Fear Factors: On the Psychology of Safety and Danger

When I moved to China nearly two years ago, one of the first things I bought was a bicycle. I live on a university campus, where everyone rides, and the bike was cheap: $17 for an ancient Five Rams cruiser, with a lively color scheme of teal and rust. I used to cycle to work when I lived in New York, dodging tourists and threading in between delivery trucks. But the moment I pulled out onto a street in China, it became clear that this was going to be a different experience.

In New York, the key to road safety is predictability. Make eye contact with drivers, so they can see your intentions. Use hand signals when you want to turn. Avoid sudden, erratic movements—if drivers can see where you're going, they'll be less likely to hit you. The first time I use a hand signal in China, angling my arm leftward to show a truck driver I am about to turn in front of him, he looks to see what I'm pointing at, while accelerating. Every time I make eye contact, other cyclists and drivers barrel right on through, instead of letting me pass in front of them. Eventually I adapt to a new reality, learn the new rules, and I discover that they are as simple in China as in the United States. Actually, there's only one rule: Ignore everyone.

When I am out on my bike, I am responsible for the area immediately around me, maybe twelve inches in every direction. The rest of the road is not my problem. I do not make eye contact with other bicyclists or motorists hurtling toward me, unless they are in my twelve inches. By not looking at them, I am making it their problem to not hit me, which of course they don't. The drivers do the same thing. We are an army of high-speed somnambulists, purposefully behaving as though we are the only ones on the road.

It feels ridiculously dangerous, riding around those first few months—also, no one, me included, is wearing a helmet, although my excuse is that I haven't been able to find a bicycle shop that sells them. But it becomes more and more evident that this is a normal, accepted level of risk here. Once, during a typhoon, I look out of a swimming taxi window and see ten cyclists casually skimming through the ankle-deep runoff, impervious, as if disposable ponchos were armor.

It's easy to feel as if safety has a universal definition. Freedom from want, freedom from fear—aren't those what everyone means when they think of safety? Perhaps, but the routes through the world to that state of being are circuitous and varied. Smoke alarms, for instance, have been required in every American bedroom since 1993. We rarely think about them, except to grouse when they go off while we're cooking. France, however, only began requiring residential smoke alarms in 2015. Switzerland, rated the safest country in the world in 2015 by one consumer-research firm, has not mandated them at all. There is not a simple, one-way progression from a state of nature to a state of safety. Even within nations, there are fundamental divisions about how we want to deal with risk.

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Deciding what dangers to avoid sounds like a supremely rational process, on the face of it. You calculate the risk of an event (house fire, bicycle crash), the probability of the bad outcome (death), multiply them together, and get a number that tells you how likely the worst-case scenario is. Then you decide how you might defend against it. Get a smoke alarm. Wear a helmet.

The truth is, though, that at this point a number of things come between us and a rational decision. Over the last half century, researchers have uncovered systematic biases built into how we decide. These...