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?

Michael Rothschild deigns to conjure the awful to make an important point. He shows that if terrorists were able hijack and destroy one plane per week and you also took one trip by plane per month in that same time, your odds of being affected by those terrorist attacks are still miniscule, one in 135,000.

Even if that implausible scenario played out, you would still be about 4.5 times more likely to die from skin cancer next year (one in 30,000) and 900 times more likely to get skin cancer if you’ve had five sunburns in your life (one in 150).

But that doesn’t matter. For sunburns, we have all kinds of ways to exert control and make us feel less helpless: hats, SPF 50 lotions, perceived favorable genetic histories and self-delusion--"My sun burn isn’t as bad as that guy’s." We have volume knobs for that radio.

For terrorism, we have no volume knobs.

ONE WAY TO CREATE them is to kindle that analytical part of our brains--to provide as much factual context about the risk we’re disclosing as possible. The more we can provide, the more we can override our dread.

Unfortunately, the lack of control over who discloses what and how they do it has actually fostered less context and fewer useful statistics, not more. So toys in my house have lead in them. What does that mean? Moreover, what are the chances someone in my house will be affected by that lead, and how?

Without context, we are anxious. Risks appear both more random and more likely than they really are. We lack of control. We curl up and whimper.

Why don’t we include context with our risk disclosure? For some, it would run counter to their agenda for disclosing the risk. “Brain-eating amoeba kills 6” gets me to click. “Rare bacteria with 50 million to one chance of affecting you”--not so much.

Fischoff believes that another factor at play is what he calls the myth of innumeracy. "There’s an idea that people can’t handle numbers, but actually there’s no evidence to support that," he says. "I believe there’s a market for better context with risks."

Slovic is less certain. He says numeracy varies widely, both because of education and predisposition. "Some people look at fractions and proportions and simply don’t draw meaning from them," he says. To that end, Slovic thinks we need to create images and experiences that help us emotionally understand th