Shortly after 8 a.m. local time on January 13th 2018, Hawaii residents received an emergency cell phone alert with an alarming message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
The message, reportedly sent by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency in error, would turn out to be a false alarm, officials said. Nevertheless, it would take 38 minutes for authorities to clear up the mistake with a follow-up alert.
On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the nuclear early-warning radar of the Soviet Union reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from bases in the United States. Stanislav Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defense Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system, decided to wait for corroborating evidence—of which none arrived. His decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States and its allies, which would likely have resulted in an escalation to a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned.
Less dramatically, during a recent trip back from Lappeenranta, my car surprised me with a message in red letters showing the icon of a tire. A quick check in the manual said that “a tire might be broken or rapidly losing pressure” (mind it is in Finnish) although the car felt no different to any other day. After a visual inspection, it seemed like a false alarm, so I decided to continue while closely watching the speed to keep it below 80km/h—as the manual suggested—which allowed me to drive all the way back home safely.
In 2010, as I was taking part of Aquarius-SACD mission’s TVAC campaign at the Laboratório de Integração e Testes (LIT) in São José dos Campos (Brazil), a very loud alarm would go off every now and then inside the integration room. Shortly after, a guy would rush in and angrily push a red button to turn it off while he would tell us to disregard it because there wasn’t any problem with the ventilation system as the alarm implied.
False alarms start off as just an alarm. It requires a cognitive process to assess the context and the conditions around the alarm in order to flag it as either genuine or false. Under pressure, evaluating the authenticity of an alarm can be tricky: an inbound ICBM alarm today would be a different thing, cognitively speaking, from an ICBM alarm in 2018 or 1983.
A sequence of false alarms can easily mask genuine alarms—what if there was an actual problem with the ventilation at LIT’s? What if a real tire failure would’ve taken place as I was driving back home? We’ve been told as kids not to lie or otherwise we’d end up like the boy who cried wolf. When we are alarmed with unrealistic dangers till the cry grows stale and threadbare, we grow incapable of knowing when to guard ourselves against real ones.
But what about the opposite: disregarding true, genuine alarms? Interacting with technical artifacts and systems requires understanding their status by means of measurements, symbols and cues that can malfunction and mislead us, and whose interpretation heavily depends on our psychological biases. And we—fallible humans—may easily ignore obvious, even accurate signs about what’s going on, due to cognitive pressures, lack of discipline, or both. At times, with tragic consequences: the pilots of flight AF4471 ignored repeated alarms indicating a stall was approaching, although the alarm was a recorded voice loudly saying “stall!”. The pilots of LAPA flight 31422 ignored an alarm repeatedly stating there was a problem with take-off configuration—flaps were not in the correct position.
To finalize with a somewhat more cheerful note, in the episode The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace, Homer Simpson invents The Everything's Okay Alarm. As implied by the name, his invention emitted a loud smoke-alarm-like sound every three seconds to inform listeners that everything is okay.
But it does break easily.
https://bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPA_Flight_3142