Science News - April 24, 2010

It’s a brutal calculus of concern, report Olivola and psychologist Namika Sagara of the University of Oregon in Eugene in the Dec. 29 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A global database of natural and industrial disasters shows that wealthy countries, such as Japan and the United States, tend to experience much smaller death tolls from these events than poor countries, such as Indonesia and India, the researchers say.

Unfamiliarity with large death tolls feeds into a previously reported tendency of those in wealthy countries to become increasingly insensitive to losses of life as the number of victims climbs. The difference between 10,000 and 15,000 deaths simply doesn’t register, based on a lack of experience with such catastrophes, Olivola suggests.

“Our results imply that those coun-
tries in a position to provide aid or mili-
tary intervention following a crisis have
populations that will exhibit a strong
diminishing sensitivity to human fatali-
ties,” Olivola says. “Factors other than
sensitivity to the number of lives at risk
will therefore motivate these countries
to provide aid.”
Residents of wealthy nations are
also particularly keen to sup-
port public health programs
with the potential either to
save or kill a lot of people,
he finds. In one experiment
in his new study, 97 of 118

Japanese and U.S. college students — around 82 percent — endorsed a risky course of action to stem a hypothetical disease outbreak. They favored a program with a 50 percent probability of causing 40 deaths and a 50 percent probability of causing no deaths over a program that would lead to 20 deaths for sure.

In contrast, 64 of 107 Indonesian and Indian students — only about 60 percent — preferred the risky program.

It’s uncomfortable to think that uncontrollable events linked to where people are living mold how they value human life, Olivola says.

U.S. parents have no problem valuing the lives of their children. But moms and dads took a collective risk in October 2007 when an FDA committee recommended that children under 2 years of age stop taking over-the-counter cough and cold medications because of rare but potentially fatal side effects. Only one in five parents of young children contacted the next month in a national survey who had heard of the recommendation said that they would adhere to it, consistent with anemic public responses to most medication warnings and product recalls.

When given a description of a product’s potential dangers, people who have safely used it for a long time fall back on their experience and resist change, says Harvard’s Barron. Those on the verge of using a product or who have used it only a few times more often heed such warnings.

Still, parents with a history of safely giving their infants cough and cold medications were not immune to the FDA’s advice, according to an unpublished study led by Barron and Talya Miron-Shatz of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The researchers analyzed data from the national survey of “The FDA may get more bang for the buck by targeting experienced

20 50 60 70

Lots of information
Not statistically
Less information
signi;cant

Adherence rate (%)

p = 0.002

0 10 30 40

Experienced
parents
Inexperienced
parents
source: t. miron-shAtz et al.

Acting on info understanding how experience shapes risk perceptions could help the food and drug Administration target safety information and product recalls. When the fdA advised parents not to give children under age 2 over-the-counter cough and cold medicine (as shown), parents with more than one child tended to ignore the warning while new parents were more likely to follow it. When experienced parents got more information, compliance improved.

Risk of
injury in a car
in the next 3 years

Actual: 4.7%
Perceived: 10.0%

parents, who are least likely to follow its recommendations, with detailed package information rather than public announcements,” Barron says.

Scientists will get more bang per study by taking Barron’s cue and targeting experience’s role in a host of everyday decisions, remarks psychologist Tim Rakow of the University of Essex in Colchester, England. Little is known about the hypotheses that people generate and the feelings that they grapple with when faced with tough, real-life choices, Rakow notes. All too often, individuals grope in the dark with neither experience nor probability descriptions to hang on to.

As Lyle Lovett crooned in a song about his comically inept attempts to pick up a woman in a bar, “Still the only certain thing for sure is what I do not know.” 