Some interesting risk stories in the news lately. The U.S. is planning for how to respond if (when?) terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb in America. Investigators in the Pacific Northwest have found yet another severed foot washed up on the shore, the 10th in the last couple years. But another risk story, which you might not have noticed, provides important lessons about the influence our subconscious affective risk perception system has on the way we respond to danger as a society.
Saccharin is officially off the EPA's list of suspected hazardous materials. When a few studies in the early 1970's suggested it might cause cancer in lab rats, there was widespread and alarming media coverage, and Congress required the FDA to mandate a warning label on saccharin packaging; "Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals." Whoa! Never mind that the overwhelming bulk of the scientific evidence back then already indicated that saccharin was safe. These were the days of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and dawning environmental concern over what industrial chemistry might be doing to us. Fear of cancer was even higher than it is today. In 1971 Congress passed the National Cancer Act , the start of the unofficial "War on Cancer'. Richard Nixon's preamble called cancer ‘the disease causing the greatest pubic concern." The saccharin issue helped fuel that concern.
So the bulk of the scientific evidence about saccharin, the weight of the facts, didn't matter as much as our fears, a Perception Gap (as I call it in "How Risky Is It Really? Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts" ) well-explained by risk perception psychology.
- We're more afraid of things the greater the pain and suffering they involve, and many of the more than 100 types of cancer are high on that list.
- We're more afraid of risks imposed on us rather than those we take voluntarily, which is why Silent Spring and the environmental movement focused on the potential perils imposed on us, like saccharin and other industrial chemicals, by modern technology.
- We're more afraid of risks that are human-made than those that are natural, another reason things like industrial products like saccharin evoke more concern than natural carcinogens (radon, the sun, highly estrogenic soy products which raise the risk of breast cancer).
- We're more afraid of things the more aware of them we are, and the media, which makes a living selling us information we want to know about - like things that feel scary - definitely fed increased awareness of anything potentially carcinogenic. (It still does.)
- And we're loss averse. We tend to give more weight to the risk side of a tradeoff, than the benefits; in the case of saccharin, the tiny/maybe risk of cancer has more emotional impact that the large/certain benefit of using a non-caloric sugar substitute to reduce obesity (which is a much greater risk factor for cancer than saccharin ever was thought to be).
Hindsight is always a wise teacher. It turns out the bulk of the evidence was right. Saccharin long ago was removed from most government lists of potential carcinogens. (That happened in 2000 in the U.S. It's still prohibited as a food additive in Canada.) The EPA only just got around to taking it off it's list of hazardous materials. But the lesson is not that we overreacted to saccharin, or that we were wrong, or irrational, though a case can be made for all of the above. (We sure spent millions more than necessary controlling the stuff, and limited use of a sugar substitute that could have reduced the risk of obesity for lots of people, and we added yet one more substance to a long list of modern industrial bogeymen that has fed a general fear of modern products and processes, and even science itself.)
The lesson is to look back and recognize the role our powerful survival instinct-based risk perception emotions played in the policy decisions we made, and how a response that was supposedly just based on the facts was also based on a lot of emotion, and we ended up with policy which felt right, but which may not have done us the most good.
The lesson is relevant today, because current issues like transgenic salmon and bisphenol A and vaccines and bovine growth hormone to increase milk production, and a long list of enviro bogeymen that hit many of the same risk perception alarm buttons, are being handled the same way. It is absolutely natural, and right, that we be careful and precautionary about these things. But being careful and precautionary also means being prudent and thoughtful, not just worried but smart too.
As much as we've become scientifically smarter at understanding the risks that come along with the benefits of modern scientific progress, we've also gotten scientifically more insightful about how our risk perception system works, and how it shapes our fears, and how it can be a risk in and of itself. We'd be dumb not to use all the tools we have to scientifically study things like saccharin, and equally as dumb not to be precautionary and use our scientific understanding of risk perception to avoid the potential harms our affective/instinctive/emotional response to risk can also create.
