Rational thinking during fear

Visual data analysis when terrified?

One of my favorite ways to convey information is with graphs that illustrate the relationship between two variables. In early 2021, I did this with “Ugly VAERS graph,” which compared vaccine death reports in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Report System from its inception in 1990 to the present:

While this graph appeared to generate the desired response, i.e. that something had gone very wrong in 2021, it was remarkable that some individuals “fought back against the data.” This included a dear friend who has advanced training in epidemiology and business administration - i.e. someone who looks at a lot of graphs.

At the time, the hypothesis that seemed most obvious was “innumeracy” - the math equivalent to illiteracy. As a part-time math tutor since my teens, I have witnessed this phenomenon lots, and wrote briefly about it last year.

There is probably an equally important explanation for “fighting back against the data,” however. That would be emotional entanglement with the subject at hand, with fear likely being the uppermost problem.

Fear constrains thinking in curious ways - fixating attention on threats; diminishing “sober second thought;” fostering black-and-white thinking.

There is likely a huge literature on this subject, particularly from the military. This will be interesting to explore.