Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Joran Van der Sloot confessed on Monday to the murder of a Peruvian woman.  If the name doesn't ring a bell*, perhaps the name Natalee Holloway will.  She's the American who disappeared on a high school graduation trip to Aruba in 2005. Van der Sloot and his brother both spent time in jail as suspects in her murder, but were eventually released.  Van der Sloot has apparently admitted that, on May 30 of this year (coincidentally exactly 5 years since Holloway was last seen), he murdered Stephany Flores Ramirez, 21, after he found her looking through his computer at files about Holloway.

The Peruvian media is all over this case.  According to the Christian Science Monitor, newspapers in Lima are calling Van der Sloot a "psychopath" and a "monster."  Perhaps we can understand why.  CSR also reports that the papers are drawing a connection to other murders of women by foreign men, and warning young women to be careful.  The implication is that foreign men, as a group, are dangerous, and that Van der Sloot is the prime example.

Aside from selling newspapers, there is a good reason why people make this sort of generalization at moments like this.  Our brains are wired to look for patterns and connections among different stimuli.  In nature, the ability to notice what signals that a predator is about to strike is very important for survival, so it's not surprising that humans evolved to have this ability and this tendency.  When something bad happens, we automatically look for the pattern that will warn us the next time and, hopefully, save us from the next predator.

The problem here is that we also tend to see patterns that are completely irrelevant, and to attribute meaning to them.  In this instance, the Peruvian press has hit upon the pattern that Van der Sloot, and some other suspects and convicted murderers, are all foreigners.  They extrapolate from that the idea that women should be careful of foreigners.  The problem is that being foreign is not what made these men murderers.  I'm not familiar with the crime statistics in Lima, but my guess is that there are many more murders of women by Peruvian men, just going by sheer numbers.  Nobody is suggesting that women stay away from Peruvian men, or from all men, though.  Those aren't interesting patterns for our brains to latch onto -- they're not specific enough.  Foreign men are.

Being wary of foreign men in this situation makes about as much sense as being wary of blonde men, or men with short hair, or men who are 6 feet tall.  All of these things may describe Van der Sloot, but none of them is a remotely reliable signal that someone is a murderer.  We could also suggest that women should avoid men whose first name starts with J, or who have three parts to their last name.  Somehow, we manage to understand that these patterns are meaningless.  The pattern of people being from a foreign country, however, also taps into some deeply rooted fears of the unknown and biases against the "other," and so newspapers can get away with publishing what is almost certainly an equally meaningless theory.

It is probably a good idea for women to be careful, period.  They should probably be especially careful around people who are larger and stronger than they are who they don't know -- often this will be men who are relative strangers.  Where someone is from is not a useful piece of information in avoiding psychopaths.  It's too bad, really.  The world would be a lot safer if picking out the predators was that easy.

* Once again I've violated my rule about not naming perpetrators.  This story is only getting press, however, because of who the perpetrator is, so it seemed to make sense to publish his name.

The relative rarity of air and rail disasters makes them novel, and hence news. Car crashes bite man, and rail and air crashes bite dog. Intensive coverage of the few air and rail accidents that do occur in turn promotes the widespread — and erroneous — inference that planes and trains are unsafe. In an unfair irony, in transportation perhaps too much safety can be a dangerous thing.

The Quarterback brings this up because in a recent post about the murder of Neda Sultan, I wrote:

We live our lives based on what is likely, not what is possible, in terms of danger. This video brings home in a very vivid way what of course we already knew -- that the world is not safe, particularly if you are a protester in Tehran.

But Morris brings up the flip side of that, which is that trauma messes with our understanding of what is possible vs. what is likely. When something like this happens, we feel like we've been duped. We've been living our lives in a state of complacency, believing, say, that the Metro is safe, and we feel like all of a sudden we have woken up from our stupor to the horrible truth that it really isn't. And the media coverage reinforces that false perception.

On a related note, on Monday Freakonomics posted the following:

In the 1990’s, a call went out for the F.A.A. to stop letting air-traveling parents carry young children in their laps, making them buy a ticket for their children instead, so that every person could wear a seatbelt. The F.A.A. refused, saying that the cost of an extra ticket could force parents to travel by car instead. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children. On the other hand, the problem of child safety in air travel, the F.A.A. said, “barely exists.” Yet another example of how terrible we are at assessing risk, especially when it comes to our children.

One of the commenters replied:

The response to your blog is simple . . .The overwhelming majority of people are ignorant of the scientific method — thus, probability and risk.

I can't tell you how strenuously the Quarterback disagrees with this analysis. The fact that rational information tells us something different than that upon which we feel compelled to or choose to act does not mean we don't understand better information, or how good information is obtained. It just means that there are things that are psychologically more compelling than empirically derived data in this instance, and that, as the original post notes, we are actually pretty bad at estimating what the empirically derived data on danger will tell us.

Morris understands this when he looks at how the relative rarity and the news coverage of a transportation accident skews our perception of the danger of that mode of transportation. It may be that if you ask people which is safer, a car or the Metro, they will say a car. They will be wrong. But I doubt that if you told them the relevant statistics most people would say, "No, the Metro is still more dangerous." What they will say, however, is, "Even though I know that, my gut instinct is just to avoid the Metro."

Our guts are powerful, and yes, they are influenced by data and by the scientific method. They are also influenced by media coverage, shock, personalization, and perhaps most powerfully, by what we can control. We can avoid a plane, or strap our child in. We can avoid the Metro. We can drive defensively. But what most of us can't do without completely changing our entire lives is avoid driving, so it is important to us that, on a gut level, we continue to be able to drive. We therefore ignore that data, perhaps not cognitively, but instinctively. We're not stupid, we're just trying to get by, to live in the shadow of what is likely and what is possible.