a tendency to fear the relatively benign. Mice, spiders, air travel, public speaking, tight places. All these and more can generate fears out of proportion to any danger they present. Appropriate caution is good, but we should avoid devitalizing our lives by overreaction to less significant dangers. How many people avoid visiting relatives because it's too far to drive and they fear flying, even though flying is much safer? How many miss the joy of visiting natural sites for fear of harmless animals? Overcoming those fears can make life more fulfilling and enjoyable.

Likewise, we often tend to fear the unfamiliar, people from a different culture, strange places, new technology, etc. That causes us to miss the enjoyment we might have if we learn of those cultures or technologies and partake of the best aspects of them. Worse, such fears lead to bigotry and class or racial warfare. That is also one reason for the widespread fear of anything “nuclear” or involving “radiation.” While radiation can be harmful, the general reaction to it is all out of proportion to the actual danger. In fact “nuclear” and “radiation” are witch words, (cf
http://hallillywhite.blogspot.com/2010/04/godwin-and-witch.html).

Of course these fears reside in the emotional part of the brain and it is not always easy to allow reason to overrule emotion and normal fears. This is especially true when reason tells us we can do something unnatural such as jumping out of an airplane. OK, I admit it. I used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Back when I wore Uncle Sam’s funny green clothes I was a paratrooper. It was fun and gave me extra pay.

My non-airborne friends used to claim I was crazy to do such a thing. The brigade commander, also a paratrooper, said something similar. He said we had to have something different about our minds to allow us to perform such an unnatural act...

I suspect our commander was right, we did have something different in our mentalities. If so, such a difference is not all bad. It allowed us to do something unnatural but not really dangerous. Most of us knew that the real danger was the trip to the airport, then back from the drop zone. For that we had to travel on the highway with cars and trucks whizzing by in the other direction. However, for humans, highway travel is an extension of our natural travel on land. Jumping out of airplanes is quite unnatural. What I did as a paratrooper was allow my intellect to overrule my intuitive fear. I knew that the parachute jump itself was statistically very safe. In fact, in all the jumps I did, many of which involved hundreds of paratroopers, I am not aware of any serious injuries, much less deaths.

We skew our thinking if we insist on classifying the natural as safe and the unnatural as dangerous. Hemlock is natural, and so are death cap mushrooms.

This problem cuts both ways. First we can overlook some real dangers in such things as food and medical products. Second, we deny ourselves, and sometimes others, the opportunity to do things that appear dangerous but in fact are relatively safe.

A friend once lost a family member to this skewed thinking. His father was a private pilot and often flew the family on vacations. The problem was that my friend’s mother did not like to fly high; she felt safer close to the ground. She insisted that her husband stay as low as he could. While such a feeling may be natural, that perception is quite wrong. The reality is that flying higher allows a pilot more time to recover if anything goes wrong. Something did go wrong over Wyoming’s Wind River Range. With no time to recover, the plane went down, killing one and seriously injuring two more. The forth person aboard was in also injured but was able to make it out and notify authorities.

That is of course an extreme example, but people make such inappropriate decisions regularly. Occasionally it costs lives; more often it costs time or enjoyment. It is common for people to drive to their destination in order to avoid flying, even though air travel is much safer than driving. The perception that flying is dangerous comes from the fact that we can’t do it naturally, and from the spectacular aspect of an airplane crash. Even the crash of a small plane will generate more news coverage than an automobile accident with the same number of casualties.

The type of misperception mentioned above tends to be widely shared. Most people tend to think of snipers as more dangerous than traffic and airplanes as more dangerous than cars. However there are individual misperceptions as well, many of which develop into phobias. The woman who wanted her airplane to stay low may have been suffering from acrophobia. Phobias are characterized by unreasonable fears, either fearing something harmless, or excessive fear of something that is a potential danger. The subject of phobias is generally beyond the scope of this article; their treatment is the province of certified therapists. However I would like to mention that those who suffer from phobias should be careful not to impose the same fears on their children. This takes effort, but no good parent wants to interfere with a fulfilling life for his or her children. If necessary, the parent should work with a therapist to avoid passing a phobia on to the children.

If we match our perspective to reality we will have safer, more enjoyable lives.

Perception vs. Reality, Part 1

We must never become so busy slapping at mosquitoes that we walk into the quicksand.
Richard L. Evans

The young woman was a bloody mess, writhing and screaming in agony. She had been riding behind her boyfriend on a motorcycle, wearing a bikini when the bike crashed. Her legs, arms and torso were covered with scrapes, scratches and ground in dirt. Bystanders, urged on by the distraught boyfriend, tried to help. The young man appeared fine; he had been wearing protective clothing.

At the hospital emergency room workers cleansed, disinfected and bandaged her wounds. They did a good job and she recovered completely... In fact she was able to attend the funeral of her boyfriend. The accident ruptured his spleen and he died from internal bleeding. His injury was neither obvious nor particularly painful. It was only fatal.

It is a fact of life: The attention we pay to an event is seldom related to its importance. The young woman’s wounds were dramatic; her boyfriend’s unseen injury was deadly. Spectacular events, celebrities, and scare-mongering distract us from less noticeable but more important issues. Modern life conspires to focus our attention on the trivial. We are constantly faced with the equivalent of an obnoxious male mosquito buzzing around our ears. While he distracts us, the female quietly sneaks in for a sip of blood.

Focusing on the spectacular hurts us two ways:

1. Distracted by the trivial, we ignore the important.

2. Fearing the benign, we devitalize our lives.

Residents of the Washington, D.C. area of the United States will long remember October 2002. For nearly a month they lived in fear as a sniper shot thirteen people, apparently at random. Adults, children, Blacks, Whites, men, women. Nobody was immune. News reports across the country and around the world trumpeted the danger. School recesses were held indoors. Football games were moved to secret locations with no spectators. Shoppers hurried through parking lots, looking over their shoulders. Nobody felt safe.

Finally two suspects were caught and the reign of terror ended. Children again played outdoors, much to the relief of parents and teachers. Everybody felt much safer. That “increased safety” was a misperception. While the danger from the snipers was gone, traffic accidents, street crime etc. continued to kill and injure people. The difference was that the press paid little attention to accidents and street crime.

Snipers are big news; they get a lot of media attention. However in any large metropolitan area accidents and street crime kill and injure people every day, drawing little if any press attention. Yet the risk of being shot by a sniper was insignificant compared to the risks we all run in our daily lives.

The terror those snipers created is an example of an all too human tendency. We fear spectacular but unlikely dangers but give no thought to common, often worse, hazards. Yes, the criminals did murder at least eleven people and wounded two others. However, the chance of them shooting any one person out of the millions living in that area was miniscule. In fact, the death rate from all causes probably dropped during their reign of terror. People were staying home, not exposing themselves to traffic accidents and other hazards. Common hazards kill and injure many more people than the snipers ever did.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

News outlets in particular distort our perception by emphasizing the spectacular and unusual. Unless a celebrity is involved, it really isn’t very big news when a traffic accident kills a driver, or a drug overdose kills an addict. A sniper or an airplane crash has much greater news value. Because of this, our perception of danger is often warped.

Snipers, airplane crashes, terrorist threats all get our attention even though any one of us has almost no chance of becoming a victim of those dangers. Meanwhile, we continue to travel on our roads without a second thought, often even driving when we are tired or under the influence of intoxicants. Warped perceptions both blind us to the real dangers of what we may think of as safe, and cause us to fear things that are not really very dangerous. Only by using our intellect to decide what's really important can we overcome this problem.

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Risk Management?

A few days ago I discussed the problems of crises, how they get our blood flowing and at times divert our attention from more important issues. However there are crises that are both real and urgent. Families may face these with financial problems or sudden health issues. Governments face them when threatened militarily or otherwise. How do we deal with these problems? One field that has developed in recent years is “risk management.” The idea is to manage the risks and thus avoid the crises they may generate. That is a good idea but I dislike the term “risk management,” I think I would prefer to call it “risk preparation.” In most cases we do not manage the risk. What we manage is ourselves.

Most risks just are, we can do little or nothing about them. The drunk or careless driver who shares the road with us; the dangerous curve on that road; the susceptibility of our bodies to certain illnesses; the risk of a layoff at work – all are beyond our control and we cannot manage them. However we can manage ourselves. We can drive defensively; we can take care of our health; and we can be prepared to change jobs or live on savings if necessary. We face many other risks, most of which we cannot control, but we can control how we prepare for and respond to them. With preparation, what might have been a crisis becomes only a nuisance or sometimes even an opportunity.

I know, some of you are thinking that this is just semantics. I disagree. What we call something affects how we think about it. If we think in terms of managing risk, the focus is on external factors that we probably cannot control. However if we think in terms of our own action we will focus on what we can do. That is much more likely to result in effective action.

So how do we manage ourselves and prepare for risk? The first step is to understand, as well as we can, what risks we face. That understanding should go beyond a simple list to include probabilities and consequences. This is related to a blog I published earlier about probability, expectation and utility. The risks of most concern are those with a high probability of costing us dearly.

As an example, consider what happens when I go rock climbing – yes I'm silly enough to do that. If I'm three feet off the ground, the consequences of a fall are minimal. Unless I plan to go higher I probably won't bother with a rope, even if the probability of a fall is high. However if I'm 100 feet off the deck things get a bit more interesting. Even if a fall is unlikely I'll probably be tied into a rope.

Step one in risk preparation is to know the risks, how likely they are to materialize, and the possible consequences. That tells us which risks are worth our attention.

Second, we need to determine what we can control and what we can't. I cannot control the hand and foot holds on that rock face, nor can I control the possibility of falling rock. I can pick my route though, and that may avoid some problems. Likewise in life there are risks within our control and some that are not. Even if we cannot control the drunk who may share the road with us, we can control how, when and where we drive. We cannot control the genes we inherited from our parents but we can control the way we eat and the exercise we get. We cannot control an employer's financial situation but we can control our preparation in case of a layoff.

Third, we should decide how to prepare for those risks. In some cases we can reduce or eliminate the risk. When I was a young man on the dairy farm, being kicked by a cow was always a risk, but usually not a high risk. However there was one cow that would fight and kick through the entire milking process. It took several men to control her and she still sometimes managed to kick one of us. My father finally decided that he could manage that risk very well. In fact he eliminated it completely. That cow never kicked anyone again and there was a bit more hamburger on the market.

Of course it is not usually practical to eliminate risks so we just decide how we will prepare for them. I could forgo rock climbing and thus eliminate that risk to myself, but at the cost of the enjoyment that sport provides. Instead I can take other measures. I can learn how to climb better, thus reducing my risk of a fall. And of course a properly used rope doesn't reduce the chance of a fall but does greatly reduce the adverse consequences. I can also look at things like weather and maybe climb tomorrow instead of today if an electrical storm threatens.

Likewise in life we can look at things like driving defensively and even not driving at dangerous times, like New Year's Eve when more people are likely to be drunk. Such actions reduce the likelihood that we will encounter the risk, even though that risk is still there. We can take measures to reduce adverse consequences. My climbing rope is one of those “consequence-reducing measures,” but so are things like insurance, diversified investments, and home smoke detectors.

On the national scene as well, there are risks we can and cannot control. Our ability to control the fanatic wing of Islam is limited to say the least but we can try to keep its operatives out of our country. We can also try to eradicate them in their strongholds though that is difficult and the outcome is uncertain. However in my opinion we as a nation have yet to make the effort to really understand this risk. Too many people think of those fanatics as simply another enemy, failing to recognize just how implacable they are. The fact that they produce people willing to kill themselves in order to hurt us should tell us something about them. Sadly we may not want to recognize what it tells us, but recognize it we must. It should motivate a study of those fanatics, their motives, methods, and weaknesses. Sadly, I’ve yet to see much understanding at that level even in our national leaders.

Once we understand the fanatics we can think about how to try to eliminate them and how to reduce their ability to harm. However any strategy not based on a sound understanding of the problem is doomed to failure. We cannot manage the fanatics. They manage themselves so we must likewise manage ourselves. We must use our strengths and shore up our weaknesses to stop them. However a full treatise on that subject is beyond the scope of this blog so let’s return to the general subject of dealing with risk.

To summarize:

There are some risks we can change or eliminate. If the risk is serious enough, we should do that.

Most risks are beyond our control so we must find other means to deal with them.

We usually don’t manage risk, we manage ourselves. We decide which risks are in our control and how to control them. For other significant risks we decide how to protect ourselves or how to reduce the damage they can do. We do this keeping in mind our abilities and how much it is worth to ameliorate each risk.

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