In my upcoming book, Automatic Influence, I propose we rid our lives of every useless fear.
I say useless fear because some fear is useful. Fear of heights, for example, is extremely useful. It keeps us from falling off balconies and bridges and cliffs. We should have a healthy fear of heights.
But useless fear is where fear hampers our performance, or keeps us from taking beneficial risks, or gets us to feel fear when there’s no real threat of harm.
We should get rid of all of these.
Which brings me to the media, and today’s advice: fear nothing you see in news media. Ever. Don’t fear war, or the Zika virus, or murder, or shark attacks, or anything the news media might propose for you to fear. It’s all useless fear.
Every news program promo should say, “Useless fears at eleven,” because that’s all it ever is.
Here’s why. Journalists scour a world filled with billions of people, looking for the most fearful thing to report, because fear captures our attention better than any other emotion, and the media is desperate to capture our attention for the sake of ratings. They rarely report on common things. They report on extremely rare things. Our chances of getting murdered, or being eaten by a great white shark, or getting a deadly virus are so miniscule (less than one in a million) that they’re not worth our attention. There’s almost no chance these things will ever happen to us. But since the media covers the lives of billions of people, these extremely rare things happen from time to time.
When we watch these news stories, we forget about the large number effect and think, it happened to them, so it could happen to us. The world seems more dangerous than it really is, thanks to the extensive coverage of news media and our miscalculations of risk.
Take murder as an example. Murder is happening around the world all the time. So the world seems dangerous. But imagine we lived in a small town like Coldwater, Michigan. It seems really safe in Coldwater. People don’t get killed here. Rarely do we ever hear of anything bad happening in Coldwater.
But the truth is, Coldwater is nearly as dangerous, statistically, as New York, where there’s murder every single day. The FBI’s 2014 Uniform Crime Report shows that the national murder/manslaughter rate in America is 4.5 people per 100,000 people per year. That means that, in the average city of one hundred thousand people, like Green Bay, Wisconsin, one person is murdered every three months.
Using the same statistic in Coldwater, which only has ten thousand people, one person is murdered every two and a half years. So Coldwater seems safer than Green Bay, because fewer people get killed in Coldwater.
But in a city of a million people like Austin, Texas, one person is murdered every eight days, and in a city of eight million people like New York, one person is murdered every day. The average chance of getting murdered on any given day is the same across all the cities, small and large, but some cities seem safer simply because they’re smaller.
Then think about the fact that our news coverage spans billions of people. This means we see extremely rare things happening all the time. We see much more danger in the news, even though the danger is extremely low and pretty much the same from small city to big city.
Which means pretty much everything we see on news media is extremely unlikely to happen to us. How many friends do you know who’ve been bitten by a shark? Or shot up in a movie theater? How many people do you know who have the Zika virus? For most people, the answer is zero. Billions of people will go their entire lives without running into any of these things, because they are extremely unlikely to happen.
Yet we fear them.
This is useless fear.
Years ago I put away media-driven fear. It’s been a great relief. Whenever I see a scary story on the news, I go through this thought-process.
- I saw it in the news.
- News, by nature, distorts our view of harmful things.
- Therefore, I will never fear anything reported on the news.
If we’re going to rid our lives of every useless fear, this is a great place to start.
