Imagine a town where 1,000 people die every year from hitting deer with their cars. It’s an incredible loss of life, but it eventually becomes standard for the people living there. Hitting a deer and dying wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just nature at play.
Now, imagine that the local government proposes a solution that is projected to cut these deaths in half. The plan is to reintroduce the natural cat predator of the deer, a cougar, let’s say. This does work out in the end, and 500 lives are saved every year. However, around forty children now die every year because hungry cougars stumble into neighborhoods in search of something to eat. Overall, 460 lives were spared each year in this town, but the citizens would never want to agree with such a plan. Why? They know the cougars eating their children was not an unlucky event of nature, but a decision that the government chose to move forward with. In other words, individuals will think it’s the government that’s killing their children.
This also shows up with seat belts. Statistically speaking, seat belts reduce the chance of dying in a car crash by 50%. This saves around fifteen thousand lives in the U.S. alone per year, which is a colossal amount! Nevertheless, seat belts and seat belt laws have remained controversial for decades now. There are rare cases where a seat belt can lead to a death after a car crash occurs. Sometimes passengers survive the initial crash but then struggle to escape the rubble. Again, this happens very rarely, but when individuals think that they could go through this, they blame the government for putting these rules and regulations in place because “they” (the government) are killing innocent civilians.
This pattern continues with even nuclear power versus coal power. Coal plants release gases that are dangerous to both humans and the environment every day. These toxins can lead to health problems such as lung cancer, asthma, heart disease, and even premature death. Nuclear plants, on the other hand, do not pollute the air and humans with dangerous chemicals. Additionally, nuclear waste is safely kept and stored in fortified underground bunkers under strict regulations that almost never let any radiation out. The conclusion here is that nuclear power plants are much safer than coal power plants, but people still can fear nuclear plants more. Once every couple of years or even decades there happens to be a disastrous collapse of a nuclear reactor that leads to a meltdown and ugly aftermath. The damage is inflicted all at once and individuals see it more clearly than the constant-and-almost unnoticeable harm that coal plants cause to society.
In the end, statistics can be frustrating. Society can be played by the numbers and everything can be done by the book. On the other hand, zooming in leads to a diverse class of individuals who value themselves more personally. They don’t react to straight facts, but instead they react to noise, emotion, and practically any big events that happen swiftly and spontaneously. They may not mean these people are wrong, but if society wants to improve more, just showing the math won’t cut it. Messages have to be delivered to the masses in an appealing and controlled way so that most listeners can be happy with the outcome and not cry at the slightest adverse effect.
Sources:
- Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Our Reaction To Statistics w/ Neil deGrasse Tyson. YouTube Shorts, uploaded by UniverseLair, 2025, www.youtube.com/shorts/ksu7vHkgN3Y.
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Seat Belts: The Issue. U.S. Department of Transportation, 2017, www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle-safety/seat-belts.
- Ritchie, Hannah. “What Are the Safest and Cleanest Sources of Energy?” Our World in Data, 10 Feb. 2020, ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy.
