Dangerous than Planes? And, if so, What?
4. Problems in Risk Assessment
Risk is perhaps one of the most controversial notions in the
debate between the two visions of rationality, and more than any other, is a multi-faceted construct. Anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and economists such as Aaron Wildavsky have explored the cultural foundations underlying the perception of risk. The former, for instance, has observed a tendency to look for moral, rather than scientific, bases for risk and to equate risk with sin. They categorise cultures according to whether they are built on personal risk perception, or rather on risk assessment by a scientific hierarchy.4
F A B I O N U T I
Travel, being a risky activity itself, provides many examples of what has been found in recent literature.
For instance: it is well known that trains are perceived as less dangerous than other comparable travel modes. Therefore, railway accidents strike people as unexpected (and, perhaps, ‘unjust’). As a consequence, travellers might exhibit lesser propensity to pay for railway trips than for other - assumedly riskier - kind of trips. On the other hand, they might be less inclined to pay for increasing safety on the railways than on other transport modes.
The relevance of willingness to pay is likely to become greater, as certain public services are moved into the realm of market relationships. In many European countries formerly characterised by mixed economies, the role of consumer demand was necessarily dwarfed by (a) limited reliance on utilitarian principles in setting prices, and (b) prevalence of general taxation as a means to collect revenues. These premises are being increasingly overturned, or have been overturned already in several places. Can willingness to pay, however, be a reliable guidance to the determination of economic prices?
Statistically, while being the safest travel mode on earth, the railway is not safer than all other competing travel modes. The fact that it is thought to be so may simply be due to bad information. However, even when informed about the relative riskiness of comparable modes, most people tend to insist that they would feel more secure on a train than, say, on a plane. In other words, it has been convincingly shown that, even
after being provided with evidences about the relative
magnitude of the chances to incur a disaster with a fatal outcome on a train as opposed to a plane, most people - regardless of their education, professional status, etc. - express the same disfavour for the plane that they exhibited before.
This case is widely employed as an example of cognitive dissonance, i.e., the refusal to accept an evidence which runs contrary to one’s beliefs.5
To reconcile such (apparent) contradictions, we have to assume people’s unfamiliarity with even elementary handling of statistics and probability, and to accept the idea that they will more likely recur to logical ‘shortcuts’, which make us save time and effort, even at the cost of big mistakes. This has been shown in a number of cases both related and unrelated to the treatment of risk. For example, when faced with the problem of assessing the identity of an unknown individual, about whom only little information is provided, the majority of people will typically cling to stereotypes (the resemblance of the individual’s description to a known archetype), rather than statistical likelihood (the statistical odds of him belonging to a given group, or social status, etc.), even when the properly assessed likelihood is included among the data of the problem. According to the results of recent research, we suspect that the above tendency is strengthened in dealing with problems which imply a certain amount of strain because of their novelty or complexity. In a sense, it seems that people are more inclined to elaborate on the qualitative, than on the
quantitative, side of the choice which is submitted to them. Thus, railways accidents are often seen as more ‘controllable’ than (for example) plane accidents, and therefore less threatening. While this is ‘obviously’ untrue (the comparison is made in terms of accidents of given gravity, e.g., fatal ones: then, ‘controllability’, besides being an illusion, is not relevant to the final outcome6), the source of the mistake is
clear: quality is perceived as relevant (or, if we prefer, process utility is considered at least as relevant as product utility): the idea of ‘crash’ may look more frightening to many than that of ‘clash’, although, once we reckon in terms of fatal accidents, the difference can only be perceived at the esthetical level. And yet, we can easily agree that quality is important and that, once the actual terms of the choice have been redressed, it can well be considered meaningful. This contradiction lies at the roots of a well known dilemma in risk regulation (see below).
It is perfectly consistent with the observation above to notice that plane accidents also exhibit a number of characteristics which can help to understand the attitudes of laypeople. Plane accidents are perceived as unfamiliar events, whose probability is more difficult to assess. This can by itself be a problem, but perhaps plane accidents are also seen as ‘less natural’ than accidents which happen on the ground. This may well be the expression of a primitive notion of nature, - so deeply rooted in fact, that it can be regarded more as an instinct than a true attitude - but instincts do play a role in our behaviour. (According to some scholars, a similar bias seems to be at work in shaping people’s hostility toward nuclear power stations).
There are certainly other - though not unrelated - elements which can influence the comparison between travel modes in terms of their relative riskiness.
For instance, it can be argued that different sorts of risks are not assessed in symmetrical manners. Many people tend to consider travel accidents as real expressions of an unfriendly fate, which distributes a given number of fatalities out of a limited stock in a given span of time. This can perhaps explain another statistical oddity, i.e., the propensity exhibited by many individuals to believe that the chances of being caught in a plane accident are bound to rise with the increase in the number of plane trips that are made by the same person and that therefore, in deciding whether to take a train or a plane on comparable routes, it will always be safer to choose the former.
The way people process information is also relevant to this issue. To this effect, retrievability can be particularly important. Typically, the chances of being involved in a given event can be made to depend on the number of similar events that one is able to remember.7Now, memory is influenced by
many factors, including - prominently - saliency. Needless to say, accidents involving trains are less salient than others (though perhaps more salient than, say, those involving cars). In particular, they are far less salient than plane accidents. Saliency, of course, depends more on ease of association than on any other objectively measurable dimension of the event.
Plane crashes are generally covered by TV and magazines, and their details are exposed, with much greater pictorial emphasis than any other comparable event. Thus, they are easily remembered and ‘numbered’. The same could hardly be said of train accidents, unless they can be hooked to a mental clue, (e.g., bracketed under a heading like ‘privatisation’).
There are, however, other aspects to be reckoned. A highly- valued danger hanging over a small number of persons is regarded as worse than a minor danger affecting a higher number of individuals, even if they come very close to each other in numerical value (e.g., when assessed in terms of expected value).
All this is compounded by the fact that events of a
catastrophic kind are evaluated at a (negative) premium over
equally damaging events, but lacking this character.
One of the most significant facets of risk - and one which has an obvious cultural dimension - is perhaps provided by what we could name the degree of fear. A sudden death is seen by many (typically, in the Western world) as ‘more acceptable’ to a lingering one. This fact, too, can have consequences on the comparative evaluations of risks in travel.
Individual controllability - which has already been mentioned
as an attribute which people use to evaluate, although sometimes in very subjective manners - diminishes the perception of risk. This may have - and it often has – a moral overtone (e.g., exposing children to a danger which is beyond their control can look worse, also in the sense of ‘more morally guilty’). Again, this is just a step away from considering certain, more ‘natural’, travel modes as less threatening than others.
Irreversibility is something that can make risk perception
more acute. For example, the risk of lesser, but permanent, injuries can be deemed more severe than that of greater, but reversible, ones.
Salience of blame. If reducing risk can also ‘redress
injustice’, the corresponding action may be seen as more worthwhile. Risk-reducing actions in favour, e.g., of poorer people (lower class trippers?) are often at a premium vis-à-vis actions taken in the interest of the rich.
Identifiability of those at risk. The rescue of people trapped in
a tunnel, or in a wrecked carriage, may warrant more money and time than a risk imminent to a number of random individuals. Here, however, it should be noted that the use of a correct practice in decision making requires an ex-ante evaluation of alternatives, and therefore for the evaluation of ‘disembodied’ risks. Statistical lives should be substituted for identifiable victims, in order to avoid the psychological and ethical overtones which are inevitably raised by the problem of assessing the value of human life.
Expanding what we said above, we might notice that people tend to overrate certain risks implied by unlikely events (e.g.,
hurricanes, or guerrilla episodes), while underrating more realistic risks connected with familiar events or activities (e.g., contracting common disease, or suffering a heart failure, or incurring accident during the usual occupations of a working day).
By the same token, if an activity is not regarded as objectionable, or ‘unjust’, its degree of riskiness in generally considered low (which does not prevent people from asking exceptionally high compensations in case of accident). As another example, most individuals seem more sensitive to deviations from levels of risk which are considered customary, than to the absolute level of risk.11Likewise, they
tend to react more strongly when faced with the prospect of an increase over the current level of risk, or the appearing of a new risk, than when faced with the prospect of a reduction in the current - assumedly familiar - level.12
A much needed refinement of the practices followed in comparing risks would consist in trying to estimate the advantages to be expected from the risk-reducing action, as well as the costs at which reduction can be obtained. Ideally, benefits and costs ought to be combined in a benefit-cost ratio, in order to give a clear idea of the efficiency of the competing actions which are being envisaged.
Comparing risk is a demanding job. Still, in a market setting, where we can be required to evaluate risk per se in an outright form, or in the form of fixing standards, it cannot be escaped. What we should do, is to try to rationalise in explicit terms the less formal thought process which individuals and governments rely upon when they make choices in any given area.