Critical Thinking: What is the Fallacy of Lack of Proportion?

One of the errors of reasoning, or "fallacies," that we study about in a critical thinking class is called lack of proportion.

The lack of proportion fallacy occurs when we fall prey to the common psychological tendency to not react to events, risks, benefits, etc. in proper proportion to their likelihood and magnitude.

This can happen for any number of reasons, many if not most of which are a matter of how vivid an impression something makes on a person.

One factor being personal experience. It may be, for instance, that statistically dog breed A is twice as likely to bite a person than dog breed B, but if you yourself were seriously injured by a bite from a dog of breed B, there's a good chance (if you're not a critical thinker) that you're now a lot more wary of dogs of breed B than of breed A. You don't put your experience in perspective by giving it equal weight with all dog bites of all people by all breeds, because your own experience is so much easier to call to mind, so much more psychologically powerful, than just some numbers.

Another factor is how much public attention and media coverage something receives. If Dictator A and Dictator B are behaving in an equally ghastly fashion, but Dictator A is in the news all the time (I'll leave it to you to speculate as to why) and Dictator B isn't, then you're a lot more likely to be outraged by Dictator A and/or to agree it's necessary to go to war against him and/or to agree economic sanctions are in order against his country, etc.

Another factor, certainly not unrelated to the aforementioned factor of media coverage, is how sensational or attention-grabbing something is. Statistically your child might be five or ten or fifty times more likely to die in an auto accident going to or from school than to die in a Columbine-style school shooting, but you may well worry more about the latter. And not just worry, but be more apt to advocate changes in the laws and social policy and such to "do something about" the latter than the former.

Or sometimes it's just a matter of whatever fits best with our pre-existing beliefs, emotions, and prejudices. It may be that some subtle change in labor law or in local business regulations or in certain tax rates would have roughly the same impact on the available jobs in your field as a certain number of people of an unpopular race sneaking over the border illegally to look for work. But if the former is just a bunch of boring wonky stuff to you, and the latter makes your blood boil, you're bound to treat these factors very unequally.

Recommended reading in this area is The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, which in some ways is a book-length treatment of this very fallacy. In it, the author compares the evidence for various high profile dangers (road rage, "wilding" criminal youth, illegal drug use, etc.) and notes how often it simply doesn't match up with people's perceptions.

So next time you wonder, say, how people can be foolhardy enough to travel overseas in spite of the terrorism danger, ask yourself if you really have sufficient grounds for regarding that as more risky than any number of other mundane activities you don't think twice about. It may be you're guilty of the lack of proportion fallacy.