to wonder why people think if something hasn't happened to them then it is unlikely?

[chargey]

I see it all the time on here. For example, someone will post a dog bit me. So many posters will then pipe up saying a dog has never bit me.

Seriously can people not understand that everyone has different experiences. Yes a dog may not have bit you but dogs to do bite people. Yet I will see post after post saying the same thing,

Is thinking really that limited?

This attitude is rife on here!

Yes, thinking absolutely is that limited for a lot of people.

It’s the Bugblatter Beast of Traal mentality: if you can’t see it then it doesn’t exist.

So true. I also think people don't realise the extent to which people with similar lives and experiences cluster together, so not only will they think something is unrealistic because they've never experienced it, this is reinforced by the fact they don't know anyone else who has experienced it too.

You see it all the time - comments like 'On Mumsnet everybody claims to be [having these range of experiences] when in real life I don't know anyone who does!' But 'real life' is really much more varied than most people realise, because it's unusual to meet and get to know people with a wide range of life experiences. This is actually a much more representative sample of people than the average person would ever get to know, whatever their 'station' in life.

I don’t really see it about a single event tbh.

I do see posters reporting they’ve experienced something many many times that does sound very unlikely and surely hyperbole.

someone the other day was claiming she knew many people whose exact wedding budgets she knew, who had also divorced. Now it seems really more likely that this person had a narrative (expensive weddings are more likely to end in divorce) and then very much talked up her experience. And rather less likely that anyone is friends with dozens of divorced people whose wedding budgets she also happened to have been involved in.

It becomes more common as people age, too. Convincing my parents to lock their front door was very difficult, because 'nobody's ever come in and we've had the door unlocked for years' (the fact that my grandma, who lived 3 miles away, found aggressive burglars in her house 3 times seemed to pass them by).

The latest is my BiL, who lives in America and currently has a lot of snow and ice, as he does every year - he lives by a lake in the woods. He's on his own since his wife died a few months ago and my partner (his sister) was trying to tell him to be careful outside (because if he fell and broke something, he could be lying alone out there for a long time. His response: "I've never broken a bone in my life so I don't think it's going to happen now." His father had osteoporosis. He's 78. The age at which my Dad fell and broke his femur and they found he had osteoporosis.

I’ve seen pics of Iran and it just looks beautiful. The people I’ve met throughout my travels are so friendly and kind.

Yes I did hear about poor Nazanin who was in jail as a hostage for 6 years and only recently released. However, honestly I think most people are just lovely and have a great heart so I’m going to go anyway! Nothing bad will happen to me.

Yes, my main conclusion from engaging in MN recently is that a great deal of people are totally, utterly thick, with little to no critical thinking skills, empathy or insight into anything outside of themselves... Either that or they're on a wind-up.

I think it's fair enough to think an unusual event is unlikely.

I'd never say impossible (MN would ban me if I did!) but I'm thinking of two recent threads where the OPs both "frequently" got shouted at in shops and I just thought, hmm, was it really frequent or just something that happened once and you've exaggerated?

The cost of living ones always get me. It's like they can't comprehend that for some families the choice is either feed your kids or have the heating on. Just because they've never been in that position, it's like they can't understand that kind of poverty exists . I get the vibe of "well you must be wasting money somewhere, gambling, drinking etc, else you could afford both". Makes me😡🙄😒

It could be that people understand statistics and risk frequencies across populations.

Most people have never been bitten by a dog. Most people have never seen other people been bitten by a dog. But people do know that it's a risk and it could happen, yet day to day, generally, unless you're in the habit of surrounding yourself with vicious dogs,it's really quite unlikely. Which doesn't mean the same as it will never happen.

I go walking in the countryside a few times a month. Obviously there are lots of people out there with dogs. Once a dog randomly ran up to me and bit me quite unexpectedly. The owner was mortified and I could see that it seemed to be very out of character. We think that I startled the dog as I came over the hill and she was protecting her puppy who was with her. I wasn't seriously hurt. But even though I have been bitten by a dog, I still think being bitten by a dog again remains unlikely because it's happened once in the hundreds, if not thousands of times I've been walking in the countryside.

See also the risk of food poisoning. On here there seems to be a lot of people who think that eating reheated rice will give them food poisoning, yet the experience of people like me who eat reheated rice all the time shows that it is very very unlikely because I've done this countless times and it's never happened. So statistically the risk of it happening is so low that it's not worth worrying about.

The thing is OP this works both ways. You get the guy who was bitten once by a dog, or reads about some other people being bitten by dogs, and does not seem to get it through his thick skull that given the number of dogs, and people, dog bites aren't that common, and of those that occur a proportion are human caused.

You get this a lot with people providing advice based on their experience of raising their own children, without appreciating that a data set from their, say, 2 children is not necessarily representative of all children.

For example, friends had a first child who slept very well from a young age, so they would dish out some fairly banal advice on the assumption that this was all down to them, and not that fact that nature played some part in this. They got something of a reality check with their second child!

It is absolutely endemic. It's a lack of imagination.

I write novels (stay with me here, it's relevant). I get reviews which say 'oh, this was so unbelievable that the main character did X, because if I were in that situation I would have done Y. The main character should have done Y.' Because people absolutely cannot empathise and put themselves in someone else's position. THEY would have done Y - so EVERYONE should do Y.

I think it is the people who exaggerate for effect. They might have had a dog run up to them in the park, but in order to make something sound like a systemic problem it becomes every time they go to the park a dozen dogs jump up at them.

We all accept things happen, what people question is the absurd frequency that some people claim to see.

People are shockingly stupid and shortsighted. And unimaginative. And complacent.

But it is not just on here - it's even worse in real life.

I think this is true with family court and abusers. People who haven't dealt with abusers have the attitude of, oh, he seems so nice! And they believe that justice reigns in family court because that's what it's for.

On a wider scale, an example is the situation in the US. This has been a stable democracy for many years and people there don't seem to believe that this could ever change despite examples elsewhere. Yet here we are in the midst of a coup, and people living in it still can't even see it.

It's bizarre isn't it. And it's either getting worse, or the internet is just exposing how utterly DIM people are on a huge scale.

Generally people base their perception of risk on personal experience rather than cold statistical evidence. You only truly know something has happened if you have experienced it. Anything else could be a lie - an implausible lie, but it could be a lie. Hell, some people believe the earth is flat because they haven't seen it isn't.

The same is true in that many compulsive gamblers get addicted because early on in their gambling career they had a fairly big win. Their personal experience skewed their perception of the chance of winning. "It happened to me once, it will happen again." Clearly that's not usually true, it was just luck. The odds of it happening again are no different than if they hadn't won before.

It affects everyone to some degree, it's the way our brains are programmed. There are people who believe that because they worked hard for success, someone who is unsuccessful can't have worked hard. Whereas someone who has worked hard all their life but never had the lucky breaks has a different perspective.

I think @ForRealCat has nailed. The ‘That’s never happened to me’ thing isn’t relevant when someone is reporting something that happened to them once. But when someone says that something unusual constantly happens to them, it is relevant that it seems to be happening only to them and not to other posters. To take the dog example, if someone says ‘AIBU to think dogs should be banned because they always bite me whenever we visit anyone who has a dog’ then pointing out that this doesn’t happen to anyone else every time they meet a dog is a useful way to point out that either a) they’re talking shit or b) they, as the common denominator in all these interactions that only seem to happen to them, are likely to be the problem rather than dogs.

It's self protection, we'd all go crazy if we worried about everything that hasn't happened.

It's a survival response mixed with ignorance.

The opposite also holds true

I earn 96k so that MUST be average

A girl at my school... so it must be common

I always try and frame it as 'oh, I've not experienced x, I've not met anyone who has either, so tell me more'
I think people seek comfort in the familiar, and anything that deviates from that can seem alien and somewhat scary, to the point people will barely believe it could be possible.
When you hear of terrible court cases of abuse and murder, your first reaction is often 'but why would someone do that, I can hardly believe anyone could do that..'
My mum just thinks that everyone in the world thinks and acts like her, and anything beyond her realm of direct experience is unlikely to exist or have ever occurred. That I'm the only person on the planet who's different.

Because there’s a lot of exaggeration and manipulation on mumsnet. If you read through a recent thread on male midwives a few weeks back the thread was packed with hundreds of generic responses of women claiming that they had had an amazing male midwife and the female midwives were all crap. Statistically this is unlikely, simply due to the small number of male midwives.
Ive been on similar threads claiming that everyone in London was getting their phone pinched, but when I was there I never saw it happen or never heard anyone mention it and never had hotel staff bring it up as a warning. Put bluntly there is a lot of fear mongering going around in general which gives a slanted view of reality

Yes, some people are shockingly bad at understanding probability and statistics even at the most basic level. It’s something that’s not covered thoroughly enough in schools in m opinion.

A decent understanding is fundamental to making both good life choices and having good relationships with other people.

I agree OP.

People also seem unable to realise that other people are not them, do not have their personalities, have not had their experiences and therefore will not experience or react to things as they do.