news-of-plane-crash-is-traumatic-know-how-to-cope-with-risk

On Thursday afternoon local time, an Air India passenger plane bound for London crashed shortly after take-off from the northwestern Indian city of Ahmedabad. The Boeing 787-7 Dreamliner crashed into a medical college.

 

Miraculously, only one passenger – British national Vishwashkumar Ramesh – survived the crash that killed rest of the 241 passengers and crew on board and another 29 persons, including five MBBS students, on the ground.

 

Thankfully, catastrophic plane crashes such as this are very rare. But seeing news of such a horrific event is traumatic, particularly for people who may have a fear of flying or are due to travel on a plane soon.

 

If you’re feeling anxious following this distressing news, it’s understandable. But here are some things worth considering when you’re thinking about the risk of plane travel.

 

Just how dangerous is flying?

 

One of the ways to make sense of risks, especially really small ones, is to put them into context.

 

Although there are various ways to do this, we can first look to figures that tell us the risk of dying in a plane crash per passenger who boards a plane. Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calculated that in 2018–22, this figure was one in 13.7 million. By any reckoning, this is an incredibly small risk.

 

And there’s a clear trend of air travel getting safer every decade. Barnett’s calculations suggest that between 2007 and 2017, the risk was one per 7.9 million.

 

We can also compare the risks of dying in a plane crash with those of dying in a car accident. Although estimates of motor vehicle fatalities vary depending on how you do the calculations and where you are in the world, flying has been estimated to be more than 100 times safer than driving.

 

Evolution has skewed our perception of risks

 

The risk of being involved in a plane crash is extremely small. But for a variety of reasons, we often perceive it to be greater than it is.

 

First, there are well-known limitations in how we intuitively estimate risk. Our responses to risk (and many other things) are often shaped far more by emotion and instinct than by logic.

 

As psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, much of our thinking about risk is driven by intuitive, automatic processes rather than careful reasoning.

 

Notably, our brains evolved to pay attention to threats that are striking or memorable. The risks we faced in primitive times were large, immediate and tangible threats to life. Conversely, the risks we face in the modern world are generally much smaller, less obvious, and play out over the longer term.

 

The brain that served us well in prehistoric times has essentially remained the same, but the world has completely changed. Therefore, our brains are susceptible to errors in thinking and mental shortcuts called cognitive biases that skew our perception of modern risks.

 

This can lead us to overestimate very small risks, such as plane crashes, while underestimating far more probable dangers, such as chronic diseases.

 

Why we overestimate the risks of flying

 

There are several drivers of our misperception of risks when it comes to flying specifically.

 

Also read: Lone survivor of AI crash: What it's like to survive a tragedy?

 

The fact events such as the Air India plane crash are so rare makes them all the more psychologically powerful when they do occur. And in today’s digital media landscape, the proliferation of dramatic footage of the crash itself, along with images of the aftermath, amplifies its emotional and visual impact.

 

The effect these vivid images have on our thinking around the risks of flying is called the availability heuristic. The more unusual and dramatic an event is, the more it stands out in our minds, and the more it skews our perception of its likelihood.

 

Although there are various ways to do this, we can first look to figures that tell us the risk of dying in a plane crash per passenger who boards a plane. Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calculated that in 2018–22, this figure was one in 13.7 million. By any reckoning, this is an incredibly small risk.

 

And there’s a clear trend of air travel getting safer every decade. Barnett’s calculations suggest that between 2007 and 2017, the risk was one per 7.9 million.

 

We can also compare the risks of dying in a plane crash with those of dying in a car accident. Although estimates of motor vehicle fatalities vary depending on how you do the calculations and where you are in the world, flying has been estimated to be more than 100 times safer than driving.

 

Evolution has skewed our perception of risks

 

The risk of being involved in a plane crash is extremely small. But for a variety of reasons, we often perceive it to be greater than it is.

 

First, there are well-known limitations in how we intuitively estimate risk. Our responses to risk (and many other things) are often shaped far more by emotion and instinct than by logic.

 

As psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, much of our thinking about risk is driven by intuitive, automatic processes rather than careful reasoning.

 

Notably, our brains evolved to pay attention to threats that are striking or memorable. The risks we faced in primitive times were large, immediate and tangible threats to life. Conversely, the risks we face in the modern world are generally much smaller, less obvious, and play out over the longer term.

 

The brain that served us well in prehistoric times has essentially remained the same, but the world has completely changed. Therefore, our brains are susceptible to errors in thinking and mental shortcuts called cognitive biases that skew our perception of modern risks.

 

This can lead us to overestimate very small risks, such as plane crashes, while underestimating far more probable dangers, such as chronic diseases.

 

Why we overestimate the risks of flying

 

There are several drivers of our misperception of risks when it comes to flying specifically.

 

The fact events such as the Air India plane crash are so rare makes them all the more psychologically powerful when they do occur. And in today’s digital media landscape, the proliferation of dramatic footage of the crash itself, along with images of the aftermath, amplifies its emotional and visual impact.

 

The effect these vivid images have on our thinking around the risks of flying is called the availability heuristic. The more unusual and dramatic an event is, the more it stands out in our minds, and the more it skews our perception of its likelihood.

 

Via The Conversation