Ulterior Motives

How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior

Art Markman is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think. See full bio

If we successfully avoid a swine flu pandemic, what will happen next time?

The dangers of successfully avoiding a pandemic.

Published on May 1, 2009

Unless you have already locked yourself into a sealed container with lots of food and water and no communications with the outside world (in which case you're not reading this post), you can't avoid news about the potential for a swine flu (H1N1) pandemic. The media is reporting a stream of government and expert recommendations including washing hands frequently, avoiding unnecessary travel, and staying home if you are feeling sick. Fighting the flu

So far, there is some reason to be cautiously optimistic that we may not see a huge outbreak of this flu. Many school systems are taking significant precautions to keep large groups from congregating such as cancelling athletic events and field trips. In addition, the flu strain itself is not jumping rapidly from person-to-person, so that dense urban centers where some cases of the flu have been identified (like Mexico City and New York City) have not seen the flu sweep through them yet.

Unfortunately, battling epidemics in the long-term does not play well to people's psychological strengths. For one thing, epidemics themselves involve geometric progressions, and people find it hard to think about these kinds of progressions. If the virus stays contained to a small number of people, it may never spread widely. But, even a small number of additional cases might push the same virus over a tipping point to where it spreads widely. So, the difference between a scare and a pandemic rests on very subtle differences in conditions.

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Geometric progression If we dodge this flu, it will be hard to determine how close we came to a real pandemic. In lots of other danger situations, we have a much better sense of how nearly disaster was averted. If you slide your car on an icy road, but cause no damage, you still witness a moment in which you have lost control. If a hurricane bears down on you, but is not quite strong enough to do serious damage, at least there is some significant wind and rain. But with a near-pandemic, a relatively small number of people get sick or die. And so we run the risk of becoming complacent if this flu scare falls short of a full-blown outbreak.

Hurricane Indeed, I have seen blog entries that point out that more people have died in the past few months in car accidents, by gunshot wounds, and by heart attacks than by the H1N1 flu. These entries are suggesting that cars, guns, and obesity are more important epidemics than this flu. It is true that cars, guns, and obesity are responsible for a lot of deaths, but the number of these deaths changes at a more-or-less steady rate over the years, and is affected by things like laws and public awareness. A potential pandemic will either kill a few people or a great many. There is little room in between.

Sooner or later there will be another flu virus that is at least as strong as H1N1 and perhaps easier to pass from one person to another. When that happens, governments around the world will issue the same warnings that we are hearing now. There is potential that we will value our own experience over the statistics. Each pandemic we avoid because we did the right thing will be one more piece of evidence that individuals can use to believe that we over-reacted to the danger. Even a small number of people who do not take precautions can tip the balance from a contained virus to a major health disaster. So now and in the future, we have to remember that our intuitions based on our own experiences will not necessarily tell us the right thing to do to help avoid a major outbreak of disease.