What ’s the biggest threat to your life ? Chances are , the reality is very different to the picture you study about in the news .
A team of information scientists have late been looking at the most common cause of death compare to the reason of death we worry about and read in the medium . In sum , it show a monumental disparity between our beliefs and reality .
Thedata was gatheredby University of California San Diego figurer skill educatee Hasan Al - Jamaly , Maximillian Siemers , Owen Shen , and Nicole Stone , who want to see if results of asimilar study carried out in 1979still held . They started by collecting public wellness figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) . For the media figures , they collated headline from The Guardian and The New York Times . For the insights into what we in person worry about , they but looked at Google movement data , drawing on our psychoneurotic leaning to google our symptoms .
That ’s the reality of it , but people ’s perception and the media ’s antecedence are very unlike .
Both The Guardian and the New York Times appear to have three big obsession : homicides , suicide , and TERRORISM ! ! ! ! These three factors stick out like a sore quarter round in the paper data point collated , even though they did n’t sport prominently in the CDC data . Cancer , the secondly highest cause of last according to the CDC is the 4th most describe on topic of the media . Heart disease , the CDC ’s leading effort of death is barely observe in the media at all .
Cancer , however , is the define feature of the Google searches . Considering the genuine CDC mortality rates , that worry is perhaps not too magnify . Nevertheless , centre disease is largely dismiss one again . Suicide , car accident , act of terrorism , and diabetes plainly fuel our fear more .
“ We found that , like results before us , the attention give by news program outlets and Google search does not match the existent distribution of deaths , ” Owen Shen explainsin a post online .
“ This suggests that general public view is not well - calibrate with the path that hoi polloi in reality pass . Heart disease and kidney disease appear largely underrepresented in the sphere of public attention , while terrorism and homicides catch a far larger share , proportional to their part of deaths have . ”
Aaron Penne , another data point scientists who did n’t work on the project , also made a childlike and easily - digestible visualization of the data too .
