Why are we so bad at calculating risk?

If you buy a lottery ticket every week, you’re more likely to be murdered in your home by a stranger than win the jackpot – but that doesn’t stop you buying the ticket. Chris Horrie looks at the psychology behind how we perceive risk in our daily lives

According to the scientists behind the doomsday clock, we are now 100 seconds to midnight... AKA the end of the world (Getty)

According to the Office for National Statistics, 12 in every million people in the UK were murdered in the past year, for which there is a complete set of non-Covid skewed data. And although past performance, as they say in adverts for share-tipping services, is not necessarily a guide to future performance, it means that, as a ball park figure, you would have to wait for more than 40,000 years to have a 50/50 coin-toss chance of being murdered on a particular day. You could probably at least double that waiting time if you live alone, since about half of all murders are carried out by close associates. For women, the clear majority of victims die at the hands of a partner. And yet the risk of death, or even serious injury, as a result of crime is overestimated by almost everyone. The ONS cites surveys which shows that more than 10 per cent of the population expect to be the victim of crime of some sort in the next year, but that on average about a third of 1 per cent of the population is affected in this way. The perception of risk is 30 times greater than the reality, at least in terms of reported crime.

In contrast, the risk of death as a result of nuclear war is ever present, and recently has increased according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to the point where we are 100 seconds to midnight on their doomsday clock. The doomsday clock is not a clock, it is a numerical scale from zero to 43,200 where zero is OK and 43,200 is the end of the world. We are now at 43,100 and counting. This is not the same sort of data as the piles of legally verified death certificates collated by nitpicky bureaucrats to produce the crime numbers. But it is based on a valid analysis by people who seem to know what they are talking about.

In January 2020 the scientists increased their risk assessment because of the planned expansion of nuclear weapons programmes by several countries including the US and UK. But far from scaring the living daylights out of people, the announcement (and the underlying facts about nuclear proliferation and waves of new conflict triggers around the world) was widely ignored. The news was swamped by Meghan Markle’s withdrawal from royal duties and, on the risk assessment front, the death of two skiers in an avalanche in a Californian mountain resort.