The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

by Gavin de Becker

People do things, we say, “out of the blue,” “all of a sudden,” “out of nowhere.” These phrases support the popular myth that predicting human behavior isn’t possible. Yet to successfully navigate through morning traffic, we make amazingly accurate high-stakes predictions about the behavior of literally thousands of people. We unconsciously read tiny untaught signals: the slight tilt of a stranger’s head or the momentarily sustained glance of a person a hundred feet away tells us it is safe to pass in front of his two-ton monster. We expect all the drivers to act just as we would, but we still alertly detect those few who might not—so that we are also predicting their behavior, unpredictable though we may call it. So here we are, traveling along faster than anyone before the 1900’s ever traveled (unless they were falling off a cliff), dodging giant, high-momentum steel missiles, judging the intent of their operators with a fantastic accuracy, and then saying we can’t predict human behavior.