Our Overwhelming Need to Feel in Control

What is it about airplane crashes that so completely draw our attention and why are so many people so uncomfortable with flying? Blame it on our need for control and on some predictable cognitive biases.

In July 2010, I landed in Islamabad and only minutes before I landed AirBlue Flight 202 crashed into the nearby Marghala Hills, killing 152 people and leaving a scar in the mountainside that haunted me for the two years I was in Pakistan. Every time I looked at that mark on the side of the mountain, I felt like I’d narrowly escaped death.

Of course, that was nonsense. I was on a different airline, in a different type of plane, with different pilots, among many other variables, including that commercial planes almost never crash.

We over-represent the possibility of extreme, catastrophic events in our thinking and we under-represent higher probability, yet more mundane events that are, by their nature, less immediately available for recall. (For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon see here.)

Compared to my thinking about the plane crash, my colleagues and I would drive around Pakistan, in all kinds of weather, at all hours of the day, and barely give a thought to the risks associated with driving – despite that the dangers we faced on the roads there (or anywhere) were far greater than the risk I faced flying into the country.

A few nights ago I was working on my computer and switched over to my browser to look something up. Predictably this led to me spending excessive time reading an unrelated article and then taking a poll at the end of the article.

One of the poll questions had to do with perception of the relative safety of different modes of transportation. Here were the responses given by nearly 500,000 people (and forgive my lack of cool graphics, to see those you’ll have to go to LinkedIn because this platform doesn’t allow for them):

Percent of Respondents Believing Category is the

Safest Mode of Transportation

Bus………….2%

Other……….4%

Train………..13%

Plane………..39%

Car……………43%

Based on 482,230 respondents                 Source: MSN News Poll, 2022

Based on this survey, and many similar ones, people tend to believe cars are the safest mode of transportation. How does this compare to reality?

Deaths by Transporation Mode

(per 100,000,000 miles traveled)

Car…………….0.56

Bus…………….0.02

Train………….0.03

Plane…………0.002

Source: NSC, 2022

Vehicle deaths completely dwarf all of the other modes, fairly well the opposite of our collective interpretation of the relative risks.

The National Safety Council estimates that in any given year you have a 1 in 7,296 chance of dying in an automobile accident and a 1 in 905,176 chance of dying in a commercial plane crash.  And in case you are interested, the odds of being murdered in the U.S. are 1 in 18,989. There is even a far greater likelihood you will be murdered this year than die in a plane crash. And a much greater likelihood you will die in your car.

So why do we get this so wrong?

The short answer is availability bias. Any airline mishap is national news and will show up on our phones as breaking news. A plane skids off a runway or passengers are injured by turbulence and it makes headlines. And we all have the images of 9/11 available in our memory for immediate recall. We, therefore, are able to easily access that information when we consider relative safety. Though approximately 100 people die in the U.S. each day in automobile accidents, this does not make news and most of us would have to work much harder to bring to mind a fatal car crash.

This, however, is not the complete story. A more complex answer has to do with our overwhelming need to feel in control.

Since the 1970s, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have continued to add research backing their Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which posits that people are better motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors.  SDT is a topic for another blog, but autonomy is a key aspect of SDT and Ryan & Deci’s work spurred a new wave of research into autonomy.

Autonomy can relatively simply be defined as a person's ability to act on his or her own values and interests. That is, the feeling that we have choice and control in a given situation.

Not only do we want to feel in control, we need to feel in control and in a real sense our lives depend on it. One of the most fascinating findings to come out of the autonomy research is that when autonomy is diminished, mortality rates increase (see here for a summary of the research). The need for choice and control over ourselves and our situation is that powerful and it seems an evolutationary imperative.

When we are driving, we feel a strong sense of autonomy – we can make whatever choices we want – and we experience a sense of control in that we are holding the steering wheel and have our feet on the pedals and feel as if we can control the outcome when faced with potentially negative events. The numbers would show that not to be fully accurate, but we surely feel that way.  

We experience none of this on an airplane. In fact, the second we set foot into an airport, we are no longer in control. We are told which lines to stand in, to take our shoes off, and to put our seats in an upright position, while the people flying our plane sit out-of-site behind an impenetrable door.

We have zero control on an airplane and that makes us anxious. And thus we believe cars, where we generally feel far less anxious, to be safer than airplanes, despite that by any measurement its not even close.

While these two factors come together to create an illogical belief that cars are safer than planes, we can pull them apart to consider how they impact us in daily life.

When you are making decisions, are you making decisions based on accurate information or simply on the information that most readily comes to mind? If you actively consider the information you are using to make a decision, and actively seek out less readily available information, your decision making process will invariably improve.

This study found that making doctors aware of the availability bias and suggesting they consider different options than the most readily available improved their diagnoses and decision making.

Finally, being aware of your own internal states is important, and recognizing whether a sense of anxiety is being caused by an actual threat or simply by a perceived threat to your autonomy can help you navigate more successfully through many situations, including getting on airplanes.

More importantly, as we are dealing with other people, if your actions are potentially impinging on their sense of autonomy, change what you are doing and restore their sense of control. Fortunately small gestures, such as allowing someone to sit where they like rather than directing them to a seat, have a disproportionately large impact on people’s sense of agency. Simply put, small gestures go a long way toward allowing someone to feel a sense of control within the situation.