How Politicians and Disinformation Campaigns Use Our Inability to Articulate Probabilities Against Us

By Alexander Joenks | Politics | March 13, 2023 |

By Alexander Joenks | Politics | March 13, 2023 |

This tweet was going around last week and is a fascinating glimpse into America’s perception versus reality.

Imagine thinking 41% of American adults are Black and 20% of the population is trans. What world do you live in?

These extreme over estimations are a direct product of right wing fear mongering and the over representation of minorities in negative news coverage.

— Travon (@Travon) March 9, 2023

Idiots, rights? However, there’s another thing going on here that’s actually a really cool and interesting element of human psychology that has nothing to do with how smart people are. Basically, none of us have any intuition for statistics, no matter how smart or statistically educated we are.

When we are asked to estimate the probability of different outcomes, we always gravitate towards estimating equal probability. Three possible outcomes? We assume one third chance of each. Even if we rationally know one of the three is really rare? We’ll say … eh. 20%/40%/40%.

But! And here’s the cool part. It’s not just that we can’t articulate the probabilities. We actually behave as if there is equal probability. If we set up experiments where you act on the basis of how likely an event is to happen, but in true psychology experiment style where it’s not presented to you in terms of numbers, just that you would do better if you sync in on the probability, we act as if there is equal probability no matter how badly we do in the “game”.

What this means in politics and society is fascinating because we treat all outcomes we are conscious of as roughly equally probable. Straight vs. queer? Must be 50/50, oh we factually know that being gay is less common? Call it 1/3 vs. 2/3. So on the one hand, bigots are acting like they are under siege because they are incapable of not overperceiving the number of the minority group. Because none of us are. But smart assholes who are aware of this leverage it as a wedge. Trans people are like 1% of the population? People will act as if they’re a third of the population. Find the 1% of any fringe and make people aware of it, and it gets entered into their calculus as having equal probability with everything they already had on their menu. So you can manipulate them into acting on the basis of the rare thing just by virtue of strategically making them aware of the right rare thing.

Or a different way of looking at it. The perception of cities being more dangerous than small towns? It’s not a function of media cliches. It’s a function of this same thing. Imagine you’ve got a murder rate of 1 in 10K people per year everywhere (that’s silly high, but it’s just for easy math). If you live in a tiny town of 1000 people, on average there’s a murder per decade. If you live in a big city there are 10K people just on your city block in high rises. Someone is murdered every year on your block. There is exactly the same murder rate in the two places but the city intuitively feels dangerous.

Because our internal math doesn’t understand stuff like 1 in 10,000. We conflate it as being two possible outcomes: I got murdered; I didn’t get murdered. In the small town, most of the time there aren’t two perceptible outcomes. There’s just 100% I’m fine. In the city block, there are two possible outcomes, 50% for each. Ergo, cities are more dangerous.

It’s the same logic at play with terrorism. Basically 0% chance of anyone dying in a terrorist attack. But the reason terrorist attacks target mundane things (like a city bus) over things that would actually easily have a way higher body count (blow up the backup generator at a hospital) is because the point of it is to play on that rare event psychosis we have. It’s not, well there was a 0.001% chance I could have died in a terrorist attack, it’s that attack was on a bus! I ride a bus every day! There was a 100% chance it COULD have been me.

Disinformation campaigns on the internet work similarly. They are rarely focused on providing a coherent alternative narrative. They’re generally focused on providing 37 different mutually exclusive narratives. Not to convince you of anything, but to introduce so many different equally weighted things that we are exhausted and give up trying to know the truth. We can rationally know that there is a 99% chance this credible thing is true, but when presented with 37 other scenarios we intuitively treat them all as equivalent and basically fritz out and throw our hands up.