“Julie, in one of my earlier lives…”
“…You mean, Curmudge, before the turn of the century?”
“…I worked with a group whose task was to allay concerns of
the populace about trace organic chemicals in a large river in the West. As the lab guy, I explained that
increasingly sensitive test methods revealed chemicals at parts-per-trillion or
(even smaller) quadrillion levels that had been there all along.”
“And did the people buy your explanation?”
“Not entirely.
I believed then that the reason was simply their lack of understanding
of the facts. I was wrong. The people were fearful, and that’s
what we are going to discuss today.”
“I don’t get it, Curmudge. A fact-based explanation should have done it for the
apprehensions of most people. What
went wrong?”
“My employer sent the wrong person. They sent a chemist, but they should
have sent a psychologist. So now,
almost 20 years too late, we’re going to explore the psychology of risk and
fear. Our main resource is a book
by David Ropeik (1), and fortunately for us, it’s written in easy-to-handle
language.”
“So what, may I ask, does this have to do with leadership
and health care?”
“Being a patient in a hospital is a risky experience, Julie, and organizational change evokes a
degree of fear in the workplace.
Furthermore, people make unhealthful decisions based on fear and
misperceptions. So don’t leave
until the fat lady sings, fictional femme,
and we’ll both learn something.”
“Okay, Old Guy.
I’m with you. Are we going
somewhere?”
“We’re going on a hike high in the mountains of Glacier
National Park. You are hiking the trail a few yards
ahead of me because I paused to photograph a flower. As you walk around a bend in the trail, there—a few yards to
the right—is a grizzly bear eating berries. What do you do?”
“I jump, and my heart seemingly ‘leaps into my mouth.’ I hit the ground running back down the
trail screaming ‘BEAR’ and looking frantically for a tree to climb. (There aren’t any; we are above the
timberline.) But what happens to
you?”
“You survive because you can run faster than I can. I survive, too, because the bear is
more interested in berries than people.”
“Obviously, our little vignette pertains to fear, and you
are going to tell us about it, right?
Hopefully in a semi-nontechnical manner.”
“Right, Julie. There’s not room to write a book in a blog. Your first sight of the bear triggered
your risk response starting in the brain’s thalamus and—in milliseconds—moving
to the part of the brain called the amygdala. Somehow, the amygdala recognized the signal as indicating
danger and told you to jump.
That’s the flight or fight response. No thinking was involved; you were on autopilot.”
“Hey, Curmudge, I learned that the amygdala was an early
arrival in the evolution of the brain.
Our cave man forefathers had an amygdala that told them to be fearful of
wild beasts. If they hadn’t had
that, they wouldn’t have been anybody’s
forefathers. Oh, and by the way,
the amygdala also stores one’s implicit
memory, the memory that we can’t consciously recall. That’s how I knew that grizzly bears are dangerous without
taking time to remember reading about them.”
“Next, the thinking part of your brain, the cerebral cortex,
got involved and told you to run back down the trail, shout a warning to me,
and look for a tree to climb. So
you see that the bear sighting initiated a lot of activity in your brain in
this sequence, fear first and think second. But sometimes that cognitive activity is a very close
second, like your shouting ’bear.’
That was an example of bounded rationality
in which you used mental shortcuts (heuristics)
as the bases for your almost-instantaneous shout. Another example of quick mental shortcuts is deciding
whether to stop or proceed when a traffic light turns yellow.”
“An influence on your decision is called framing, or how facts are
presented. In the yellow light
example, your decision will be influenced by there being a police car next to
you or someone tailgating you who might not agree with your decision to stop. And then there‘s loss aversion. The
cost and inconvenience of being rear-ended may outweigh the cost of paying the
fine for running the traffic light.”
“You are really getting into this risk stuff, Julie. Let’s talk next about why some threats
seem scarier than others, which Ropeik calls fear factors or risk perception factors. They make our fears go up or down and cause us to be more or
less afraid. The difference
between the actual risk and the perceived risk is the perception gap. The
author presented a substantial list of risk perception factors, most of which
are self-explanatory. Here are a
lot of them: trust, risk vs. benefit, control, choice, natural or man-made,
causes pain and suffering, uncertainty, new or familiar, risks to children, and
fairness. And of course, can it
happen to me or did it happen to someone I know?”
“Curmudge, I fear that my brain is at risk of exploding if
it has to absorb any more information today. Let’s take a week-long coffee break and return to Risks and Fears later.”
Kaizen Curmudgeon
(1) Ropeik, David
How Risky Is It, Really? (2010, McGraw-Hill)
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