The Power of Noticing by Max Bazerman

Author:Max Bazerman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ERRORS OF OMISSION

Imagine that you have a 10 percent chance of catching a new strain of flu virus. The only available vaccine prevents this type of flu, but it also has a 5 percent chance of causing symptoms identical to those it is supposed to prevent, and with the same severity. Would you get the vaccine? Ilana Ritov and Jon Baron, psychologists at Hebrew University and the University of Pennsylvania, asked participants in a research study this question. The majority said no.

Ritov and Baron have found in their research that we tend to pay far more attention to harms caused from action—the 5 percent risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine—than harms from inaction, or the 10 percent risk of catching the flu without the vaccine. This is true despite the fact that the vaccine described can be expected to reduce the odds of flu symptoms by 5 percent.2 This bias for harms of omission over harms of action is known as the omission bias: people tend to follow the rule of thumb “Do no harm.”

Now imagine that you are a federal policymaker who must vote on one of the following two options:

A. If a citizen in your country dies in an accident, that person’s heart will automatically be used to save another person’s life. In addition, if a citizen needs a heart transplant, there is a 90 percent chance that the citizen will get the heart.

B. If a citizen in your country dies in an accident, that person will be buried with his or her heart intact. In addition, if a citizen needs a heart transplant, there will be a 45 percent chance that the citizen will get the heart.

When presented with this choice, most people chose Option A. This is not surprising, since it appears to lead to a dramatic improvement over Option B in terms of lives saved. But most Americans are not presented the question in this form. Typically Americans are asked only whether or not they will donate their organs. The net savings of lives in society is left out of the question, and a large majority of us do not notice the omission. What good will come of my donating my organs? As it happens, quite a bit. In the United States about fifty thousand people are on waiting lists for organs at any given time. More than fifteen thousand of them can be expected to die before an organ is found. Doubling the number of donations in the United States would save many thousands of people per year, yet we fail to make the right policy change.

This tragedy persists despite the fact that an effective means of increasing the number of organs available for donation exists. Many other countries (including Austria, Belgium, France, and Sweden) have “opt-out” organ donation programs that presume their citizens have given consent to organ donation in the event of an accident, as compared to the “opt-in” programs in many U.S. states, which presume nonconsent. If we changed

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