Risk perception

Ah yes, one of my favorite subjects.Two and a half million people fly in the United States every day. Until Tuesday of this week, there had not been a single fatality resulting from a commercial flight in the United States since 2009. On Tuesday, one person died following the disintegration of an engine on a Southwest Airlines flight.This event was the lead story on every TV news program and on every major new web site, and has continued to be a front page story every day since. Nobody has been paying attention, but if the past three days have been about average, more than 300 people have died in the U.S. in motor vehicle crashes since Tuesday. Many of the crashes involved multiple fatalities. Not a single one of them made national news.So what ' s going on here? It is true that commercial airplane crashes normally draw a lot of attention because a large number of people are killed all at once. We seem to perceive a single, large-scale catastrophe as more important than a whole lot of smaller ones. That is, until we don ' t. Hardly anyone in the U.S. is paying any attention to the war, famine and pestilence in Yemen right now; our interest in Syria is pretty well over even though the war is not. Oh wait! Chemical weapons!I ' ll get back to that momentarily. To stick with the Southwest Airlines engine failure, it was not a large-scale catastrophe, so why the OJ treatment? There was drama, to be sure. The pilot was skilled and composed and she is given credit for saving the pla...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs