How your worst fears stack up against reality

Do you have any irrational fears? You might discover some after checking out this interactive visualization of common fears by Inga Ting, Mark Doman, Nathanael Scott, Alex Palmer, and Ri Liu for ABC News Australia. On the page, you are first presented with a grid of illustrations of common fears, from which you are told to select the three ways of dying you fear most (I chose falling, drowning, and fire).

Terrifying grid of fears/horrible ways to die
Terrifying grid of fears/horrible ways to die

Once three fears are selected, the page automatically scrolls down and displays a bar chart of the three fears you chose, with length and a number representing how many people died of each cause between 2007 and 2016.

Deaths from my worst fears
Deaths from my worst fears

As soon as you press a key or move the mouse, the page expands the bar chart to include the entire set of fears, so you can compare the three you chose (in peach) to the ones you didn’t (in gray).

Causes of death, ranked by number of deaths (turns out my fear of falling is totally legit)
Causes of death, ranked by number of deaths (turns out my fear of falling is totally legit)

The article goes on to explain the concept of irrational fears, why we have them, and why we tend not to have such an intense, visceral fear of things that would be more rational (such as skin cancer).

The visualization’s goal is to engage the reader with factual information about irrational fears in a way that is more personal and compelling than text alone, or even text and illustrations or photos. UX issues aside, requiring the reader to select their fears and then presenting their fears in comparison to the entire data set is effective for a few reasons:

  1. By making me select my biggest fears, the story becomes personalized to me and puts the facts in the context of things I care about
  2. The interaction requires me to imagine myself dying and to imagine my own experience of fear, which rouses emotions
  3. The data is presented in a simple, easy-to-understand format (bar chart) that clearly shows the point being made (how my fears compare to reality)

The actual set of data shown is also very small: the number of deaths in Australia from 2007-2016, grouped and sorted by cause of death, with only a selection of causes displayed. The sources of the data along with some clarifications are stated in a set of notes at the end of the story. The audience is the Australian public and some of the data is specific to that audience…for example, most Americans probably don’t think much about death by crocodile. But apparently I could stand to be a little more afraid of the sun.