In September 2005, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about auto safety and the rise in popularity of SUVs. It’s an interesting article. Two important facts to take away from the are: (1) perception is reality and (2) feelings often trump facts. If people can acknowledge these two human tendencies, they will at least be more self-aware, and perhaps even more rational and thoughtful. The following are snippets from the article that illustrate these two central points.
Perception is Reality
Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cup holders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put my
coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe.
Feelings Trump Facts
The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn’t make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-percent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-percent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-percent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two percent, four percent, and one percent.) But this desire for safety wasn’t a rational calculation. It was a feeling.
