If you live in the United States, your odds of dying from heart disease (1 in 6) vastly outweigh your odds of dying from an accidental opioid overdose (1 in 92), which in turn outweigh your odds of dying in a car accident (1 in 107), which itself is more likely than dying in a fire (1 in 1,547), in a massive storm (1 in 58,669), or being killed by lightning (1 in 138,849).
A 2018 study by the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the odds of dying in a plane accident or crash are about 1 in 29.4 million.
One's annual chance of being killed in a terrorist attack, in the US, is around 1 in 43.8 million for a native-born terrorist, and 1 in 104.2 million for a foreign-born terrorist.
None of which means these things are impossible: they're still risks because they do still happen.
But what's striking about figures of this kind is how much of our cognitive attention is dedicated to worrying about things like plane crashes and terrorist attacks perpetrated by people from other countries, when the more immediate, tangible risks are things like our own health and (in some regions in particular) the possibility that we might get hooked on a dangerous drug, take too much of a drug, or ingest a drug that isn't what we thought it was.
These extreme, scary-seeming risks that get outsized attention from our brains are often called "dread risks," because although they're usually not the most vital things to worry about and prepare for, they capture our imaginations and thus, more of our cognitive resources.
Part of what distinguishes a dread risk from other sorts of risk is that they tend to center on events with the potential for catastrophic outcomes: the detonation of nuclear weapons or meltdown of nuclear power plants, the emergence of global pandemics, apocalyptic asteroid impacts, and the possibility of bombings in public places are focuses for this type of dread in part because the number of deaths and amount of destruction caused by them could be significant, and in part because the deaths they cause could occur all at once.
That's one of the interesting things about dread risk: events that kill large numbers of people over time ("continuous risk") don't seem to trigger the same overwhelming sense of dread as events that kill a lot of people within a short period.
We also seem to dread the types of risks over which we, perceptually at least, have little or no control.
I can't control an asteroid that might hit Earth, nor can I control the actions of a terrorist or new disease that kills large numbers of people seemingly at random.
Anything that stands out from our normal state of affairs—the risks we've come to accept as being just part of how things work—also tend to be more likely to fall into this category.
Car accidents are common in many countries, but the risks associated with them—even when they're substantial—have been baked into the foundation of everyday existence: we tend to fear them less than we fear plane crashes, despite the former being a lot more likely than the latter.
Interestingly, there's some evidence that our internal risk-assessment computations related to human fatalities peak at around 100 deaths, which might be the consequence of how we organized way back in history, with tribes of around that number of people being the norm and anything beyond that leading to a necessary split into multiple tribes.
The theory is that events which cause around 100 deaths are especially scary because there's something in our biological or sociological makeup that imbues us with dread over the death of what would have essentially been our entire tribe, all the people we know. But there are diminishing returns beyond that, in terms of dread, so a terrorist attack that kills 100 people will feel emotionally and intuitively similar—in terms of how scared we are of similar things happening in the future—to a terrorist attack (or weather event or plane crash) that kills a lot more.
All of which is useful to know because it implies we'll tend to be more naturally attuned to some types of risk, but that it might be prudent to question these knee-jerk assessments and perhaps even recalibrate our risk-amelioration efforts toward those that are more likely to cause us actual, rather than theoretical and scary-seeming, harm.
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