Heads you win

"Britain plagued by 80 million rats," spreading Weil's disease, salmonella and tuberculosis, screamed a recent tabloid headline. Who says and who counted, you may ask. Not surprisingly, Rentokil UK, "Britain's leading provider of pest control," provided the info.

The second part of Dan Gardner's invaluable book quotes many examples of the way in which statistics, both the legitimate kind and the damn lies variety, are used to frighten the customer into parting with his or her money and the voter to deliver at the poling station. For most readers of this review, the evidence will not come as a great surprise.

In the context, however, of the first half, where Gardner, quoting one of his many reliable sources, explains how "we unconsciously screen information about risk to suit our most basic assumptions about the world and our place in it," we realise that none of us is free of wired-in bias born of our personalities, cultural conditioning and the influences of the people among whom we live.

When it comes to the inevitable struggle between gut and head, all the evidence of numerous socio-psychological experiments reveals that gut wins hands down.

We base our responses to the "information maelstrom" that engulfs us, engendering feelings ranging from anxiety to terror, on personal experiences, anecdotes from friends and, above all, the natural human propensity for storytelling, rather than unexciting scientifically analysed data.

Statistics - "people with the tears dried off" - can rarely compete with living, individual stories and, while stories may be entertaining, they are "a lousy tool for understanding the world we live in," according to Gardner.

Whereas the use of fear by the commercial manipulators is evident in so many TV ads and our political masters have no doubt of its use in garnering support for their schemes, Gardner does not allow those of us who might believe that we are rationally objective in our concerns about, say, environmental pollution, to escape our bias.

Perhaps most telling is Gardner's survey of the use of fear to generate support for the "terrorism industry." For example, "malaria kills roughly one million people a year ... 67 times more people ... than the almost 15,000 killed by international terrorism over the last four decades." But then the fairly cheap answer to wiping out malaria is nowhere near as profitable as the war games.

So what can we, "the safest, healthiest, wealthiest humans in the history of the species" now hiding under our beds, obsessed with the fears of energy depletion, climate chaos, mass starvation, nuclear terrorism and annihilating plagues, do to retain our sanity?

"Understand how Gut works and ... wake up Head and tell it to do its job, which is to think hard."