Risk Is Influenced by Conscious and Subconscious Decisions

I’m willing to bet that you’re never late for a truly important meeting — especially not when the meeting is a matter of life and death — because, in those cases, people do everything in their power to be on time: They set an alarm to go off well before the meeting time, catch an earlier train, and pick out their clothes the night before. They make sure that all the things that could go wrong have no chance of actually going wrong.

The “important” meetings that people are late for are the ones that are not important enough to warrant such preparation. These are the meetings over which their internal risk-benefit assessment calculated that, with the usual traffic, and with their usual luck, they were more likely than not to make the appointment on time — and while there was a small chance they could have missed it, it was worth taking the risk and potentially dealing with the consequences.

In this way, no accident is actually an “accident.” Those rare happenings are just corner cases that we, ahead of time, have decided are acceptable. This isn’t only true for meetings, but also applies to traffic situations, how we handle a pandemic, and anything else that the real world has in store for us.

We accept some risks only because, quite often, the 100% safe alternative isn’t actually feasible. We can’t take the earlier train for every meeting, because we really don’t want to sit in waiting rooms for most of our workday. And we can’t all walk instead of drive, because some trips really cannot wait.

The comedian George Carlin makes the point in his own way: “If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?”

Safer bets

Speed limits, traffic rules, and other elements of road safety are the result of a long period of trial and error, but the consensus on them arose from many individual cost-benefit calculations. In a rather roundabout way, society has accepted that we’re okay with risking a certain number of traffic accidents if the alternative means everything would have to move much, much slower.

So how do we decide what level of risk is acceptable?

The psychologist Paul Slovic is known for his extensive research in risk perception and decision-making. His work suggests that people rely on their emotional responses — rather than on rational judgment — in situations where uncertainty or risk is at play. This might come as a surprise to those of us who think we’re rational thinkers, but to be fair, it’s probably good news. People really can be rather bad at statistics and calculating probability.

In the publication Facts and Fears: Societal Perception of Risk, Slovic and his co-authors, Baruch Fischhoff and Sarah Lichtenstein, explain that when people decide to engage in behaviors such as smoking or unsafe driving situations, they may be aware of available statistics that could guide those decisions. However, without interpretation and context, these statistics are merely empty numbers and therefore won’t be incorporated into the actual decision-making process.

Different groups of people can vary greatly and systematically in their perceptions of risk. For instance, there’s a difference between experts and laypersons, and there are even differences between individuals within the same group as well. Someone can have cognitive limitations, be swayed by biased media coverage, have a misleading experience, or experience a whole other set of variables that change their opinions. All of these factors can lead to risks being misjudged, uncertainty denied altogether, or judgments backed by unwarranted confidence. Factors such as familiarity or dread can also significantly influence how individuals perceive the severity of a risk.

The best decision may be no decision at all

Since we decide which types of accidents are acceptable and which ones aren’t, accidents are created by our decisions.

There are differences in how groups of individuals make their risk-benefit calculations — and then there are all the emotions and other factors that affect those calculations as well. But since experts in a field are generally better at calculating acceptable risk-benefit ratios than the rest of the public, the safest bet might be to allow experts to spread their wisdom.

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Psychology plays a fundamental role in the success of prevention strategies. Understanding human behavior, the decision-making process, and how individuals perceive and respond to risks is crucial in designing effective prevention measures.

For example, behavioral economics suggests that whether we emphasize potential losses or gains makes a huge difference, and so individuals respond very differently to a choice framed as “80% chance of survival” versus “20% chance of mortality,” even though these two mean the exact same thing. When asking people to make a decision, how the information is presented matters a whole lot.

Similarly, people don’t like the hassle of changing the default option. In situations like organ donation or retirement savings plans, designing the default option carefully can significantly impact participation rates.

And sometimes a clever design can make a decision obsolete. Many Finnish motorways feature curves instead of long, straight stretches. The idea behind this design is to prevent monotony and therefore maintain a driver’s attention, especially on long journeys. The changing landscape and subtle curves help keep drivers engaged, reducing the likelihood of fatigue that can lead to accidents.