After September 11, 2001, many people feared further terrorist attacks and chose to travel by car instead of flying. To put it simply, the number of airline passengers in the fourth quarter of 2001 fell by 18%, by comparison with the last three months of the year 2000. In other words, influenced by 9/11, close to one in five travelers decided not to fly. Let’s look at some other numbers now: in 2001, there were 483 deaths among commercial airline passengers in the USA, about half of them on 9/11. Interestingly, in 2002 there wasn’t a single one. And in 2003 and 2004 there were only nineteen and eleven fatalities respectively. This means that during these three years, a total of thirty airline passengers in America were killed in accidents. In the same period, however, 128,525 people died in US car accidents. That’s an estimated 5% more than expected, based on past driving patterns. The statisticians have concluded that as many as 5,000 deaths would probably have been avoided if people had carried on taking the plane as usual. In addition, up to 45,000 people would have been spared serious injuries and up to 325,000 less serious ones.
Why did so many people take their car instead of the plane after 9/11? The simple explanation is that, behind the wheel of your own automobile, it’s natural to feel in control. Try telling drivers that they have no influence over the skills of other road users, the weather, the condition of the road, mechanical problems, or any other common causes of accidents – and they will agree. But they still feel in control of their destiny when they drive. They can’t help it. Put them on a plane, and they think their life is in the hands of the airline pilot or, worse, a bunch of terrorists.
Psychologists call this the “illusion of control.”
© Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba, 2009