Kozlowski: Freak accidents inspire undue terror

People respond to spectacular accidents in strange ways.

Consider the Costa Concordia cruise… People respond to spectacular accidents in strange ways.

Consider the Costa Concordia cruise ship. While en route from Civitavecchia, Italy, the cruise liner ran aground on the island of Giglio on Friday, Jan. 13. The media is full of pictures of the massive ship — it weighed over 100,000 gross tons — wallowing on its starboard side at an angle of 80 degrees. As of the last count, 12 are dead and 21 are still missing.

Survivors’ accounts of how scary the wildly listing ship was and how the evacuation was not especially orderly have filled the media. (They’re not kidding: when I take my own experience on a wildly listing dinghy and magnify it, I get kind of spooked myself.) Now, of course, innumerable people have reported that they’ll be canceling that cruise they were planning.

Such reactions are irrational, as the Costa Concordia accident is pretty unusual. The circumstances of the accident — a calm sea, a well-charted island and no unusual conditions like fog — are strange to the point of meriting an investigation. Why, even 100 years ago, when there was only primitive radio and no radar, computers or GPS existed, this still would have been considered a weird accident. And even after the ship hit the rocks, only 33 people at most died. Even though that’s 33 too many, it’s less than 1 percent of the 4,200 passengers. A fear of cruising based on this one incident doesn’t make much sense.

People harbor the same irrational fear about flying. Traveling on a U.S. commercial airline is in fact ludicrously safe: Not a single American airline passenger died in 2007, 2008 or 2010. While it’s hard to pin down an exact number for the risk that flying entails, as risk is defined in different ways, one MIT researcher examined records between 1975 and 1994 and concluded that the odds of dying on a single flight are about 1 in 7 million. You’re almost as likely to win the lottery as die on a particular plane, but the fear of flying is fairly common.

Why are people nervous about dying in a spectacular manner even when it’s extremely unusual? The same reasons TV shows like “1000 Ways to Die” make for popular viewing, and the CDC’s National Vital Statistics Reports don’t.

First, common deaths don’t seem quite so scary because they’re familiar. Many of the leading causes of death are considered either avoidable or exclusive to older people. For example, about 32,000 people  died on American roads in 2010, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But we can comfort ourselves by saying that we drive carefully. The eighth leading cause of death, claiming 53,582 people in 2009, was pneumonia and influenza. But we may have contracted those diseases already and survived. 25,651 people died of hypertension in 2009. But we don’t smoke, and we aren’t fat. Sure, heart disease and cancer — killers that cause around 20 percent of all deaths each year — are widely feared. But even when confronted with these, we can tell ourselves comforting little lies about why the disease doesn’t run in the family or why we’ll beat the odds. Disasters such as cruise ship sinkings and airline crashes, however, are harder to dismiss. Victims in these instances aren’t in control, and we can’t make ourselves believe they are.

Another major reason we fear exotic death is that we see much more of it than the mundane stuff. The media loves to inflate an event’s scariness in order to encourage viewers to tune in at 10 p.m. and learn why they could be the next victims of a disaster so horrible it can’t be mentioned until the next broadcast. The press harps on spectacular accidents, and our brains are hard-wired to see events that are repeated — particularly those that concern our safety — as important.

But before I turn this into another journalist-who-hates-journalism piece, we have to consider that the media wants to make money and that if people weren’t genuinely interested in reading about all of the sordid details of a disaster or in watching ghoulish images on TV, there wouldn’t be as much emphasis on these events. There would be no disaster fiction. Jason Statham, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Barney the Dinosaur would host a cooking show together. We wouldn’t have action movies like “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” a film that put the “disaster” in disaster movie. We become irrationally scared and worked up about disasters and destruction because we want to. Disasters are disastrous, but exciting.

Now, I’m not blaming people for being afraid of cruises or flying. Get jostled around by turbulence, and you begin to question how accurate those statistics really are. Fears aren’t always driven by reason, and it’s hard to dismiss them using reason. But we should at least make an effort to do so.

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