Stop. If you are looking for a book that sensationalizes human-shark interactions and human tragedies, you should pick up a different book. This is not that kind of book and these are not those types of sharks. Flaws: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking is a book that identifies the flaws in people’s perceptions of sharks, what I refer to as our Jaws-related thinking. And it seeks to reimagine the human-shark relationship without the social construction of Hollywood and cable news. It also pushes the boundaries of how we think about politics and emotions. This book is more broadly emblematic of the way governments often respond to highly emotional events. Shark bites are an example of this type and class of political issue.
In this case, I am asking: what is it about shark “attacks” that creates such a social and political frenzy? It has been argued (including by me) that shark bites are what Cass Sunstein calls low-probability, high-consequence (LP-HC) events. But as I think about this more and more, I question what is the high consequence? Is it the shark bite on the victim, the hit to tourism, the media sensation, the anger of beach communities, or the sensational and hourly media reports? What is the high consequence? In this book, I argue that the way emotional events distribute acute penalties to politicians is the high consequence of shark bites, and that it is this phenomenon of penalty-educing political environments that has escaped a proper examination. The issue is not that victim’s injuries and community concern do not matter, not at all. The issue is how they are made to matter and under what circumstances do they matter to politics. There is an emotional hierarchy to certain issues, at certain times, affecting certain people, and shark bites let us illustrate this in a profound way.
Next, I would like to preface my book in two important ways:
- First, by noting that shark bites and indeed all human-shark interactions can be very serious. So I want to stress that people are not numbers to me. I do not for a moment make light of the injuries people endure, fatalities that families face, or the impact these events have on the community. Again, people are not data and I am not questioning what someone involved in these incidents wants to call it. I analyze reporting of incidents by media outlets and politicians to review the way these terrible events can be made worse by newspapers that play to sensationalism and by elected officials who fear-monger.
- Secondly, I would like to ask your permission to introduce several caveats to my introduction to this book:
- 1.Sharks do bite people
- 2.Governments are in a difficult position
- 3.Shark scientists are good people trying to prevent shark bites
- 4.We know nearly nothing about the ocean or any of the fish—specifically sharks
- 5.There are some things that we do which may or may not be responsible for stopping sharks from biting people—but our data is limited
- 6.I am a troubler of assumptions. I am a political scientist—who has adopted a mystery writer’s skepticism
- 1.
With these things in mind, I must confess to be a troubler who is troubled by where we are on the topic of human-shark interactions and government responses. What my research has found after more than ten years of study is not that these incidents are not tragedies—nor that they don’t concern certain sections of the public—but that, as a matter of objective evidence-based analysis, what we are seeing is not a shark “attack” response but a theatrical political process, whereby an isolated and individual human tragedy is made worse when these incidents are politicized by politicians and sensationalized by the media.
There are two drivers at work here for politicians and the media: political survival and economic profit. The media should largely be ashamed of itself for its blatant click-baiting, fear-mongering, and scapegoating of sharks for swimming in the water. They have largely perpetuated false myths about shark behavior to sell papers and boost its audience—like the infamous rogue shark theory, which provides cover to politicians who use these stories to make problems where there aren’t any and solutions which do not work. Moreover, politicians should be ashamed for undermining confidence in the political system by lying to the public, in effect trying to scam the public when these tragic events occur. There are only so many times a politician can lie to the people or provide a false sense of security before it erodes the democratic process and shark bite responses are an example of this.
In this book, I examine the policymaking processes by starting with a central feature of the issue: the fear of being bitten by a shark. Understanding the influence of policy responses in these cases provides a valuable study because public policy is often made on the basis of averting dreaded outcomes for politicians and certain advantaged segments of society. Public feelings and attention about an issue, event, or stimulus can create pressures that influence the political survival of actors. As a result, understanding the politics of shark “attacks” is about the way actors use the policy process to escape difficult situations for themselves.
This book encompasses a number of important theoretical themes, including the role of emotions in decision-making, the actions of policy entrepreneurs to champion policies, the narratives that are used, and the different types of policy windows. Together, these themes and theoretical elements illustrate how the issue is not simply the way shark bites serve as dreaded outcomes, but rather what the emergence of feelings about specific, real or perceived, dreaded outcomes does to the political system during certain contextual periods. I therefore begin with the role of emotion—in this case negative emotion, because policy responses are often influenced by the feelings about the idea of a given outcome rather than the reality of its occurrence. It is here that this book focuses by looking at the way the psychological and emotional dimensions of dreaded outcomes influence the policy process and what other contextual factors accelerate or mitigate social and political attention. This book is novel in its development of a framework for analyzing the role of political emotionality in policymaking. I propose a framework (called HELP: high emotion-low policy) for understanding these elements and this is a key contribution of this book. To review this, I examine shark bite cases that will allow for a broader review of the way emotion and dreaded outcomes are managed within the political system.
The research questions that motivate me in writing this book are as follows: why sharks and not dolphins? Why one shark bite, but not another? And why do responses differ to the seemingly same kinds of situations? Flaws: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking approaches these questions with an important bias that there are fundamental flaws in public perceptions and policymaking related to human-shark interactions, particularly following shark bites. Some of these flaws include public perceptions about the likely risk of a shark bite (known as probability neglect), or the presumption that communities are upset and blame sharks for shark bites. The flaws reviewed in this book include the depiction of sharks as the enemy, the idea that sharks intentionally “attack,” and the assumption that policy responses are designed to provide beach safety. Instead, this book advances the argument that the politics of shark “attacks” involves the way politicians use the emotionality of the situation following a shark bite to control the policy process and protect themselves. They do this in three ways:
- First, the discourse they use includes emotive phrases like “shark attack” that convey a very serious or fatal human-shark interaction, regardless of the details. This plays into a flawed thinking that all shark “attacks” are the same. In addition, this language is important because the public has a social-emotional threshold for the number of “shark attacks” it will tolerate along its beaches. Therefore, the language serves as the basis for required government action.
- Secondly, political actors give meaning to shark bites by relying on sensationalized media reports and fictional stories from movies like Jaws . The result is a flawed government narrative that treats sharks like movie monsters and “rogue” menaces intentionally eating bathers. These tales have political implications because they make ungovernable accidents of nature governable by identifying individual sharks as responsible. Narratives about intent-driven sharks can also boost fear (Pepin-Neff and Wynter 2018) and increase policy preferences for lethal responses.
- And thirdly, political actors often select policy responses that are designed to relieve perceived social anxiety and boost public confidence in the government, which often do little to protect the public or address the underlying risk. The flaw here is to assume the policy response is directed at beach safety to reduce the occurrence of future shark bites. Different responses include shark hunts, shark culls, aerial patrols, watchtowers, electronic deterrents, and bans related to shark tourism. Shining a light on these responses is important because they can be harmful by misleading the public, killing protected shark populations, and offering a false sense of security.
This is the first book dedicated to examining the policymaking following shark bites. In highlighting these issues, however, this book goes beyond the cases and the issue of shark bite prevention; rather, I suggest that these events illustrate a class of highly emotional issues that often result in policies meant to placate the public and protect politicians. Using shark bite incidents as the case studies, this book demonstrates how emotionality facilitates the distribution of penalties to government actors and how these pressures influence policy responses directed at emotional relief. In turn, the two objectives of Flaws are (1) to identify the main arguments used to support policy responses following shark bites and (2) to highlight the ways emotion influences the policy process, including politicians’ perceptions of penalties, the use of emotiv...