Ideas From The Void

On any given day, less than 5% of people miss scheduled work.

Quick: What’s not happening right now?

The bottom has not fallen out of the domestic stock market. It might feel like it has given recent volatility. But no, markets aren’t panicked. They haven’t cratered in over 15 years, even during COVID.

The IRS, everyone’s beloved federal agency, estimates from random audits that less than 15% of citizens fail to pay the taxes they owe. That is, over 85% of filers do not cheat.

No accidental and calamitous (taking more than 200 souls) fires in densely populated urban areas have occurred — particularly in high-rises — in 75 years. I’m not ignoring the 9/11 terrorist attack or other acts of war, nor am I minimizing deadly smaller fires in many other places (more recently, in Grenfell Tower, Santa Monica, and Lahaina). Unplanned fires are happening more often; they are killing fewer people.

Fraud rates in federal and state elections are almost infinitesimally small. They are estimated in various places to be less than 0.00001. That is, even with historical bipolarization of the electorate, 99,999 of 100,000 people follow voting laws. Even in Chicago.

On any given day, less than 5% of people miss scheduled work. That is, >95% are not ditching.

No cases of or deaths from polio have been reported anywhere in the world in the last 25 years.

And, despite scientists searching continually for decades, there has been no known contact from other life outside Earth. Sorry, Mulder. Bonus: The Cylons haven’t invaded either.

I’m not listing these streaks to be macabre or trying to convince you to be happy. Instead, I’m highlighting our human and scholarly tendency to attend to salient, attention-grabbing, negative events. We construct elaborate theories about these low base-rate, dreadful occurrences.

In many cases, however, it is the absence of horrific episodes that might be more shocking. I am gobsmacked that some howling, misanthropic nutter has not poisoned the water supply of a city, despite how trivially easy that would be.

What is the Big Idea here? The banality of what doesn’t happen every day is important to study. If we try to explain the absence of things, sometimes entirely distinct causal mechanisms come to mind other than the opposite ends of the continua we use to explain why and when these things do happen. For instance, perhaps features of organizational prevention systems are working remarkably well. Or, aspects of first-responder training might be particularly effective. Cultural or social norms about what to avoid are possibly getting internalized. Internal moral compasses could be firmly guiding people to do the right thing. All of these ideas can be pursued in business school research.

All right, all of that makes sense, except for the Cylons. We know they’re really just hiding in plain sight. We just don’t know where. I’m betting one of them is Yannis Stamatopoulos, who is insanely productive and must never sleep. He tells us about one part of his prodigious and impactful research below.

Dr. David A. Harrison
Associate Dean for Research