Why are You Panicking?

"Hitchhiker, grab your towel and don't panic!"
-The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Before "Hurricane" Irene hit NYC, people seemed to lose their minds. Two days before the hurricane happened to be my grocery day. I saw people in BJ's with 2 full carts of food. It was like they were preparing for the end of the world. If the disaster is bad enough to warrant that much stuff, you may want to just avoid the disaster entirely (like those areas that were evacuated).

The question is, what made people panic like that? What caused people to hoard batteries and flashlights like we were going to be plunged into 10 years of darkness? Why did people who feared the idea of losing power also purchase lots of meat, especially if they would not have any refrigeration?

How people react is affected by what information they are presented with, and the manner in which the information is presented. In the case of the hurricane, the information was presented like NYC was going to crumble. It also didn't help that the media piggybacked it with the "earthquake" from earlier in the week.

A example of this presentation issue can be seen elsewhere. In The Survivor's Club, the author looked at airline flights, and why people seemed to see air travel as dangerous.

He started out by asking: Why do people perceive the danger to be so great? Barnett studied the front page of The New York Times and found the answer. Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was sixty times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDS; fifteen hundred times greater than auto hazards; and six thousand times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.

What are my chances of dying on my next flight? In the aviation safety field, it’s known as Q: death risk per randomly chosen flight. Analyzing all the data from the last ten years, here’s Barnett’s bottom line: When you get on your next domestic flight, your chance of being killed—your Q—is one in sixty million. That means you could fly every day for the next 164,000 years before you would perish in a crash.

Even if you somehow ended up in a plane crash—a remarkably unlikely if—your chances of dying are still unbelievably small. Believe it or not, the survival rate in plane crashes is 95.7 percent. Yes, 95.7. More precisely, the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed all the airplane accidents between 1983 and 2000. Some 53,487 people were involved in those incidents, and 51,207 survived. Hence, the survival rate of 95.7.

The front page appears to tell us what is important, and we've started looking at the 24-hour news cycle as our way of staying "informed." The problem is, we rarely do any evaluation on our own, taking everything at face value. This is worsened by the fact that the papers and news channels present their information in order to catch viewers and hold them. Information presentation is a competition, and the real losers are people who don't do independent research or look to multiple sources.