‘I don’t wish to know that’:

Preferring stereotypes

to statistics

A point that Daniel Kahneman, the contemporary American

psychologist, makes is that all people have a tendency to let

stereotypes trump statistics. For example, if two people in

your street got burgled last year, whatever the official claims

about such things your assessment of the level of crime is

probably too high.

Newspaper headlines provide a similar kind of distorting per-

spective on the world: if your paper runs a series on ‘Women

attacked at night walking home’, while my paper runs a series

on ‘Why walking is good for the health’, we end up with two

quite different views on the same matter, based on a partial

and misleading kind of ‘evidence’ (what we’ve read in the

paper).

The power of the mass media to distort, if not quite all human

thinking certainly people’s assessments of risk, is shown in

public anxiety over things such as children being attacked by

strangers on the way to buy sweeties, or train stations being

blown up in terrorist attacks.