Why Do We Ignore Existential Risks?

By Andrew Quist

In his book, End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World (2019), journalist Bryan Walsh details eight existential risks to humanity and discusses what we can do to prevent them from causing the end of the civilization. These risks include asteroid collision, supervolcano eruption, nuclear war, climate change disaster, pandemic, bioterrorism, artificial intelligence, and even hostile aliens. Although the chances of each of these risks coming to fruition is low, the damage they would cause is so great (potentially world-ending), that from a risk analysis standpoint, it makes sense to invest heavily to do what we can to ensure we prevent or survive them.

But cost is not the only the only barrier to ensure we are ready to survive an existential risk; our psychology is a significant obstacle to appropriate preparation. Walsh details several psychological tendencies that cause us to ignore, deny, or play-down our responsibility to deal with these risks, and many of these overlap with the cognitive biases explained in the Arithmetic of Compassion website.

Availability heuristic

As Walsh explains, the availability heuristic is “the human tendency to be overly influenced by what feels most visible and salient in our experience.” Because we don’t have experience dealing with existential risks, the availability heuristic causes us to ignore them. Walsh writes, “No human has seen an asteroid on a collision course with our planet, or witnessed a disease rise and threaten our very existence. These threats have no availability to us, so we treat them as unreal—even if science and statistics tell us otherwise.”

Threats like impacts from large asteroids or eruptions from supervolcanos may be very rare, but they have occurred on earth before—the Chicxulub asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the Toba supervolcano covered the stratosphere with so much ash that global temperatures decreased by 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Similar disasters could plausibly occur again during human civilization, and it is folly to ignore these low-probability events when their occurrence would mean the destruction of human civilization. As Walsh notes, “Our inability to see beyond the narrow boundaries of human history . . . means that we suffer from a blind spot that can leave us vulnerable to an array of extremely rare but extremely lethal existential risks.”

Affect heuristic

The affect heuristic refers to our tendency to make decisions based on how we feel rather than through reasoned analysis. Walsh writes, “human beings are terrible at evaluating risk—especially existential risk. We rely on feeling rather than fact, and privilege emotional memories over hard numbers.” Our reliance on emotional memories to assess risk prevents us from appropriately preparing for existential risks, for which we have no experience, and therefore no basis for emotional memory.

Psychic numbing

Another aspect of psychology that prevents us from addressing existential risks is our inability to scale up the concern we feel for one human to hundreds of millions or billions of people. Humans have an incredible capacity for empathy for one identified victim. In fact, we feel even more empathy for the suffering of one person than we do for a group of people, even though, logically, we should care about the plight of multiple people more than the plight of one person. In psychology this bias is called “the identifiable victim effect.” Its corollary is psychic numbing: the inability to feel emotion for the suffering of large groups of people. Due to psychic numbing, “our empathy actually erodes as potential death tolls grow.” Citing the work of Arithmetic of Compassion contributor and psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues, Walsh notes:

Slovic has found that sympathy can begin to fade as soon as we’re presented with two needy people, rather than one. . . Counterintuitively, instead of concern and our willingness to act rising as the size of a potential catastrophe grows, it can actually contract. The psychic numbing that Slovic identifies makes it that much more difficult to come to grips with existential risks of any sort—including the ones, like nuclear war and climate change, that result directly from our own actions. Rather than being motivated to prevent global catastrophes, we prefer to ignore them. And if we can’t accept those risks, we can’t do anything about them.

Lack of empathy for future humans

Psychic numbing is especially pronounced if we have no connection or an attenuated connection to the people at risk. For this reason, we are even more numb to the potential suffering of future lives than we are to people alive today. This is relevant to one risk in particular, climate change, because the vast majority of the victims of climate change will be among future generations. Walsh writes:

The real victims every time we turn the ignition on our cars or switch on the air-conditioning are not us, the people of the present generation, but our children, our grandchildren, and their descendants. With every other existential risk—a nuclear war, a bioengineering pandemic, even hostile aliens—the people of today would be the first victims, even if the greater tragedy is the loss of the far larger number of human beings who would have lived in the future. But the worst consequences of climate change, those that might truly qualify as existential, won’t hit home until many or most of us are long gone. That raises a vital question: what do we actually owe the people of tomorrow?

Because we don’t readily feel empathy for the future humans that will be effected by climate change, it is especially incumbent on us to use our reasoning to put into place policies that address climate change, and to consciously remember that unsustainable lifestyle practices will impact real people in the future.

The collective action problem

Another psychological tendency that impedes action to address climate change in particular is our inability to appreciate that the small actions of each person on the planet add up. This is called the collective action problem. Walsh writes:

Part of what holds us back is the distributed, globalized causes of man-made climate change. A ton of carbon emissions emitted at any one place in the world has a warming effect on the entire world. To prevent nuclear war we have to focus our efforts on just a few nuclear-capable nations, but every country contributes to climate change, as indeed almost every individual does through their use of energy. Ever have a dispute at work where no one will take responsibility because everyone is implicated? That’s climate change times 7.7 billion—the ultimate collective action problem.”

Conclusion

In his book End Times, Walsh persuasively makes the point we should be prepared to prevent or mitigate existential risks if we want the project of human civilization to continue. This means we must be ready for a supervolcano eruption, a large asteroid impact, or a large-scale bioterrorist attack. In order to effectively prepare for existential risks we must recognize the blind spots in our psychology and invest the necessary resources. After all, what could be more important than preventing the end of our world?