I study risk perception. There are several reasons for the differences in estimates of the danger of driving vs. flying (as many of you already said). Here is a list:
1) Availability heuristic: deaths by plane get a lot more media attention than deaths by car. For example, many of the victims of the flight that crashed in Buffalo were on the cover of the NY Times. Most people don't ever get on the cover of the NY Times and it is hard to imagine that these people would have been had their tragic deaths occurred due to car crashes. 2) Evolution: we fear heights more so than driving fast. It just feels more frightening to hurl through the air even when the outcome is almost always good. 3) Perceived control: people have no control when flying. People in general feel better about controllable outcomes. Research comparing the risk perceptions of drivers and passengers show that drivers are more optimistic about their risk than passengers because they feel they can simply avoid accidents by driving carefully (which is partly but not entirely true). 4) Dread: a plane crash is a high dread but rare event. Lots of research shows that people are disproportionately freighted by high dread events. 5) Mysterious technology requiring experts: We tend to be more afraid of technology or inventions we don't understand. Yes planes have been around for a long time but it seems almost magical that a huge plane can fly at all. We certainly have little insight into all the steps that much occur for a plan to fly and it is easy to imagine that something might go wrong and the plane crashes. In contrast, steering clear of other cars seems straight forward. 6) Experience: lots of research shows that when we have experience with an event we judge it as more likely to happen to us. Thus people who have had a serious experience with car accidents (personal accidents or knowing know someone who was injured or died in an accident) will rate the risk as greater than someone who has not had that experience. However, the power of personal experience tends to fade over time. Thus, our greater personal experience with the dangers of driving vs. flying is likely overwhelmed by the frequent media reminders of the dangers of flying (and few media reminders of the dangers of driving). I'm sure there are other factors and some of these obviously interact. Marie **************************************************** Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Psychology Kaufman 168, Dickinson College Carlisle, PA 17013, office (717) 245-1562, fax (717) 245-1971 http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/psych/helwegm Office hours: Monday 10:30-11:30, Tuesday & Wednesday 2:00-3:30 **************************************************** From: Christopher D. Green [mailto:chri...@yorku.ca] Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:17 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology Isn't this just a classic case of Tversky & Kahneman's availability heuristic? Everyone can retrieve stories of horrific air crashes, mainly because so many people die at one instant and the national media gives them saturation coverage. It is much harder to retrieive specific instances of horrific car crashes (because, at most, only a few people die at one time, and the coverage is mostly only local and fairly brief). Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 chri...@yorku.ca<mailto:chri...@yorku.ca> http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== Ken Steele wrote: I agree with Rick that there are two aspects to this calculation when you are trying to describe whether a greater fear of flying is irrational. The personal base rate of driving relative to flying would suggest that driving is a safer activity in that we have more experience of safe driving trips. The lack of knowledge of the base rate of trips in the air would contribute to this fear. But here is the question for me. Assume that people don't know the actual number of flights per day and underestimate that value. If they base their decision on that underestimate, are they being irrational? Or are they being rational, but working with incorrect assumptions about the data? Ken Rick Froman wrote: I think there could be some other factors operating in this overestimation of the danger of air travel. First, everyone travels in cars all the time and we have long ago become habituated to the danger (which doesn't actually bode well for the safety of car travel but does explain why it feels safer). Most people don't travel by air frequently enough to become habituated to it (more people are probably sensitized to it). Those that do travel by air frequently enough to be habituated to it probably do not have a hard time believing it is safer than car travel (also based on personal experience and therefore, no more statistically valid than those who fly rarely who fear air travel). There is another factor related to the availability heuristic that you don't often see addressed. Of course, plane crashes, due to the news, will be more available to memory than car crashes (of which there are so many that only the most horrific would end up on the news). A largely unconsidered factor that relates to the availability heuristic is the frequency of car travel vs. air travel. We see cars all the time around us and planes only when we go to the airport so I think people don't have a good idea of the base number of plane flights there are every day and the number of people who fly each day to compare to the fatalities of the occasional plane crash. According to Wikipedia, on 9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_on_9/11), Canadian and American air traffic controllers had to land 6,500 planes carrying close to a million people. And that was just at one point in time, not the total number of air travelers scheduled to travel on that day. Checking a flight tracker such as http://flightaware.com/ gives you some perspective about the number of flights each day. When I checked it today at 3:30 pm CST, it claimed to be "tracking *4,849* airborne aircraft" and to have "tracked *44,851* arrivals in the last 24 hours". Clicking on the map with the red dots gives you some idea of how many flights there are in the air at any one time. Of course, this doesn't compare to the number of cars but the planes carry many more passengers than the cars and they crash much less frequently than the cars. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences Box 3055 x7295 rfro...@jbu.edu<mailto:rfro...@jbu.edu> http://tinyurl.com/DrFroman Proverbs 14:15 "A simple man believes anything, but a prudent man gives thought to his steps." *From:* Claudia Stanny [mailto:csta...@uwf.edu] *Sent:* Wednesday, March 25, 2009 3:10 PM *To:* Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) *Subject:* RE: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology The short-term probability calculation is an interesting consideration. However, the relative risk of air travel compared to travel by automobile is consistently in favor of air travel as the safer option. Nevertheless, people consistently prefer travel by car as the "safer" option. Much of this fear is driven by ease of retrieving examples of fatalities in air crashes and overweighting this risk. Fatalities in auto crashes are mundane, not covered well in the media, and their risk is underestimated. 911 enhanced the ease of retrieval of air crashes with fatalities (and may have marginally increased the "real" risk of air travel). I doubt that the safe "soft crash" of an airplane in the Hudson River with zero fatalities did anything to reduce this overestimation of the risk of air travel. But that is an empirical question. Anybody working on it? J Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director, Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor, Psychology University of West Florida Pensacola, FL 32514 - 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435 e-mail: csta...@uwf.edu<mailto:csta...@uwf.edu> <mailto:csta...@uwf.edu><mailto:csta...@uwf.edu> CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm *From:* Maxwell Gwynn [mailto:mgw...@wlu.ca] *Sent:* Wednesday, March 25, 2009 2:38 PM *To:* Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) *Subject:* Re: [tips] Rick Steves: Travel guru reports on a little psychology I'm not an expert on Risk Assessment, but it would seem to me that when people were considering the riskiness of traveling by car versus by air, they would have been likely to consider that (after September 11) there had recently been four commercial flights in which all passengers had been killed. The NSC data would not have included this information in their data base. I don't think that the possibility/probability of further terrorist hijackings would be independent of the incidence of recent terrorist hijackings, and so wouldn't people be making a conditional risk calculation? That is, the comparison would not be Probability of dying in a car crash versus Probability of dying in a plane crash (37:1), but rather Probability of dying in a car crash in the next few days of traveling versus Probability of dying in a plane crash in the next few days of traveling _given that_ there had been recent terrorist hijackings of commercial flights (??:1). What I'm getting at is that the increase in car travel was not necessarily all a result of the "dread risk" phenomenon, but also included some novel calculations of relative risks based on reality rather than overreaction. -Max Maxwell Gwynn, PhD Psychology Department Wilfrid Laurier University 519-884-0710 ext 3854 mgw...@wlu.ca<mailto:mgw...@wlu.ca> <mailto:mgw...@wlu.ca><mailto:mgw...@wlu.ca> >> "Frantz, Sue" sfra...@highline.edu<mailto:sfra...@highline.edu>> 3/25/2009 >> 11:51 AM >> <mailto:sfra...@highline.edu%3e%203/25/2009%2011:51%20AM%20%3e%3e><mailto:sfra...@highline.edu%3e%203/25/2009%2011:51%20AM%20%3e%3e> Bungled Risk Assessment and Tragic Road Trips <http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/index.cfm?fuseaction=entry&entryID=333><http://www.ricksteves.com/blog/index.cfm?fuseaction=entry&entryID=333> Fearing dying in a terrorist airplane crash because the September 11 events were so prominent in our memories, we reduced our air travel and increased our automobile travel, leading to a significantly great number of fatal traffic accidents than usual. It is estimated that about 1,600 more people needlessly died in these traffic accidents (Gigerenzer, 2006). These lives could have been saved had we not reacted to the dread risk as we did. We just do not seem to realize that it is far safer to fly than to drive. National Safety Council data reveal that you are 37 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a commercial flight." - --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
