Empathy and Risk

Image via Unsplash.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to watch my daughters dance for the first time since last February. I’m a Dance Dad, with two daughters—ages 16 and 13—that have chosen to narrow their very broad athletic pursuits and interests to focus primarily on that sport. Before I became a father of daughters, I could never have imagined how much I would enjoy being a Dance Dad, and it’s not just watching my children do something they enjoy.

A big part of it is the community around dance. I’m not talking about the high maintenance moms living vicariously through their kids—there is some of that, but a lot less than I might have imagined—but the smiling faces I see at competitions, who help with snacks and cleanup, new friends who I stop and chat with when I see them around town.

Only I’m not seeing them around town lately because I’m not going around town—because, of course, the pandemic. The few times that I have, I’m wearing a mask and not my glasses, which fog up pretty quickly no matter what kind of mask I wear. If I could even recognize them on these rare outings, I would not dwell to chat.

Even at the dance show, we were spaced apart from everyone, outdoors and with masks on. Even with attendance limited to two per dancer, what would normally be one show was split into five to allow parents to space. My wife and I took a selfie and you couldn’t see us smile. I miss sharing smiles with others.

I live in a part of the country that has had very low rates of coronavirus infection, at least until now. With things moving back indoors, there has been a significant spike in both cases and deaths. Even so, I’m surrounded by the people that so many of you are frustrated with; the ones who refuse to wear masks, or refuse to social distance, or just want their kids to play football so badly that they are willing to believe anything that justifies discounting the risks.

A lot of this is attributed to the election season and the choosing of teams—Team Mask and Team Anti-Mask—and I agree that is likely part of it, but it’s not the biggest part of the story. I’m watching people take actions that individually are very logical, at least from their own perspective. The challenge has always been to get people to view themselves as part of a larger community, something the shaming and jeering at them by Team Mask has done (only it’s not the team they were hoping).

In the early months of 2020, there was a vocal group of anti-car advocates who took the pandemic warning as an opportunity to advocate for increased traffic safety: “If you’re willing to stop flights from China for something less lethal than the flu, you should be ready to stop auto trips for something that kills far more people.” On February 3, I wrote the following:

Nobody who is panicked about coronavirus is panicked because it has killed X number of people. Few are uptight because they think it might kill 100x people. The thing that is panic-inducing about the coronavirus is not the floor but the ceiling, the notion that millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions could die in a pandemic.

If I told you that 32,000 died in auto-related incidents last year, we could all agree that was a senseless tragedy, something we should be doing far more to address. If I told you that, if we didn’t do anything, deaths would rise to 35,000 this year, you’d probably join me in dismay at this needless loss of life. However, if I told you that there was a chance that next year 10 million people would die from auto crashes, you (along with everyone else) would lose your mind. And you’d probably never drive or even go near a car.

Statistically, there is essentially zero chance that auto deaths will climb into the millions next year, and everyone understands that. Auto deaths are non-scalable.

Americans take 1.1 billion auto trips a day. There are roughly 6 million auto crashes each year in the U.S. In 2019, there were 38,800 people who died in auto crashes. Without accounting for any other factors (comorbidities), this means that each trip a person takes has a 1 in 70,000 chance (0.0015%) of resulting in a crash and a 1 in 10 million chance (0.00001%) of resulting in a death.

Image via Unsplash.

This seems pretty safe, actually, because driving is a relatively safe activity. I’ve said in the past—and it has made some of you really angry with me—that even drinking and driving is statistically a safe activity. If drinking and driving increases your likelihood of a crash by ten times, that means that 6,999 times out of every 7,000 times one drives under the influence there will be no crash and 999,999 times in a million there will be no fatalities. This is the math someone does when they get behind the wheel and it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not wrong.

The risk only becomes statistically significant when the activity is repeated over and over again, and this is a much more abstract calculation, one the modern human mind is not wired to perform (although Jared Diamond’s writing suggests this is a modern adaptation, that our ancestors were more tuned to the impact of what money managers call “tail risk”).

The typical American averages four trips per day. That means over a 10-year period of time, the typical American will take that 1 in 70,000 risk of a crash 14,600 times. The repeated risk taking over ten years means that the American has slightly better than a 1 out of 5 chance they will experience at least one crash. The risk of death changes from 1 in a million per incident to 1 in 1,000 from repeated exposure to risk.

Let me say this a different way: If you were forced to play Russian Roulette with a gun that had 10 million chambers—only one of them loaded—you would have a one in 10 million chance of dying. Those odds are in your favor. If you were forced to play four times a day, every day, the odds are still in your favor—only 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed—but substantially less so.

Each auto trip act has a low probability of resulting in harm. It’s the cumulative exposure to risk that shifts the odds. And unlike car crashes—which are discrete events that do not compound—cumulative exposure to potential viral transmission compounds the risks for everyone.

It seems to me that the difference between individual and cumulative risk is what Team Mask is having a difficult time communicating, largely because I suspect they don’t understand it. (And note that my actions indicate I am on Team Mask, even if I’m uncomfortable with some of my teammates’ way of communicating).

When four men are playing basketball in a park, or two women are sitting at a bench conversing, or three kids on the swing set, each one is statistically very unlikely to have coronavirus. Yelling at them that they are killing their grandmother, attempting to shame them, or taking a picture and posting it on social media as a warning to others who may transgress, are not effective communication strategies likely to get the outcome we want (mask wearing, social distancing). In fact, it reinforces the Team Anti-Mask narrative because almost all of these interactions will result in no transmission of coronavirus, making your reaction seem somewhat hysterical.

You can walk around with a mask and fail to social distance many times, just like you can drive under the influence many times, without probability catching up to you. The odds are in your favor.

Image via Unsplash.

As with all such low probability, cumulative risk behaviors—virus transmission, driving, unprotected sex, smoking—the most effective way to persuade isn’t shaming or ridicule. It’s empathy. It’s making the consequences real. It’s tying individual action to cumulative effects.

If someone smokes a single cigarette, they are unlikely to develop lung cancer, although it is possible since such cancers seem to be part of a random mutation process that cigarette smoke exacerbates. If someone smokes multiple cigarettes a week during their teen years and then quits, they are more likely to develop lung cancer than the person who only smoked one, but less likely than the person who has smoked multiple packs a day for decades.

Dramatic reductions in smoking didn’t happen because anti-smoking advocates yelled at smokers and shamed them into submission. That’s actually what made smoking cool! No, it was a combination of simple restrictions on where people could smoke (not in enclosed public spaces), a focus on the long-term health risks of smoking (humanizing the tail risk), and a significant reduction in high profile individuals smoking (movies, television shows, commercials) that brought rates down.

I wrote this last May in “Nine Things Local Government Needs to Do Right Now In Response to the Pandemic”:

Connect Masks to Economic Recovery. Ubiquitous mask use is the quickest and easiest way to get the local economy moving again, but it requires a cultural shift, which is difficult to do, especially as top-down partisanship invades our discourse. Local leaders inside and outside the government must lead by example. Be very conspicuous in wearing a mask in public and take every opportunity to explain why, emphasizing the relationship between getting the economy moving and donning a mask. You need wearing a mask to become a public duty that good citizens feel compelled to do, not for health reasons (that’s obvious—don’t dwell on it) but for economic reasons.

This was my strategy for moving us from Team Mask versus Team Anti-Mask to Team Community. It’s still my strategy. Local leaders inside and outside of government need to emphasize how wearing a mask is how we get keep our local economy going and our schools open, regardless of whether they change your individual probability of contracting or transmitting the virus.

I’ll add a strategy now for those of you who want to see changes in behavior and are prepared to move beyond the ineffective instinct to shame or ridicule: be friendly. If we’re trying to move people who are Team Anti-Mask into Team Community then we have to meet them there.

If you come across someone you think should be wearing a mask or doing a better job of social distancing, go out of your way to be friendly to them. Give them a wave and a nod. You can even smile—they might be able to see the creases in your face outside of your mask. Let them know that Team Community is a friendly place and they are welcome.

The probabilities suggest that even if you only change their behavior a little—maybe they social distance a little more, or sometimes wear a mask, or opt to avoid large gatherings out of deference to other friendly people in Team Community—it will have a disproportionate impact.

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