What Coronavirus Tells Us About Ourselves

Fear is having a good season. A quick survey of the headlines provides a window on what frightens us — government, police violence, immigrants, being left behind, climate change, plane crashes and now the coronavirus.

The ability to sense and avoid harm is essential for all animals. Fear has played a central role in our survival as a species. And yet we often fail when it comes to knowing what to be afraid of.

Risk assessment is not a trivial capacity. It affects how we perceive the world, our health, lifespan, emotional state, how we make decisions, how we manage our finances, and how we vote.

In this article I will provide a review of our wiring for risk perception followed by data on the coronavirus and CDC recommendations that can help inform your response to a story that has captured the world’s imagination.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT US

We are not wired for accurate risk assessment.

Try these True/False questions to set the stage for a reconceptualization of how we make decisions.

1. We make choices in our best interest.
2. If we have the data we make the right choices.
3. We accurately evaluate past experiences.
4. It is unnecessary to protect people from the consequences of their choices.

The data indicate that all of the above are false.

Why?

The environment in which human risk assessment evolved, presented a very different kind of risk than what we confront today. Ancient formative risks were immediate and obvious, a charging lion. The greatest contemporary risks to our health are delayed and invisibly dangerous, bad diets and inactivity. The risk has changed. Our neurology has not.

That neurology is intuitive, automatic and fast. Two false beliefs frame our misunderstanding of risk assessment. The first, people are generally rational. The second, when people are not rational it is emotion that blocks the proper thought process.

Not so. We make systematic errors in our decisions because of our brain wiring, not because that wiring is corrupted by emotion. A good example of a hardwired flaw in…