Not a day goes by without reports of bear sightings or attacks appearing in the news. As a media researcher, I believe it’s necessary to examine the phenomenon of bear incidents themselves.

As an objective fact, hornets have long been the wildlife responsible for the greatest number of fatalities. Recently, the number has generally been around 20 people per year, with a peak of 73 deaths in 1984.

As of November 5th, 2019, the highest number of deaths from bear attacks on record, 13 people have died. Despite this, we perceive bears as a far greater threat than hornets.

Risk perception is subject to a certain bias. This year’s bear incidents, in particular, have seen a massive amount of risk information circulating in newspapers, on television, and online, along with reports of people suffering serious injuries even if they didn’t result in death. It’s highly likely that this has triggered catastrophe bias, or a reaction in which people assume the worst, even if the likelihood of occurrence is low.
Meanwhile, bear sightings in areas where bear damage is occurring are mapped, revealing their widespread distribution. This is also a fact. There have also been numerous videos of bears running around town and peering through the glass doors of buildings.
This video information is also objective fact. Given this, it seems fair to say that the danger posed by bears is greater than ever, but there is one thing we should keep in mind.
Today, we have an information environment that leaves behind more video recordings than ever before. People carry smartphones as video recording devices at all times, surveillance cameras are installed throughout cities to record their surroundings, and dashcams are becoming increasingly common in cars.
Bears that were previously only known through hearsay have now been recorded on these cameras, and there are likely cases where bears that people hadn’t noticed before have been spotted after the fact.
In other words, just because there are numerous bear sightings backed up by video recordings does not allow for a definitive determination of how many more there are compared to the past.

I am not saying here that the bear frenzy is the result of media hype. Given that differences in the information environment and biases in human psychology inevitably lead to a certain degree of bias in our perceptions, I would like to point out that we need to carefully consider which information we should focus on.
In that sense, in densely populated areas and during certain times of the day, bear sightings would have been recorded in detail, even in an era when the infrastructure for video recording was less extensive than it is today. And since there have been many reports of bears being spotted for the first time in such places and at such times, we can conclude that something abnormal has happened this year.
This may seem like a detour, but in an age of information overload, perhaps detours like this are necessary.

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