Why We Love Superstorms

Maria Konnikova

1 Weather is a famously boring conversation starter—until you drop a name like Sandy, Katrina, Juno, or Irene. Even without a hurricane or "snowmageddon" on the horizon, weather reports on channels like CNN garner high viewer ratings. Sometimes, the Weather Channel itself beats the rest of the competition. But why are people so fascinated by storms, even when they're nowhere near them? When the weather turns bad, why can't we look away, even after we've gotten the information we need to get through it?

2 We may be addicted to the danger. Humans didn't evolve to be safe, risk-minimizing citizens; because our early experiences involved constantly perilous conditions, we developed a certain expectation of risk. Even if you stayed inside your camp or your cave, the world was full of unpredictable, potentially dangerous things. And actively taking risks could be rewarded; that might have been the only way to get food. In the modern environment, we aren't exposed to natural risks in the same way. But the underlying neural mechanisms haven't gone anywhere.

3 Some people innately seek out high-risk situations. They run extreme races, BASE jump, or invest in volatile stocks. Most of us, though, enjoy a certain thrill without losing our heads. We like roller coasters. We'll ski the black diamond trail but may not go off piste. It's a phenomenon that the sociologist Stephen Lyng calls edgework. We feel like we're living on the edge, but we know that there's a safety net.

4 Edgework is precisely what extreme weather is. A winter storm—or any storm, really—approximates this thrill. It's powerful and even dangerous. But safely hidden inside and in front of our computer screens, we don't think it will really hurt us. The power might go out, but then we would be able to share a picture of a car buried in a snowdrift. And then, soon, it will be over. You will have had the thrill, and you might have gained control over it by capturing a moment of "danger", but in all, it seems a relatively minor risk. We satisfy our inner risk seeker without going into dangerous territory.

5 As for the people on the West Coast who followed the winter storm Juno in 2015 -as avidly as any New Yorker or Bostonian, risk can well be experienced vicariously. We stay glued to forecasts of gloom and doom for the same reason we watch the latest X Games. They capture our attention and emotion. The media know this all too well—hence endless calls for photos of the storm.

6 There is one major exception: those who have suffered an extreme weather calamity in the past. We learn differently from description than from experience. If you were in a record-breaking storm in the past and nothing bad happened, you will likely dismiss the current danger. But if you experienced a major loss—the destruction of a house, say, or a multi-week-long loss of power—you likely won't do much rubbernecking this time. Unlike everyone else, you realize the danger probably isn't worth the Instagrammed snow scene.

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