CSO Disclosure Series | Reporter's Notebook: The United States of TMI

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us?

B, but he didn’t really understand why. To Dog C the shocks were random, out of his control. Afterward, the dogs were shocked again, but this time they were alone and each was given the lever. Dog A and Dog B both escaped again, but Dog C did not. In fact, Dog C curled up on the floor and whimpered.

After that, the researchers tested the idea with positive reinforcement, using babies in cribs. Baby A was given a pillow that controlled a mobile above him. Baby B was given no such pillow. When both babies were subsequently placed in cribs with a pillow that controlled the mobile, Baby A happily triggered it; Baby B didn’t even try to learn how.

Psychologists call this behavior "learned helplessness"--convincing ourselves that we have no control over a situation even when we do. The experiments arose from research on depression, and the concept has also been applied with regards to torture. It also applies to risk perception. Think of the risks we learn about every day as little shocks. If we’re not given levers that reliably let us escape those shocks (in the form of putting the risk in perspective or giving people information or tools to offset the risk, or in the best case, a way to simply opt out of the risk), then we become Dog C. We learn, as Fischoff said, that the world is out of control. More specifically, it is out of our control. What’s more, sociologists believe that the learned helplessness concept transfers to social action. It not only explains how individuals react to risk, but also how groups do.

MY FAVORITE LEARNED HELPLESSNESS experiment is this one: People were asked to perform a task in the presence of a loud radio. For some, the radio included a volume knob, while for others no volume knob was available. Researchers discovered that the group that could control the volume performed the task measurably better, even if they didn’t turn the volume down. That is, just the idea that they controlled the volume made them less distracted, less helpless and, in turn, more productive.

Control is the thing, both Fischoff and Slovic say. It’s the countervailing force to all of this risk disclosure and the learned helplessness it fosters.

We have many ways of creating a sense of control. One is lying to ourselves. "We’re pretty good at explaining risks away," says Slovi