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Risky Business

Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000 by John Ruscio

Vividness, Availability, and the Media Paradox

The popular media deliver reports on a carefully chosen set of events in vivid detail. Owing to its concrete, personal, and emotional flavor, this biased sample of information is easily retrievable from memory and therefore exerts a disproportionate influence on our judgments and decisions.

This results in the media paradox: The more we rely on the popular media to inform us, the more apt we are to misplace our fears.

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Do you believe that more people die in the United States each year from falling airplane parts or from shark attacks? From tornadoes or from lightning? From stomach cancer or from car accidents? From diabetes or from homicide? When we evaluate the relative degree of danger associated with different hazards, we can easily overlook two subtle biases in the sample of information that comes to mind. First, the popular media report to us, in vivid detail, a carefully selected assortment of unusual events. Second, vivid and unusual events exert a disproportionate influence on our subsequent judgments through their increased memorial availability. These two biases operate hand-in-hand to create what I call the "media paradox": The more we rely on the popular media to inform us, the more apt we are to misplace our fears.

In one widely cited study, college students ranked nuclear power as the most dangerous of thirty different activities and technologies. Experts in risk assessment, on the other hand, ranked nuclear power twentieth on the same list, less hazardous than riding a bicycle (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1979). Ross (1995) reviews several serious misperceptions of risk and poses the critical question, "Are we then turning our backs on a raging inferno while we douse the flame of a match?" (53).

Vividness

Many of us rely on the popular media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and so forth) for daily information to help navigate the hazards in the world around us. These sources, however, do not provide us with a representative sampling of events. For a variety of reasons--including fierce competition for our patronage within and across the various popular media outlets--potential news items are rigorously screened for their ability to captivate an audience. Stories featuring mundane, commonplace events don't stand a chance of making it onto the six o'clock news. The stories that do make it through this painstaking selection process are then crafted into accounts emphasizing their concrete, personal, and emotional content. Each of these aspects of a story promotes its vividness, which increases the likelihood that we will attend to and remember the information (Nisbett and Ross 1980; Plous 1993).

Both anecdotal and empirical evidence demonstrates the impact of vividness. Imagine that you are in the market for a new car, and you turn to Consumer Reports for advice. [1] Several hundred consumers' experiences, plus the opinions and road tests of automotive experts, are neatly summarized, and it appears that the cost and reliability of a Honda Civic will best meet your transportation needs. Before making a purchase, however, you happen to mention your decision to a colleague, who is shocked. "A Honda! You must be joking! A friend of mine bought one and had nothing but trouble. First the fuel injection system broke, then the brakes, and finally the transmission. He had to sell it for scrap within three years!" The vividness of this warning makes it quite compelling. How many of us can honestly say that we would treat it in a rationally appropriate manner, fairly weighing the favorable evidence from several hundred consumers plus a consensus of automotive experts against the unfavorable evidence from one s econd-hand account?

Of course, I would not expect to convince you of the significance of vividness with a single vivid example. Experimental investigations more definitively illustrate the impact of vivid information. For example, Borgida and Nisbett (1977) asked introductory psychology students to rate their interest in taking each of ten upper-level psychology courses. To help make these ratings, all students were randomly assigned to one of three informational conditions. Those in a "base rate" condition read a statistical summary of course evaluations from "practically all the students who had enrolled in the course the previous semester." A small panel of advanced students shared their views on the ten courses with participants in a "face-to-face" condition. The panelists prefaced their remarks by reporting the same average numerical evaluations that were provided in the statistical summary to "base rate" participants. Finally, participants in a control condition were given no information about the courses.

Compared to the control group, students receiving the statistical summary expressed slightly greater interest in the recommended courses. More important, students hearing the panel discussion expressed considerably greater interest in the recommended courses. The face-to-face presentation of information had a more pronounced impact on students' preferences than did the statistical summary of a far larger number of previous students' responses. [2] Moreover, this effect was stronger among students who had recently decided to major in psychology than among students who had declared other majors. Personal relevance appears to magnify the power of vividness.

Risky Business

Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000 by John Ruscio

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