Why aren’t people taking drastic action in the face of an impending disaster? I’ve been deeply troubled by this question since climate change started gaining traction as a serious issue in society. I’ve always imagined people running helter-skelter trying to stop the worst from happening. Instead, most people are doing nothing about this issue. In the face of almost certain death, we continue in oblivion by driving around in our gas-guzzling “fuck-you mobiles” (SUVs/ cars, as described by Bill Maher), pushing Coca Cola down peoples throats and building a world based on financial gain instead of value creation.

Oddly enough, I was startled to find the answer to my question in an article in the Scientific American Mind entitled “The Powers and Perils of Intuition” by David G. Myers. Here’s an excerpt to the section that answered my question:

Why do we so often fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers (whose habits shorten their lives, on average, by about five years) worry before flying (which shortens life on average by one day)? Why do we fear violent crime more than obesity and clogged arteries? Why do we fear tragic but isolated terrorist acts more than the future’s omnipresent weapon of mass destruction: global climate change? In a nutshell, why do we fret about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities?

Psychological science has identified four factors that feed our risk intuitions:

We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear.
With our old brain living in a new world, we are disposed to fear confinement and height, snakes and spiders, and humans outside our tribe.

We fear what we cannot control.
Behind the wheel of our car, but not in an airplane, we feel control.

We fear what is immediate.
Smoking’s lethality and the threats of rising seas and extreme weather are in the distant future. The airplane take-off in now.

We fear threats readily available in memory.
If a surface-to-air missile brings down a single airliner, the result - thanks to the availabililty of heuristics (rule of thumb) - will be traumatic for the airline industry. Given the difficulty of grasping the infinitesimal odds of its being (among 11 million annual airline flights) the plane that we are on, the probabilities will not persuade us. Intuitive fears will hijack the rational mind.

For these reasons, we fear too little those things that claim lives undramatically (smoking quietly kills 400,000 Americans annually) and too much those things that kill in spectacular bunches. By checking our intuitive fears against the facts, with mindfulness of the realities of how humans die, we can prepare for tomorrow’s biggest dangers.