Risky Business

One of the central topics of discussion concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been people's tolerance for risk. But one item that could perhaps use more discussion is how people determine who is a risk.

I was chatting with an old acquaintance who was somewhat put out by a tendency to treat the unvaccinated as modern-day lepers.

"Well, doesn't it stand to reason that a person is more likely to have an infectious disease if they are unvaccinated than if they are vaccinated?" I asked.

My acquaintance agreed that it did, but that this was no reason to treat all unvaccinated people as infected.

At which point I reminded them of an earlier conversation, in which they had agreed with the premise that it was appropriate for White people in the United States to treat Black people as agents of violence and anarchy, because Black people were over-represented in crime statistics. And that this was true even if they didn't know whether the Black person in question had a criminal record.

I pointed out to my acquaintance that they didn't have hard numbers on things like the number of people who were currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 or the number of Black people who had committed crimes in the past year or whatever. But absent those numbers, they considered it appropriate to conclude that one group of people was a threat and another was not, even though the same general criterion, more likely to X, was being employed.

It wasn't mean to be a gotcha, but rather to point out that for many people, these sorts of considerations aren't about the hard numbers, but about in-group versus out-group identification. Because "biased" has become such a dirty word in American English, I think that a lot of people have difficulty owning up to the idea that they may, in fact, be biased, especially when it comes to whether or not certain other people should be seen as embodying some sort of risk. Because, of course, the situation works both ways. I know people who would bristle at the idea that Black people represent some sort of generalized risk, but not at the idea that the unvaccinated do.

Thinking on it, I suspect the reason that this particular failure of risk analysis doesn't receive more attention is the simple fact it's already understood that people are poor at assessing risks and why. Simply pointing out to people that they tend to think of out-groups as more risky than other people likely doesn't really add anything to the discussion.