It Won’t Happen to Me

It Won’t Happen to Me

Preparing for Disaster by Overcoming Optimism Bias

To live is to risk. Being born is risky. Getting out of bed is risky. Crossing the street is risky. Your first date is risky. The 6^th mass extinction is risky. Toxic chemicals are risky. The climate emergency is risky. And yet most of us are terrible at judging risk – we either exaggerate their severity and are filled with despair and freeze or pretend its not a problem and deny the danger: why is that?

Right now I am visiting my brother at his cottage in northwestern Ontario near Kenora. It’s not the kind of place I expected to meet a psychologist who is an expert at risk assessment, but, given how wondourfully odd life is, I enjoyed a lovely chat with such a man yesterday. I asked him about why it is that most of us are especially bad at judging risk and most especially risks of low probability but high impact – events like the cloudburst that flooded Calgary.

He first responded by saying that most of us are terrible at judging all risk – we see life as “normal” so we either see something as dangerous which is not or see something really nasty as impossible so discount it and think it will never happen to us. Secondly, he said that because we are so social we tend to see risk like the other people around us and basically stop thinking. This last statement struck a chord with me as I have succumbed to unconscious peer pressure by doing what I had originally not wanted to do. So here’s a small and silly personal story of my judging risk wrongly, in my case succumbing to socially induced optimism bias.

Last summer my wife and I were on a vacation on the north shore of the St.Lawrence in Quebec close to the Labrador border – a cold and wet part of the world. We were going on a boat to see some islands of the Mingan Archipelago National Park Reserve – where arctic-alpine plants hang on for dear life. At first I grabbed my raincoat and boots – in spite of the fact that it was a sunny day – “just to be safe” – as I knew this was a cold and wet part of the world. Sounds like I was being smart? Well, almost, but then I made the mistake of looking at all the other tourists who were wearing T shirts and flip flops and I felt ridiculous and paranoid in my rubber boots and rain coat – so I allowed myself to fall for their optimism bias and left my raincoat and boots in my car. Silly me. Half way to the island is started a warm drizzle soaked the world around us and I was as wet and unhappy as all the other silly tourists. Now here is the worst part: you think that I would have learned my lesson and not allow the poor judgement of others affect me. Sadly, that is not the case. This year while on vacation I fell for it again and dressed like all the other over optimistic tourists while walking through the desert in Utah not properly prepared for the heat. Silly me. Silly humans.

This is what psychologists tells us about this human flaw. “Interestingly, our perceptions of risk – and our optimism bias – are also influenced by the number of people who are exposed to the same risk. In other words, an individual’s perceived risk decreases as the number of people who are exposed to the same risk increases. This altered perception illustrates a false sense of security that arises based on sharing a risk with many other people. “ [5]

It’s only a Disaster when you Don’t Prepare For It

Let’s return to other flip side of the coin: people who see danger where almost none lurks. A case in point is bear attacks. Although I just read a book about a lady from Calgary [The Bear’s Embrace by P. van Tighem] who was attacked by a grizzly the reality is that this is very, very rare – especially if you are hiking in a park with other people near you. Now I that does not mean I am foolishily optimistic either – I bring bear spray when I walk in the Rockies and walk in a group of at least 3 people – so that we “look” bigger than a bear to a bear. However, most people are petrified of bear attacks and many will not even go hiking because they are so afraid. This seeming contradiction is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: our inability to accurately judge our abilities. Here is bit about it.[8]

“A person’s lack of knowledge and skill in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also drives those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, leading them to underestimate their abilities. The Dunning-Kruger effect hurts our society because it holds talented people back from unleashing their full capabilities. Meanwhile, those who are the least skilled overestimate themselves the most, and may be more likely to pursue leadership roles or other positions of power. Not only are overconfident individuals extremely resistant to being taught — since they believe they know the most — but they are also guilty of sharing the most information (read: misinformation). At its core, the Dunning-Kruger effect preys on just that, not a lack of information but rather an abundance of misinformation. When individuals present information confidently, we are more likely to believe them, regardless of whether or not the information they are sharing is well-founded. On a global level, this effect has dangerous consequences. Politicians and other public figures may benefit from a trusting and overconfident audience. People who aren’t as well-informed about political and world issues are likelier to believe what you say, consider themselves educated, and share their views with others.”

What the Dunning Kroger effect helps us understand is why most of can suffer from optimism bias and then deny the ecological collapse unfolding right in front of us. Simultaneously some of us suffer from “pessimism bias” by being so overwhelmed by the negative data that we suffer from doom and gloom and so no way out of our self made trap and give up and only see what’s wrong with the world instead of the opportunities that arise as the status quo falls apart.

So what can we do to avoid these twin traps as we try valiantly to not overheat the planet, murder thousands of species and toxify our bodies with chemicals? First, knowing about these twin traps give us the ability to not fall for them. Second, we must not avoid real, non-ideological information that can help us be honest about how much we need to change [I avoid terms like bad news – it is not helpful in getting us to act and feel like we can actually do something]. Of course, for most of you reading this that is not the issue – most of us face the challenge of reading too much about our challenging state of affairs and then feeling like we are doomed. If you are one of these people you need to dial down the information overload and find something positive to do, to laugh and enjoy life a bit too, as you find the silver lining in the cloud – and those silver linings are there. Of course we all know that – but doing so is so much harder than knowing. And then to make things even tougher we need to also prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best – as this story highlights.

Fudai TsunamiWall

But folks, disasters and risks are not “bad” – unless we succumb to the cognitive biases mentioned. They are “bad” when we aren’t ready for them. Yes, life is dangerous but the danger is what keeps us sharp and awake and more fully alive – well, to be clear, we usually stay alive if we are honest about the risks, otherwise…. Here is an example from Japan of how facing the risk of a huge disaster meant that thousands of lives were saved by avoiding optimism bias.

In the rubble of Japan’s northeast coast, one small village stands as tall as ever after the tsunami. No homes were swept away. In fact, they barely got wet. Fudai is the village that survived — thanks to a huge wall once deemed a mayor’s expensive folly and now vindicated as the community’s salvation. The 3,000 residents living between mountains behind a cove owe their lives to a late leader who saw the devastation of an earlier tsunami and made it the priority of his four-decade tenure to defend his people from the next one. His 51-foot (15.5-meter) floodgate between mountainsides took a dozen years to build and meant spending more than $30 million in today’s dollars. “It cost a lot of money. But without it, Fudai would have disappeared,’’ said seaweed fisherman Satoshi Kaneko, 55, whose business has been ruined but who is happy to have his family and home intact. The gate project was criticized as wasteful in the 1970s. But the gate and an equally high seawall behind the community’s adjacent fishing port protected Fudai from the waves that obliterated so many other towns. Two months after the disaster, more than 25,000 are missing or dead. Towns to the north and south also braced against tsunamis with concrete seawalls, breakwaters and other protective structures. But none were as tall as Fudai’s. The town of Taro

believed it had the ultimate fort — a double-layered 33-foot-tall (10-meter-tall) seawall spanning 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometres) across a bay. It proved no match for the March 11 tsunami. [9]

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. – Benjamin Franklin

So we all need to think like the mayor of Fudai. But being like him is tough, really tough. Here’s why. There’s something called the “preparedness paradox.” Preparation for a danger (an epidemic, natural disaster, etc.) can keep people from being harmed by that danger. Since people didn’t see negative consequences from the danger, they wrongly conclude that the danger wasn’t bad to start with. And then there is problem of living a safe country like Canada. Because we think we are safe, and because the think its the government’s job to save us most Canadians (76%) are unconcerned (29%) or unaware (47%) of specific risks of weather-related emergencies and natural disasters.[4] Only one in ten Canadians (11%) have taken steps to reduce the risk of their home being affected by a weather-related emergency or natural disaster such as flood, wildfire, tornado, hurricane, ice storm, blizzard, extreme cold. This includes only 2% that have also taken steps to help their community. Surprisingly, Past experience with natural disaster, or living in a moderate to high-risk area, has little bearing on future preparedness. The survey found that past natural disaster experience does not strongly influence future preparedness. [4]

Once again, what can you & I do? Admit that the Tsunami is coming. It could be fire, or flood, or disease or heat or…. its different depending upon where you live. Overcome your cognitive biases, don’t succumb to being “normal” and pretending its never going to happen to you, get prepared and work with others as you do so. Life is great, in spite of these risks [some would say because of the risks and dangers of life] that are actually an essential ingredient for the long term survival of all living creatures. So build that wall. Build that ark. And enjoy your life and your friends while doing so.

It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. – H. Ruff