Risk Thinking and Human Brain Tricks

Human brains often err in assessing risks. In a thunderstorm, perhaps we worry more about getting hit by lightning than about our car swerving on wet pavement. Or we fear terrorism more than we fear driving to the grocery store (but driving kills far more people than terrorism). Our brains anchor on the sensational and build memories and stories around those moments. 

But risk is all around us. Yes, it can sometimes manifest in striking ways, but it can also lurk in spreadsheets full of seemingly unremarkable information, or it can arise in a deviation from established procedure that seems, in the moment, like no big deal. The magnitude of risk has little to do with its showiness. Similar to how when risk management succeeds, the victory is often silent, risk is often quiet and under the radar. 

How we react to risk is under our control, but only if we can contravene our brain’s instinctive perceptions based on ancient fight-or-flight programming. 

How about an example?

Sure. Like I said, driving is one of the riskiest things we do every day. But of course most of us do drive, because the perceived benefit outweighs the perceived risk. And most of the time, that’s the right call. But there are exceptions: some road terrain has risk that outweighs the benefit, as long as a safer substitute is available. 

For example: when I lived in L.A., there was a blind left turn out of my apartment driveway, since parked cars lined the streets on both sides. You could be almost sure, but rarely perfectly sure, that no one was coming. Still, turning left was the shorter route, and I often took that route on my way to work. One morning, I edged out, confirmed no one was coming, turned left—and saw another driver oncoming perhaps twenty feet away. He swerved, I swerved, and we ended up in opposite lanes, facing opposite directions, neither of us having hit any parked cars or each other. I looked at him. He looked at me. We drove away. 

I never turned left out of that driveway again, and that makes sense because that turn was extremely dangerous. I’d been rolling dice, my brain telling me that the benefit of saving three minutes on the commute was worth the risk, and my number finally came up. Over the course of years, odds were fairly high it could come up again. 

Eating sub-optimally is another example, with the added wrinkle that cardiovascular and metabolic risk build up over decades, and in the meantime, our brains’ short-term reward centers like the idea of brownies and ice cream. They are delicious, and our brain is salivating: who knows when we will find more?

One problem: we mostly aren’t hunting and gathering. We may have more brownies and ice cream at our disposal than we know what do with, enough to degrade the rest of our lives if we indulge enough. Our brains are hopelessly behind modern society, and in this context, making bad risk decisions feels great. 

So I should be more cautious?

Not always! Here’s a counterexample. Several years ago, I was on a plane that experienced a bird strike shortly after takeoff (fortunately not a double bird strike!). I heard an odd, grinding, whirring noise as we gained height over New Jersey, but couldn’t see anything awry when I looked back out the window: no flames or smoke. One of the flight crew came on the loudspeaker and said, as I recall, “We are returning to the airport out of an abundance of caution”—and that was scary, because those words are often code for, Shit is happening as we speak. 

We whirred along and landed, a concerted act of non-drama, though we didn’t leave the plane immediately. I looked out my window again and saw a pilot posing for a photo next to the engine. Cannot be good, I thought. Sure enough, we left the plane and it was taken out of service because the bird had destroyed the engine. 

Despite the incident, I got on another plane an hour or so later and went on to my destination, overriding my brain’s slightly haywire circuits. I looked up bird strikes and found there have been, on average, more than 7000 bird strikes annually¹ in the United States in recent decades: 227,005 total in a thirty-year period from 1990 to 2019. Yet, there were only 292 human fatalities from “wildlife strikes” globally during that period². This risk is extremely low, even if the human brain doesn’t like it and wants to panic. 

In situations like this, getting back on the horse, even when your brain is telling you to flee, is important. That’s why I looked up the statistics and then got back on the replacement plane. I need to go to distant places sometimes, and I can’t travel by covered wagon. It’s statistically unlikely, given my frequency of travel, that I’ll ever be on a plane that strikes a bird again. And if it happens, I’ll do the same thing I did last time: override the fight-or-flight response and carry on. 

Okay, let’s wrap up. 

Risk ebbs and flows along with changes in society, the economy, technology, politics, and our individual life choices. Our very existence is a story of risk stretching back to prehistoric times and our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors.

In our current society, which doesn’t match the environment our ancestors encountered in so many ways, the ability to differentiate between the sensational but rare and the common but under-considered is a superpower. I don’t always do it right. No one does it right all the time. But it’s worthwhile to practice developing that skill, so we can tune our “risk muscle memory” to a more modern channel. 

1. This is an average. There were more than 17,000 bird strikes in the US in 2019, according to the FAA frequently asked questions. The more flights there are, the more bird strikes there will be, and there are more flights now than there were in 1990. Even so, this is still extremely low-risk! There are 16,405,000 flights annually in the United States.

2. “Wildlife Hazard Mitigation: Frequently Asked Questions and Answers.” Federal Aviation Administration. https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/wildlife/faq