ArticlesI offer here another way to look at various human behaviours. I am not suggesting it is the “right” way, just that it is one more way to get some insight.
Risk Taking
We humans take risks all the time, in order to get some reward.
Sometimes it is an obvious gamble, like betting on a roulette wheel or buying some shares. These are the sort of gambles that appear in probability text books.
Sometimes it is an obvious risk, like jumping off a a cliff with a bungee cord attached to your feet, but perhaps not something you would associate with probability theory. Yet, you are betting that the cord won’t break in order to get a pay-off of a adrenaline rush.
Sometimes it is a day-to-day event, like crossing the road to get to the butchers’.
You probably don’t normally see this as a risk-taking behaviour, but if you squint hard, you can see that it is. You are betting that you won’t get hit by a car; the cost of losing the bet is injury or death, while the benefit from winning is the opportunity to purchase some meat.
We rapidly make these every-day decisions every… err… day. The decisions we make are not necessarily rational: humans are notoriously bad at handling with low-probability, high-cost risks (e.g. smoking), and are certainly inconsistent. A second-order effect comes in where we take accept a risk in not fully investigating the probability of an event, because the cost of investigating it may itself outweigh the benefit of understanding the it.
However, we’ve evolved to make these decisions quickly and get on with our lives, rather than to get caught up in computing expected values. A wise man once pointed out (read ‘I can’t remember who’) that if we had a higher life expectancy – say 200 years old – we might refuse to cross the road – it is too high a risk.
Different people select different points on the risk-aversity scale – for example, some people will jay-walk, while others will only cross at the traffic lights on a green light. Some people will go bungee-jumping, some won’t.
New Insight
Okay, so this is an uncommon perspective to take, but not particularly controversial, so why bother? Well, here’s an insight:
Humans hate other people choosing the risk-levels for them.
With this insight, we can explain a number of phenomena.
Why do speeding drivers and drink-drivers get such a bad reputation, while bungee-jumping is legal? From this perspective, the argument would be that it’s because dangerous drivers risk my life with their behaviour. Bungee jumpers only risk their own lives.
Why does flying cause so many phobias? Because, as a passenger, you are require to tolerate the risk-taking behaviour of a couple of pilots and the aviation industry, without any ability to control your fate.
It doesn’t explain why bike-helmet and seat-belt laws exist, but it does explain why they need to be enforced so strongly to have people pay attention to them; they want to make their own risk-taking decisions.
It explains why developers often protest against rigorous processes that are thrust upon them from above (like peer-reviews and unit-testing). It takes away their ability to control the risks that they take with their code.
To use an Australian finance example, if I fail to elect a super-annuation fund, my employer will (by law?) put my money into a very low-risk, low-return fund – a poor financial decision for someone my age, but one determined, I believe, by the driving force that no-one should have their money risked without their consent. Similar understandings hobble the way governments can invest their monies in a variety of situations.
The legal requirements for children to have innoculations against various diseases is another controversial area, and this insight suggests why. Parents of infants don’t want to be exposed by others (out of their control) to the risks of disease. Parents of older children don’t want to be exposed (out of their control) to the (often exaggerated?) risks of innoculation side-effects.
If you accept that passive smoking is dangerous, then it forms a strong argument – according to this view on the human thought process – for non-smoking environments. “No matter what risks I take in day-to-day life, you’re not permitted to choose to smoke in any way that puts me at risk.” (I prefer to avoid the passive smoking line, and stick to the more immediate one: “That stinks. Please get away from me.”)
I think the list of controversies that can be illuminated this way goes on – coming work while sneezing, letting prisoners out on parole, terrorism, using a mobile phone on an airplane, bird flu fears, sending troops to war…
Conclusion
The next time you get frustrated with someone, ask yourself if the reason can be explained because they are limiting your ability to choose your own level of risk-taking.
If not, oh well. As I said at the beginning, this is just one way of looking at things.
If it is, yes! That reinforces the power of this way of looking at things.
However, I am not sure it helps much. I haven’t a recommendation about how to use this insight to solve this problem or to change your life. If you do, please let me know. We can write one of those self-help books together that have one simple idea spread over 200 pages.
Comment by Andrew on December 8, 2005
I don’t think I trust you to co-author a self-help book. It might not sell, and we’d be left with thousands of unsold copies. I think I’ll do it by myself.
Comment by Alastair on December 8, 2005
Makes sense to me. In fact, motorcyclists have an aphorism that it is “always scarier up the back”. Meaning that a pillion passenger will always feel a lot more anxious than the rider, even though they are taking exactly the same risk. I can verify this from my biking days.