people think in binary terms: either something will happen or it won’t. Either it will affect me, or it won’t. So when people hear they have a 6 in 100,000 chance of dying from a fall, they shelve that risk under the label “won’t happen to me,” even though falling is in fact the third most common cause of accidental deaths in the United States (after car crashes and poisoning). It would be much more powerful to tell people about Grant Sheal, age three, who fell and cut himself on a vase while playing at home in February 2007. The toddler died from his injuries.
