Risk and irrationality  

 

Coming home the other day from Padstow, we called in at a Little Chef to see if the great Heston Blumenthal's cooking revolution had reached Exeter. As we walked to our table, a waitress reached passed me for a sauce bottle and then dropped it in front of my left foot. It smashed and the HP sauce splashed up my left trouser leg. She was very apologetic and so we had what was in a way a free lunch. No, I didn't detect Mr Blumenthal's influence. Two days later, I was standing in the kitchen. Heather had warmed some butter in a dish and was walking across the kitchen with it. She dropped it in front of my left leg and this time the splashes on my trouser leg were yellow. Obviously the world is a dangerous place, particularly for my left leg.

Risk is all around. And so we put money into the NHS and make rules in our society in order to try to reduce accidents and death where we can, but then, of course, we get upset that it is all taken too far: that we have become a nanny state. We complain that health and safety smothers risk taking, when some degree of risk makes our lives worth living. Experiments in the school laboratory to create explosions or noxious gases, are a privilege not now permitted to school-children for fear of being sued. One of the distorting influences here is the health & safety industry which has grown up over the years and relies upon promoting health and safety beyond what is reasonable in order to make even more money out of it. And this is encouraged by the court's approach to lawyers costs which makes it cheaper on the whole for insurance companies to agree to pay relatively small claims whether or not they look likely to succeed.

Our attitude to risk is, though, very inconsistent. We happily drive around in our cars knowing that road accidents are a significant cause of death and we see stupid drivers using mobile phones and driving far too fast. But driving is, arguably, an essential part of our lives, granted the way in which our lives are structured. And so we find a way of blanking out the inherent danger which it presents. I tell myself that my superior' skill as a driver will mean that while others may be injured, the likelihood of my being involved in a serious accident is a lot lower. People went through a similar process of irrational denial with cigarette smoking, refusing to accept that they were killing themselves. Why? Because they couldn't face the thought of giving up.

But we take a different view when it comes to things like terrorist attacks. The evidence is that remarkably few people have been killed or injured in the UK as a consequence of such attacks, whether recently or during the troubles in Northern Ireland, as compared to deaths on the road. Where we object to the minor inconvenience of speed limits and speed cameras as fundamental breaches of our human rights, the public seem to be willing to accept draconian laws which remove many traditional liberties in order to try to limit the ability of terrorists to attack us. Why is this?

When an attack happens, then the outrage is tangible. There has been sadness and indignation on those occasions when a train has crashed if it appeared that it was caused through gross negligence, but nothing like the scale of feeling which followed the attack on July 7th 2005 on the Tube in London. I wonder if it has something to do with a perception of gross unfairness? After all, we accept that accidents happen, but death deliberately inflicted by people who do not respect any of the norms of civilisation is in a different category. It is deeply unfair.

And the more that we look at our attitude to unfairness, the stronger and more pervasive it seems to be. The latest research shows that unfairness produces a reaction in the same primitive area of the brain - the part we share with such things as crocodiles - as that which deals with the smell of rotting flesh. We seem to be fundamentally hard-wired to reject unfairness.

So whilst we do all we can to reject limits on what we can do in our ordinary lives, it seems that, threatened with a deliberate attack from outside', most people are willing to take all sorts of steps to combat it, even if those steps are on a scale which is actually quite irrational. But then our innate ability to judge the actual importance of any given risk has been shown time and again to be very poor. It seems that, despite our millions of years of evolution, emotions still rule OK.

 

 

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