Tag Archives: behavioural economics

If a pharma company had discovered alcohol

Imagine if alcohol had been discovered by a pharmaceutical company.

This is what I imagine.

A chemical called ethanol was discovered by scientists at a leading, global, pharmaceutical company.

It seems to be very effective at reducing anxiety and aiding sleep. In trials nothing turns up to prevent it going to market.

Only when it has been on the market for a while do they discover that at high doses it has a very different effect. It makes people incoherent, tense and aggressive. Worse than that it irritates the stomach, causes dehydration and leads to severe headache.

Subsequently it is discovered that in overdose it can be fatal and long term use causes brain, skin and liver damage.

The nail in the coffin is when they discover it is also highly addictive.

The pharmaceutical company withdraws the drug from the market but the damage is done. Hundreds of thousands of people sue the company and the costs become so enormous the company has no choice but to close.

It goes down as the most dangerous drug ever licensed by the pharmaceutical industry. The result is all future trials are faced with new regulation to prevent the same mistake ever happening again.

Could this have ever happened? I think it could.

Fox Attacks

In behavioural economics they call it heuristics. It’s the discipline that explains a whole series of built in biases in the way humans think. Heuristics are mental short-cuts or rules of thumb that often result in thinking errors. The availability heuristic is particularly relevant in the case of Fox attacks.

shutterstock_28943083

Put simply, the availability heuristic operates on the notion that if we can recall something easily we tend to overestimate its importance. The classic would be shark attacks. When we read about a shark attack it sticks in our memory and so we tend to  over-estimate the risk and its importance. In reality the chances of being attacked by a shark are infinitesimally small.

This applies to the recent media coverage about Foxes and Fox attacks. The number of Fox attacks in recent years are in single digits. Compare this to the fact that over 6,000 hospital admissions in the UK  last year were for dog attacks. But dog bites are so common they are not even reported in the press, so few people worry about the issue.

The recent hysteria and demands for action after the Fox attack in London are exactly what the availability heuristic would predict.

The reality though is: there are around 40,000 urban Foxes in the uk. They may be a bit of a pain, annoying everyone’s pet dogs, occasionally going through the bins and making a lot of noise. But they aren’t usually dangerous, most people like them and in a country that needs to hang on to all the wildlife it can, they do add a certain exotisism to the city experience.

It’s amazing how  animal species are respected when they are few and far between: how much we love red squirrels, deer, beavers, stoats, pine martins and hedgehogs. But heaven help the species that actually do quite well: grey squirrels, foxes and badgers seem suddenly to change status from darlings of the nations to pests and pariahs.

So lets try and fight the availability heuristic and not waste time and money worrying about urban Foxes……. now dog attacks…that’s another matter.