Framing Risk
Consider, for a moment, the following series of statements:
There is a 99.5 percent chance of survival if infect. There is a 1 in 200 chance of dying if infected. There is a .5 percent chance of dying if infected. 199 people will survive out of every 200 people infected. There is not even a whole person out of every 100 who will die if infected. Less than .5 percent of those infected will not survive. Not less than 99.5 percent of those infected will survive. Only a part of a person will die if infected. There is a .5 in 100 chance of not surviving. Out of every 200 infected only 1 will result in death. Out of every 200 infected 1 will result in death. Out of every 500 infected not less than 2 will die. 100 out of every 10,000 persons will die from the infection. [Note: I’ve simplified the actual COVID-19 numbers here to make my point more digestible.]
Obviously, there are a couple statements in the above that are designed colloquially to reduce the other statements to apparent absurdity, but when framed within the context of the rest of the statements, they seem pretty deficient in describing anything at all — that is if it didn’t already seem obvious in any of the real-world situations you might have encountered those statements.
To me, the most clearly tangible framing of this statistic is this one: “1 out of every 200 people infected will die.” It is clear, succinct, and to the point. It’s tangible, because I actually know 200 people, and it makes the statistic relatable because a whole number equates to a single individual, as opposed to .5 persons out of 100 say.
Another reason this framing may seem more relatable to me is that a given person is only capable of engaging authentically in communities of 100 to 200 people. Such community sizes are thought to be relative to the population of villages in which human’s have lived for the vast majority of our evolutionary past. In other words, our minds have evolved to engage in communities no larger than 200 persons, so it helps to frame population samples in terms that are more likely to conform to my, and your, evolutionary inclinations.
This idea seems to shed some light on one of the reasons why people are more likely to donate to a charity in which a story of a single poverty-stricken child is related, as noted in Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, as opposed to a statistic projected to incorporate an entire population, such as 3.1 million children globally will die from “undernutrition” this year (this statistic according to the worldhunger.org).
A human face becomes increasingly more abstract and incoherent as a purported population sample increases, which is wont to happen given that larger samples of a population in a given study would invariably increase the statistical accuracy of the research being done, and, thus, sinking a tangible human face into ever-increasing obscurity.
Granted, the likelihood that any one person will be that 1 person out of the 200 is heavily weighted toward pre-existing risk factors, such as chronic illness and/or a compromised immune system. That being said, I would be curious to know whether or not that 1 person out of 200 equates to the percentage of the population who are immune compromised or have other underlying predispositions, such as age. To frame it differently, is the .5 percent of the US population that are at increased risk of death proportional to the number of people who are significantly immune compromised and elderly?
As a healthy adult who is well outside the at-risk age range with not indication of a compromised immune system, I do knowingly engage in activities that put me at a higher risk for contracting the virus and I accept that risk. Nonetheless, it is important for me to accept that other people do not, since I do know several people who are at an elevated risk, I could wind up being responsible for an illness they may have a much more severe reaction to or may not recover from at all.
To reduce this possibility, I engage in all the relevant precautions to reduce the possibility of otherwise contracting the virus and of spreading it to others, namely that I wear a bandanna at all times when I leave the house or may encounter non-consenting persons in well-trafficked public areas, like grocery stores or the lunch room at work, in which case I pull the bandanna over my nose and mouth.
The effectiveness of any one person’s mask is multiplied according to the number of persons they encounter who are also wearing a mask, thus the overall effectiveness of a mask in general is multiplied.
The reopening of the economy should be a separate consideration from whether or not a person decides to wear a mask. If you can’t develop a position that is cognizant of more than one ideologically prescribed set of “facts”, you might be confused about the nature of cognitive bias; you may, in fact, be thinking on terms that are relatable only to our own human inability to relate beyond the community of people we typically engage with, which, of course, is to say nothing of the potentially hundreds of people you actually engage with at gas stations, at grocery stores, or at work in your day-to-day routines.
If you think you are standing up against tyranny by refusing to wear a mask, you might be confused about the nature of tyranny. There are, in fact, millions of Americans who actually are in prison right now for non-violent crimes (some of which are no longer crimes under current law), so if you are concerned about tyranny, there is your face. Start picketing outside your local prison. We are wasting billions of dollars every year that could be better spent on education and infrastructure that are instead providing for people who could be providing for themselves, and, in all likelihood, would very much prefer to, particularly in comparison to your petty disgust for wearing a mask.
[The scope of this post was inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s book mentioned in the above text.]
