Is there a term for when people’s risk assessment goes haywire, and they end up preparing for events that will never happen?
Like for example, I’ve known a few preppers in my day, more than one person who’s convinced that people are out to rob/rape/kill them and therefore carry guns, and people who are so worried about cybercrime that they unplug their computers at night. Or my favorite, the little goofy hammers in glove boxes in case you are in the car as it’s sinking that you can use to break the window. And in another thread, there was actual serious discussion about the relative vulnerability of phones vs. PCs, and what to do if someone robs you and makes you transfer money to them(?).
To me, these all seem like examples of flawed risk assessment. That stuff just isn’t going to happen in the real world. Your real threats are stuff that we know are going to eventually happen- natural disasters of various magnitudes, small home disasters, medical emergencies, flat tires, etc… and those are the ones you should prepare for.
Worrying about stuff that could happen, but is unlikely to happen is foolish, but apparently pretty common. Is there a term for this or is it a recognized phenomenon beyond “poor risk assessment”?
My understanding of proper risk assessment is that likelihood of occurrence is built into the model. In other words, something that would be horrific if it occurred, but which realistically almost certainly won’t, receives a very low score in exercises designed to identify risks and appropriate mitigation strategies.
I guess where I’m going is that plenty of us have poor risk assessment at one time or another, but it’s something else entirely to be willing to go through the time, money and effort to prepare for events based on the poor risk assessment. I mean, it’s far more likely that people won’t recognize the obvious risks and fail to prepare for them, than they’ll fail to recognize them, and then seriously prepare for other, considerably less likely stuff.
That’s what I’m getting at- it’s the actively misguided part.
Well there’s catastrophizing in psychology. But your assessment is deeply flawed. Risk assessment should involve three dimensions. Likelihood, severity of outcome and cost of mitigation.
The likelihood of your car ending up in water and you having issues with the windows and or seat belt is quite low, but not zero, and the severity is high and the cost of a tool that will break the window (and often includes a recessed blade to cut a seat belt) is insignificant.
In contrast for most people the risks of having a gun is higher than the chance of having one preventing a bad outcome.
And some outcomes become much more likely if there isn’t a large number of people making the effort to lower the risk. Computer and cell phone security is one such thing. If most people don’t take steps to safeguard against blackmail using what is now the number one tool to access all their finances that significantly increases the odds of criminals starting to take advantage of the opportunities offered.
Even at that, it’s $5 too much. That kind of thing NEVER happens, even if the cost of the tool is pretty much incidental. I mean, I wish I was the guy who thought those things up, but I’d be extremely surprised if one of those has ever actually been used for its intended purpose.
And I’m not talking about normal phone security- the thread I was referencing was about someone holding you up and making you use Zelle or something to transfer money to them on the spot, and what sort of safeguards you could take against that. Again, that never happens, or it’s the sort of thing that only happens to those people who woke up in bathtubs full of ice after their kidneys were stolen.
What I’m talking about is having one of those goofy hammers, yet not spending the time to make sure their spare tire and jack are easily accessible and in good working condition. Or who carry guns to defend against phantom muggers, but don’t keep their smoke alarms in working condition and tested.
Okay, so you are talking about ordinary humans assessing risk in their daily lives, versus organizations/government policies assessing and managing risk?
These are very different things. As a professional working in development organizations, my job often included analyzing “what could possibly go wrong here? Is it at all likely? How should we plan accordingly?” We had pretty good tools that helped us look objectively at the extent to which we should prepare for various awful events.
Then there is the case of, “Ordinary human going about life and how those people manage risk.” A classic example being the fact that most people think nothing of driving to the airport, but may obsess over the possibility of a plane crash once they are on an airplane. Objective statistics tell us that the risk of injury/death while in a road vehicle far exceeds the likelihood of injury/death from being a passenger on an airplane.
It’s human nature to misunderstand (or in the inadvertently lovely terminology of George W. Bush, “misunderestimate”) risk.
Individuals, not organizations. I’m aware of how organizational risk assessment works; maybe that’s part of why I’m so fascinated with how weirdly people do it in their personal lives.
Part of it is the Availability Heuristic/Bias. Because the unlikely but “dramatic” events are the ones we hear about and think about and get stuck in our minds, we overestimate the risk of their happening to us.
Bad risk assessment goes both ways. Approximately 400 people are killed in the US each year due to accidental drownings in cars. How many would be prevented by these tools is open to question, but the answer isn’t zero.
While it happens, it’s extremely rare in most parts of the US. Certainly nothing that a suburban white guy should carry a gun to defend against, especially when he rarely leaves the suburbs.
Death by submersion in a vehicle occurs about 0.03% of car deaths. It’s not common, but to say that it “NEVER happens” is demonstrably false.
I’ve never used a glass breaker to egress from a vehicle but I did use one to break the side glass on a burning car and remove the unconscious occupant. I keep a breaker (actually two; one is a combination pen/breaker and one is on a pair of folding medical shears) and webcutter in my vehicle along with a full trauma/wilderness medical kit because even though I’ve never needed to use them (aside from that one instance) if I needed it and didn’t have it I would rue the oversight.
I’ve been subject to an attempted carjacking twice, an attempted mugging, and have been shot (fortunately was wearing body armor at the time). Admittedly, in none of those cases did I use or really need a gun to respond, but crime does occur even to people who live in nicely kept suburbs. The argument against routinely carrying a gun is more on the bent of the liability of misplacing it and potential for negligent discharge by the typical poorly trained owner (and just the general awkwardness and discomfort of concealed carry) rather than that crime never happens to good people.
It’s not just about water. I was in a wreck several years ago that managed to bang up all four doors to the point that they couldn’t be opened. No water involved, but I didn’t want to be out in the middle of traffic any longer, so I wanted to GTFO right now. I was able to lower my driver door window and crawl out, but if that window had also been disabled, a window-shattering hammer would have come in handy.
A tool like this can also be handy for rescuing other crash victims. Every now and then there’s video on the evening news of a crash in which the occupant is non-responsive and the car is on fire. Car windows can be astonishingly difficult to break without the right tool. An opportunity to use one of these doesn’t come along very often, but the cost to prepare is minimal.
A lot of people are just negligent about maintaining their car’s spare tire. IOW, it’s not a matter of flawed risk assessment. Very few people make a conscious decision to abandon their roadside tire change capability.
This is where multi-tasking comes in handy. Having a tool that works for more than one emergency makes the cost more reasonable. In the hammer example, you might never end up in a lake and have to escape your car - but pretty much every summer, there’s stories of kids or pets being left in a locked car and dying of the heat. Having a hammer to smash the window might make the difference in saving them, or letting them die. Sure, you could try just using a rock or something, but car windows can be surprising hard to break at times.
You have to be careful here. Many companies have gotten into trouble because of equating an extremely small, almost negligible, probability of happening with will not happen. Therefore they do not try to prevent (or at least mitigate) something with an almost (but not quite) nonexistent probability that has HUGE consequences and so when it does happen …
