When emotions distort the risk equation
We all like to think we understand risk. After all, the maths is simple enough: Risk = Likelihood × Severity. The more likely something is to happen, and the more severe the outcome, the greater the risk. Straightforward. Clean. Rational.
Except human beings are none of those things.
Our perception of risk is rarely shaped by the numbers. Instead, it is shaped by how something feels - how shocking, frightening, or outrageous it appears. And when emotion enters the equation, our internal risk assessment becomes wildly skewed.
Take two examples. In the UK, deaths from flu can reach several thousand per year. Covid years aside this is viewed as not unusual and outside the health professions it rarely gets talked about on any scale. Yet statistically, it is one of the most consistent causes of preventable harm.
Contrast that with a rare, violent incident - something shocking, deliberate, and deeply disturbing. The likelihood of being personally affected is statistically very small, far smaller than dying of flu, but because the event is outrageous, it dominates our attention. We feel exposed, even when the statistical risk to us is close to zero.
In both cases, the outcome is the same: a life lost. But our emotional response is entirely different.
This is where it helps to distinguish between fear and outrage.
Fear is about the experience of harm. Being attacked by a dog or being trapped in a fire - these are terrifying scenarios. They are also extremely unlikely. The fear comes from imagining the experience, imagining the pain, not from the probability. In fact, you are roughly four times more likely to die falling down the stairs than you are in a fire, but when was the last time you walked down the stairs in fear of your life.
Outrage, however, it is about the nature of the event. A violent assault triggers outrage because it is intentional, personal, and morally wrong. A fatal car crash, though far more common, rarely triggers the same emotional response. The severity may be identical, life changing injuries or even death, but the story is different - and our brains react to the story, not the statistics.
This matters in safety-critical industries. When we rely solely on formal risk assessments, we assume people will behave according to the numbers. But people don’t. They behave according to the emotional weight they attach to different hazards.
A low‑likelihood, high‑outrage event can dominate attention far beyond its actual risk. Meanwhile, high‑likelihood, low‑outrage hazards - fatigue, slips, routine shortcuts, everyday exposures - fade into the background because they don’t feel dramatic.
If we want people to make better decisions, we need to help them recognise when outrage is inflating the perceived risk, and when familiarity is deflating it. Neither distortion is deliberate. Both are human.
The goal isn’t to remove emotion - that’s impossible. The goal is to create a moment of pause where people can ask:
Am I reacting to the likelihood, or to the story?
Am I underestimating a familiar risk because it feels ordinary?
Am I overestimating a dramatic risk because it feels outrageous?
When we help people separate the emotional response from the actual numbers, their decisions become clearer, calmer, and far more aligned with reality.
At Macnaughton McGregor, we don’t just teach risk assessment - we help people understand the psychology behind it. If you want your teams to see risk as it truly is, not as it feels, talk to us.
shaun@2macs.com
