The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability. If we really were just concerned with preventing the most likely causes of death, we would worry more about falling down than we would about plane crashes. The nightly news would feature back-to-back segments on tragic heart-attack deaths. And we might spend more money on therapists than police. (In the United States, you are almost twice as likely to kill yourself as you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime.) It’s as if we don’t fear death itself so much as dying. We fear the how, not so much the what.

Terrorists understand dread. Unpredictable attacks on civilians are an extremely efficient way to create dread. And dread is a good way to get a population agitated. In fact, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism in the past fifty years is fewer than the number killed by food allergies. But terrorism is by nature a mind game. After 9/11, many thousands of Americans decided to drive instead of fly. Driving felt safer, and, given the spasm of new security rituals in airports, certainly easier. In the months after 9/11, planes carried about 17 percent fewer passengers compared with the same period before the attacks. Meanwhile, the number of miles driven increased about 5 percent, according to government estimates. But something terrible happened in the name of common sense. In the two years after 9/11, an estimated 2,302 additional Americans were likely killed because they drove instead of flew, according to a study by three Cornell University professors. The study compared the total number of road fatalities in the years before 9/11 with the period after. It controlled for other things that might explain a spike in accidents—like bad weather. And after all of that, the researchers found 2,302 deaths above and beyond the “normal” tally of car-accident casualties; that’s 2,302 people who, if not for 9/11, almost certainly would have lived. These were the lesser-known, secondary victims of 9/11, casualties of the adjustments we make in times of great uncert...

Even in times of calm, we trend toward arrogance. About 90 percent of drivers think they drive more safely than the average driver. Most people also think they are less likely than others to get divorced, have heart disease, or get fired. And three out of four baby boomers think they look younger than their peers. People have a tendency to believe that they are, well, superior.