It’s Irrational to Say that People Who Get Risk Wrong are Irrational.

How irrational it seems to lament how "irrational" we are about risk. In the name of intelligence and reason, bright and well-intentioned people unintelligently and unreasonably ignore the vast scientific evidence which teaches us that risk perception is not, and can not be, a purely fact-based rational process. Risk is subjective, a matter of not only the facts, but how those facts feel. We know that. We know that the brain reacts instinctively to possible danger. We know the psychological characteristics of situations that make them feel more or less scary, the facts notwithstanding. We know the mental shortcuts people use to make judgments on the fly that produce behaviors which don't seem to make much sense. There is so much evidence, from various fields of science, which explain why our fears often don't match the facts. Why do the rationalists so irrationally deny all that evidence, the cold hard facts, about the affective way we perceive and respond to risk?
Let's take one current case. Deborah Blum, one of the finest science writers around, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (and a person I'm proud to be able to call a friend), has written a piece for Slate lamenting the irrationality of those who want to drink raw milk. Deb dismissively calls them "cult-like" and "pure food obssesives...in love with a past that never really existed." She lays out quite convincingly how risky drinking raw milk can be, and is clearly frustrated at the farmer who argues that raw milk is safe because "everything God designed is good for you", despite the fact that an outbreak of God-designed and quite deadly E. coli O157-H7 was linked back to his farm. Deb writes, "I wish someone would explain the logic that leads to the conclusion that this apparently divine infection is actually ‘good for you'."
Dear Deborah (and Michael Specter, author of "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives", and everyone else who shares frustration at such irrationality); The best way to understand this kind of thinking, is to stop thinking of risk perception as a purely logical process. In fact, stop thinking of it as thinking. It is not a cognitive process. It's a mix of the facts and conscious reasoning, interpreted through a powerful set of emotional and instinctive subconscious lenses that give those facts the valence, the meaning, the feel that helps us judge whether something might be dangerous.
The raw milk issue is a perfect example. You can hear it in the voices of the people Deb quotes. The study of risk perception has found that humans are less afraid of risks that are natural ("everything God designed") than risks that are human-made (as one raw-milk fan in Deb's piece said of pasteurized milk, "One of nature's most perfect foods has been murdered.") You can hear it as Deb notes that some people prefer "old-fashioned organic produce" and "old fashioned farming methods". It's not the old part they prefer. It's the organic/natural part. Natural radiation from the sun is less scary that far-less dangerous radiation (really!) from nuclear power. Natural medicines, which can be sold without any testing and which sometimes have harmful side-effects, are less scary than much more carefully studied and tested human-made pharmaceuticals (which are mostly based on natural substances anyway). Genetically modified food worries people more than food modified by natural hybridization. The milk from cows injected with Bovine Growth Hormone is scarier than the very same milk from cows without BGH. Here are the basic facts on that one. BGH is the naturally-occurring hormone in the cow that stimulates milk production. Genetic techniques allow farmers to raise those BGH levels in the cow, and produce more milk. It's the same milk. There is just more of it.
Rationally that fear makes no sense. But emotionally, it does. It feels different. The milk isn't natural anymore. It's like the fellow in Deb's piece who thinks heating milk to kill germs - pasteurization - "murders it". It's no longer the stuff that "God designed", and it is built deep into our psyche to fear risks more if they are human-made, or human-tinkered with, than if they are natural.
Deb, and Michael, and others, are absolutely correct to point out that sometimes this Perception Gap...when our fears don't match the facts...can be dangerous in and of itself. I stress that precise point in "How Risky Is it, Really? Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts", a primer on the sciences of risk perception. It is absolutely more dangerous to drink raw milk that pasteurized. But the way to get people to recognize this threat is not to call them irrational cult-like zealots. The way to encourage healthier choices is to recognize why risks feel the way they do, how psychological factors like Natural vs. Human-made, or Trust, or Control, shape how we feel, and to respect those feelings while also honestly admitting that our feelings may actually be raising the risk, and then to ask ourselves whether the fact that something is natural, or human-made, is sufficient reason to judge how dangerous it might be.
Careful, thoughtful, thorough science from several fields has given us the wisdom to know why we sometimes get risk wrong. To ignore this body of evidence, and simply call people who get risk wrong ‘irrational', seems contrary to the very argument that we be more rational in the first place. Instead, let's use these insights into the affective way we perceive and respond to risk as tools for making healthier decisions.