| The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, February 14 2009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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Crash tragedy obscures the larger story. It is a tragedy that 50 people died in a plane crash in the United States Thursday night. But making it all the worse is that one of the dead is Beverly Eckert, the wife of a man killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Eckert was on her way to a ceremony to be held on what would have been her husband's birthday. The ceremony was to mark the creation of a scholarship in her husband's name. It is unbearably sad. And yet, we do bear it. In fact, we are drawn to it. It's worldwide news. All over the planet, people are reading, hearing, and talking about this sad story -- a simple fact that powerfully demonstrates an important facet of human nature with huge consequences for how we see the world. Our species loves stories. We love to tell stories. We love to hear stories. It is a universal human trait, a behaviour observed by anthropologists in every culture, in every place, in every time. Evolutionary psychologists believe it is biologically hard-wired. What constitutes a story is also universal. The absolutely essential element is that it involves individual, identifiable people. Even stories about animals, elements, or gods follow this rule because their supposedly non-human protagonists are fully anthropomorphized --they are humans in another guise. Stories also feature certain basic elements, including conflict, emotion, and novelty. The more these elements are present in the story, the better -- the more compelling -- it is. It's true of Hollywood movies. It's true of thriller novels, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Homer. And it's true of the daily news. Why is the plane crash in Buffalo worldwide news? Why are people talking about it on blogs, at watercoolers, in elevators?
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Aside from the very few personally touched by the tragedy, the crash is of no personal consequence. It tells us nothing about the state of travel safety. It has no economic or social repercussions. So why are we paying attention to it and talking about it? Because it's a powerful story, of course. Not only did 50 innocent people die violently, there is a single, identifiable victim who died under circumstances that are incredibly poignant. This is the stuff of a really sad movie. But notice what is essentially irrelevant to the story: numbers. The only figure involved is 50, the total number of dead. But does it really matter? If 40 people had died, would it have made any difference to the power of the story? 30? 20? Not at all. A tragedy happened, whatever the number. And that poor woman ... Scientists have discovered humans do have an intuitive grasp of numbers, but it is primitive. We are hardwired to know the difference between two and three, for example. It's a trait we share with rats, dolphins, and other species. But beyond that, we are not wired for numbers. We can understand them if we are taught how they work and if we make the effort to think about them consciously. But we do not respond to numbers emotionally, intuitively, instinctively. They leave us cold. Josef Stalin is reputed to have said "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." It's a brilliant insight, whether the old murderer actually said it or not. Logically, it makes no sense. If one dead is a tragedy, a million dead is a million tragedies. But human nature isn't calibrated that way. Stories matter. Numbers don't. And since you can tell a powerful story about one death but you can't about one million, the one death is powerful in a way the one million is not. Scientists like to say "anecdotes aren't data," meaning stories cannot prove what only properly gathered numbers can. And they're right, in rational terms. But human nature isn't rational, in this sense. For people, the maxim is "data aren't anecdotes."
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Here are two numbers you probably haven't heard before: In 2007 and 2008, American airlines carried 1.5 billion passengers on scheduled flights. In those two years, not one passenger died in a crash. That was a record. And it wasn't a fluke. The rate of fatalities on American airlines fell by half between the 1960s and 1970s. It fell by a third between the 1970s and 1980s. It fell by almost half again from the 1980s to the 1990s. In this decade, the risk is half what it was in the 1990s. (The story is much the same in Canada and other developed countries, incidentally.) At the end of 2008, Alan Levin, a USA Today reporter who covers aviation issues, noticed that the U.S. was about to go two years without one death. So he wrote a short article about it. It got a few mentions elsewhere. And that was the end of it. That's all the attention this wonderful news got. These statistics may be essential to understanding safety. They may tell us more about the risks of travel than dozens of stories about crashed airplanes. And yet they are only numbers. But when a pilot lands a plane safely on a river, it is the "Miracle on the Hudson" and all the world stops to watch. And when the widow of a 9/11 victim dies in a crash on her way to commemorate her lost husband, we all share the pain. Inevitably, the human preference for stories over numbers skews our perceptions of the world. We see danger where there is very little. We ignore what should worry us. We simply do not see clearly. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |