JER – On fear and getting back on the horse

From JER:


Today’s New York Times has an article by the always interesting Gina Kolata about cycling accidents and why even dedicated athletes – herself included – will often swear off the bike forever following a serious crash.


Fell Off My Bike, and Vowed Never to Get Back On


But not all crashes have this debilitating effect. The key, says the experts, is in whether or not the faller felt in control of the circumstances surrounding the fall.


Control makes a big difference in whether we take risks,” Dr. Loewenstein said. “With biking, you feel in control until you have an accident. Then all of a sudden you realize you are not in control. That can have a dramatic effect — you can shift abruptly from excessive daring to exaggerated caution.”


We also have a tendency to blame ourselves for what happens to us, to try to turn accidents and even random events into something we somehow deserved. This is known as the Just-World Phenomenon – the tendency for people to believe the world is fair even when they witness or experience an otherwise inexplicable unfairness or adversity.  While it sounds almost foolish in its description, the just-world effect is a surprisingly common coping mechanism



The hypothesis does let some people continue a risky sport — by deciding that a serious accident was not really random.


You see it with rock climbers,” says Rob Coppolillo. “There will be a fatality or someone will really get hurt. There are those psychological backflips you can make yourself do. ‘It won’t happen to me.’ “


And if you have an accident and you can blame yourself for it, then you can also convince yourself that it won’t happen again.


Riding bicycles and riding horses have their obvious parallels. But by the end of the article, I was starting to feel sorry for those bicycles, reduced to twisted bits of metal and then unapologetically abandoned by their fickle owners. 


I’ve never met a dedicated horseperson who’s voluntarily sworn off riding forever after even a serious fall. Is that because, just by getting on a horse, we’ve already surrendered total control? Is our willingness – our desire, even – to get back on because we always implicitly acknowledge the partnership of human and horse with all the risks and benefits it entails?

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