What Is Really Risky?

October 22, 2012

Interview with Glenn Croston, author of the book The Real Story of Risk: Adventures in a Hazardous World

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Mike Carruthers:
Interesting thing about risk we often worry about the wrong risks.

Glenn Croston:
Why do we really worry about things like sharks or snakes that affect almost no one - whereas the big killers like heart disease we do our best to ignore?
 

Glenn Croston, author of the book The Real Story of Risk: Adventures in a Hazardous World

We worry a lot about gory risks which aren’t, specifically speaking, all that common. But we tend to ignore the slow risks, the not so gory risks, the not violent risks which overall statistically are far more abundant risks in our daily lives.

Another thing that affects our perception of risk is how much control we have over the situation.

And there’s a really common perspective that people have an optimism bias. That we think nothing bad is ever going to happen to us especially not if we’re in control. If we’re driving the car we trust ourselves – maybe too much because then we allow ourselves to get away with texting or putting on our makeup or reading the newspaper.

We evolved as species to worry more about immediate risks things like the charging water buffalo.

You’re not going to fight a water buffalo but you’ve got to quickly run away and that’s within your power to do. So those are the kinds of things we tend to do well with if it’s an immediate threat we have personal responsibility, we have control and we know what to do about it. But the problem is a lot of the threats we face they’re not like that they’re not the charging water buffalo right there in front of us. They’re diffuse responsibilities spread out over time although they’re very common today they’re much harder for us to deal with.