Risk, Propaganda, and Social Policy
The COVID-19 pandemic is only the latest high-profile example of why we, as voters and citizens, need to think about risk and social policy. More to the point, every concerned citizen needs to think about risks and how they can be represented or misrepresented by dishonest or incompetent actors.
Gun violence is another example of where our perception of risk can be distorted, or manipulated. We’ll see how data, propaganda, and cognitive bias combine to make risks hard to assess. And, after we think about the data, we don’t always make rational decisions.
COVID-19 and Public Safety
Let’s say you are an infectious disease specialist in the United States. It is early February of 2020 and you have become aware of a novel virus that appears to be more infectious than influenza and 14 times as deadly. What policies should the United States consider to keep this thing from reaching the United States and spreading?
How should the United States be managing the pandemic? Has the government’s response been too slow and too conservative or too dramatic and too authoritarian? Follow social media and the news for a bit and you can find people in both camps. How did they get there? Was it mostly a matter of information or a matter of spin?
Guns and Personal Safety
Should the average American adult buy a gun for protection? Most of us have a knee-jerk reaction to this question. Some people are certain that having a gun and knowing how to use it is almost a requirement to be a responsible citizen. Other people will say guns should be banned. Most Americans fall in between one of those extreme views.
Misrepresentation and Risk
Gun rights can be put on a continuum, from “All gun control laws violate our rights and the Constitution!” to “We need to abolish the Second Amendment and ban guns!” Most Americans, again, are between two of those extremes. Interest groups on both sides are quick to misrepresent the risk of acting on gun violence or failing to act. Conservatives tend to be certain the government will go after “assault rifles” this year, then handguns next year. Liberals are convinced that widespread gun ownership creates risks that cannot be managed; the only civilized thing to do is to get rid of those guns.
Consider COVID-19 again. Should there have been a lockdown or a national emergency over COVID-19? The flu is deadlier, right? The costs of lockdowns and business closures outweigh the healthcare costs of not doing those things. Right? Well, the problem is some people only want us to think about the costs of fighting the pandemic, not the costs of treating COVID like the seasonal flu.
Emotion and Risk
What do people value in life? Whatever else people may value, health and personal safety tend to rank high on their lists. This is so obvious I won’t waste time trying to explain. What might not be so obvious is this: Our perceptions of risk tend to be distorted when core values like safety and health are at stake.
Advertisers, politicians, and bloggers can use that to put us in a state of heightened emotions and use those emotions to scare us away from making a reasonable decision. Gun control provides a good example of how this works. Gun control opponents may scare viewers with images of masked men (always men) with scary black guns, stories of armed thugs killing a woman in a home invasion, armed robbers blowing away an elderly shop owner, and so on.
None of this information has anything to do with gun control. These stories tell us nothing about why we need more gun control or less gun control. Knowing that other nations have stricter gun laws and more violence or less violence, means nothing.
How should we really think about the risks of gun ownership? Here is where emotion and propaganda tend to seize control. Someone on the Left might immediately think about all of the people killed in mass shootings. Someone on the Right will think about an anecdote about an armed man chasing away three armed robbers at a store.
Those responses probably represent the end result of social marketing by pro-gun forces or anti-gun forces. Our responses to gun control, or lockdown rules, or gay rights might be the end result or something called an availability cascade.
Reason and Risk
Both COVID-19 and gun violence are social issues that warrant some kind of policy response. Most people would agree on that much at least. Beyond that basic agreement, things get muddy in a hurry. Ideally, we’d use a combination of data and some scientific thinking to help us decide how to respond. We’d look at the risk of dying from COVID-19 and the risks from shutting down much of the economy for a few months.
Gun control should be fueled by a number of facts. On the question of owning guns for self-defense, we should think about things like:
- How often do people lawfully use guns in self-defense?
2. How often are those people successful?
3. How common are accidental shootings? What about suicide by gun or crimes of passion that involve guns — how common are those things?
The answers will make no difference to some people, but those questions influence lots of people who vote, or serve in Congress.
How much do your responses to risk reflect our cognitive biases versus our reason and knowledge? I’ll write more about that question, and how availability cascades relate, in future articles.
