The Art Of Choosing: The Decisions We Make Everyday of our Lives, What They Say About Us and How We Can Improve Them

by Sheena Iyengar

And though we’d like to believe otherwise, one of the main concerns in the previous era of medicine—that we’d choose poorly if given the opportunity—was not unfounded. For instance, physician and medical decision-making scholar Peter Ubel points out in his book Free Market Madness that many parents in the 1970s resisted vaccinating their children for polio because of the risk of contracting the disease from the vaccine itself. Since the chance of this happening was only 1 in 2.4 million (far lower than the chance of an unvaccinated person contracting polio), any medical professional would have encouraged vaccination. But probability is cold comfort when that 1 in 2.4 million is your child; some parents must have been so afraid of making their children ill by choosing to vaccinate, thereby becoming causal agents, that they preferred the far riskier option of doing nothing. This is just one example of how our well-known tendency to give more weight to the potential harms of action than to those of inaction can get us into trouble.