“The way I see it, there’s no floor and no ceiling to what I can do. I’m willing to try anything,” Casey says. But how many times can he expect to jump onto a moving train or fall from a speeding vehicle before something backfires and he’s seriously hurt or even killed?
Take one of his more explicit dismemberments. In director John Woo’s World War II–era film, Windtalkers, Casey played an American Marine fighting the Imperial Japanese Army during the invasion of Saipan. Having secured the beachhead, his platoon comes under friendly fire. He is running, dodging artillery shells and fiery bomb blasts, when an immense explosion lobs him into the air, chars his face and hands, and obliterates the skin and bones beneath his right knee. The explosion reduces his right leg to a red-and-black charred nub.
The film’s production crew had carefully marked off Casey’s run, rigged the flash and flares, and set the kerosene and petrol to ignite on cue. When Casey reached his mark, a rig vaulted his body, and he landed on his second mark, all within a single take. Nothing was left to chance. Still, executing these stunts is pretty dangerous work. For every fireball, Casey is dangerously close to actual flames and potential debilitating injury.
He’s been near enough to death to know the stakes better than most, both on-and off-screen. Like all supersurvivors, he has faced unexpected peril and narrowly escaped with his life. So how can he so easily take such enormous physical risks for a paycheck? What allows him fearlessly to perform stunts that would petrify almost anyone else?
Sometimes the biggest stunt is convincing yourself there’s no risk at all.
Risk is an unavoidable part of life. Virtually all activities, even those that feel safe, involve a certain amount of risk. It’s possible that your car could be struck by lightning and collide with oncoming traffic only moments after you leave a restaurant where you contracted salmonella from the lettuce in your sandwich. But most of us assume scenarios like this are pretty unlikely. So, we drive our cars in the rain and eat at the corner diner with little fear. When it comes to skydiving, bungee jumping, or working as a stunt performer, however, we may take a pass, believing that the risk is just a little too great.
Perceptions of risk have real implications for how we behave. A considerable amount of research links people’s willingness to engage in a wide array of activities with their perceptions of risk. In general, people who believe that speeding is unsafe drive slower, people who view smoking as unsafe choose not to smoke, and people who consider unprotected sex risky practice safer sex. It’s rational, of course, to be more careful when we believe we’re at risk. But people’s perceptions of risk don’t always coincide with reality.
Take texting while driving, for example. To determine the objective danger associated this act, researchers often place people in lifelike driving simulators and compare their performance while reading or writing text messages with that when their attention is not divided. The results are startling, with some studies showing that people spend 400 percent more time with their eyes off the road and react to hazards 35 percent slower when sending text messages. In fact, a 2009 study of the driving habits and safety records of a hundred commercial vehicle drivers over a period of eighteen months by the U.S. Department of Transportation found that texting increased the likelihood of accidents and near-accidents by twenty-three times. Texting friends while driving is dangerous; it places us and others at risk, and we shouldn’t do it. We probably wouldn’t do it if we were good at assessing risk. But it turns out that human beings generally aren’t.
Surveys show that up to 73 percent of drivers in the United States at least occasionally send or receive text messages while driving, not to mention 66 percent of drivers in Australia and 62 percent in the United Kingdom. People apparently don’t think it’s all that risky. In New Zealand, psychologists Charlene Hallett at the University of Auckland and her colleagues Anthony Lambert and Michael Regan recently undertook a national survey in which they asked more than a thousand drivers about their texting perceptions and behaviors. Only 41 percent of respondents said they thought texting while driving was “very unsafe.” In fact, 30 percent of respondents said they thought texting while driving was either “very safe” or “moderately safe,” while 29 percent said they thought it was only “moderately unsafe.” So it shouldn’t be surprising that 59 percent of respondents said they regularly received or sent text messages while driving. This doesn’t square with the twenty-three-fold increase in objective risk mentioned earlier.
Fortunately, the research also shows that, although notoriously difficult to do, people can shift their perception of risk when they are confronted with the facts. But most of us don’t have access to hard data as we go about our day, and in the absence of such data, risk is very much in the eye of the beholder. When someone calls an activity “too risky,” it turns out they may be making a statement as much about their own psychology as about the physical world.
Though Casey’s first public stunt wasn’t physically risky, it was a masterpiece of showmanship.
He was a tall, nimble sixteen-year-old, the kind of kid who was both a math whiz and a dynamo on the basketball court. One morning he proved he could be a master of comedy as well, when he graced the school assembly in a dress.
It wasn’t the sort of stunt that announces itself with pyrotechnics—he was just showing off—but Casey felt something in the air change when he arrived in the crowded hall. Attention shifted to him. “I don’t think most people knew what to think,” he recalls. “It was funny—for me, anyway. I learned early on that I liked to expose myself to the admiration or ridicule of my peers by doing or attempting anything and taking big social chances. I found exuberance in nonconformity. People responded to it, so I’d do it more. I’d take on a funny accent for the school play, or do things that were just unexpected.” Some might have worried that appearing at a school event in drag would carry harmful academic or social repercussions. But Casey wasn’t concerned.
Casey never dreamed that his antics would lead to a future in the daredevil trade of movie aerobatics and television death scenes, or for that matter, catapult him from small-town kid to one of Hollywood’s most sought-after stuntmen. Although he never spent much time considering what he would become, he recalls having a sense that he was in control of his future. He could become anything he wanted, and do it—whatever it was—better than anybody. “My attitude’s always been I can do anything I set my mind to and do it better than the next guy. I’ll fight like hell to prove that to you.”
Whether it’s his pride or candor, one feels an infectious sense of empowerment when talking to Casey. His message is clear: he succeeded by trying hard and believing he could do anything. But stunt work is a dangerous game. Take the 1998 staged explosion that killed stuntman Marc Akerstream during taping of the series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. Or the case of A. J. Bakunas, who, while performing a three-hundred-foot fall from the Kincaid Towers in Lexington, Kentucky, for the 1979 film Steel, tore straight through the soft-landing airbag. (In case you’re wondering, the criterion for ensuring 100 percent mortality is a free fall onto a solid surface from the height of ninety to a hundred feet.) Despite safety precautions, accidents in the world of stunt work hurt and kill actors every year.
“You definitely take your life in your own hands when you do this work,” Casey says. “I could break my neck, my arms and legs, get burned, or lose a body part.” Curiously, even given his open-eyed admission of these dangers, he’s pretty certain that these kinds of disasters won’t happen to him, otherwise he wouldn’t do what he does. When asked about this, he simply grins and says, “But I’m good.”
Casey clearly believes he’s at much lower risk than many people would think they’d be in his position. Some might even call him delusional. But he’s hardly alone. More than three decades of research show that such “delusions” are widespread.
Try a little experiment next time you’re at a dinner party. Ask people to raise their hands to indicate whether they
believe they’re at less risk, about equal risk, or greater risk than the average person of just about anything—from having a heart attack to developing cancer to getting into a car wreck to being mugged. Most people will say they’re at less risk than average. This is exactly what psychologist Neil Weinstein of Cook College, Rutgers, found in his seminal study published in 1980 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He asked more than two hundred and fifty college students a simple question: “Compared to other Cook students—same sex as you—what are the chances that the following events will happen to you?” Then he listed twenty-four negative events ranging from the merely inconvenient (purchasing a car that turns out to be a lemon) to the catastrophic (developing cancer). For nineteen of the twenty-four events, most students indicated they were at less risk than average. In fact, compared to the few students who thought they were in more danger than the average student, about four times as many estimated that they were safer! This is, of course, statistically impossible. By definition, there should be about equal numbers of people on both sides of the average, with the largest number of people falling just about on the average.
It might be tempting to assume that this phenomenon is limited to idealistic college students who haven’t yet been worn down by the realities of life. But the same phenomenon, known as comparative optimism, has been demonstrated in adults and children of all ages in dozens of published studies since Weinstein’s paper.
Just like Casey, people generally believe that it—whatever “it” is—won’t happen to them.
Casey was back in Carson City from his freshman year at Wassuck College, where he had a full scholarship to play basketball. The regulars, his old gang from the class of 1984, were all there that evening in the jet black Oldsmobile 442 that he and his best friend, Kenny, had lovingly rebuilt. With a rev of the restored four-barrel carburetor, the car zigzagged across the highway. As it approached a turn, it took a hard left and fishtailed wildly, righting itself again before gunning forward.
But now smoke was rising from the hood. The boys pulled the car off to the side of the road, where it died.
The driver’s-side door opened and Casey stepped out, waving smoke away from his face. Kenny dislodged himself from the passenger side and shouted, “I told you not to take corners with the loose battery!” It had been a raucous night of partying and hitting on girls; Casey had even nearly gotten into a fight. But Casey never drank and drove. Years earlier, his father was driving with Casey’s brother when they were struck and killed by a drunk motorist. The loss was devastating to Casey and sent him tumbling into a numbing years-long depression from which he had only recently begun to emerge.
Casey looked down the empty highway and considered their options: wait for help, leave the car and walk to town, try to find a payphone in the middle of nowhere and call a tow truck, or start pushing. Kenny shook his head with bluster. “I’m not leaving the car out here in the middle of nowhere.” So Casey decided to push it all the way to Kenny’s father’s garage, more than two miles, and an hour’s march, away. He took a section of the back bumper, and Kenny engaged the clutch. With a mighty heave, the car rolled forward.
Eventually the garage appeared as a miniature reprieve in the distance, its windows and awning dark. A lamppost created a brief respite of light, and beyond that unfurled the unlit expanse of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Casey heard what sounded like the grouse of an old engine barreling through the darkness. From behind, a phantom Ford LTD crossed the white line, swerved, and then sped up. The side of the garage swelled with white light. A violent force thundered into Casey from behind. His body was crushed against Kenny’s Oldsmobile in a flash of shattering pain. The two vehicles, married by their bumpers, dragged him fifteen yards before releasing him into the darkness of unconsciousness.
“The driver that hit us was drunk,” Casey explains mildly. “My right leg two and a half inches below the knee was gone. Both of my knees were turned inside out. My left tibia was crushed. I’d lost a third of the medial gastrocnemius [inner calf] muscle. My left foot was broken but intact.”
What were the odds of two drunk drivers, separated by six years, destroying the lives of the Pieretti family? Surely, given the deaths of his father and brother by a drunk driver, Casey realized the risk he was taking by walking along a dark highway accompanied by a pack of teenagers. But just as Neil Weinstein found, on some level Casey believed he was at less risk than average.
Upon waking up in the hospital and facing the long road to physical recovery ahead of him, Casey strangely felt a sense of near-immediate acceptance. “I could have died; I should have died,” he says. “But I wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t willing to waste time. I’d learned to live my life with my father and brother and then to live life without them. It was the same with the leg. I’d had two legs up until age nineteen, and now I was living without one. The core person I was was the same, but what I’d do and choices I’d make had to be radically different.”
Within days of the accident, Casey decided that he was going to push through rehab with vigor and run a triathlon in a year. As much as it may seem like it, this wasn’t the kind of denial-based positive thinking that Alan Lock and Maarten van der Weijden avoided. Casey was realistically and brutally aware of the cards he had been dealt; there was no denying, ignoring, or distorting the absence of a leg. He fully understood the difficulties that awaited him, and he was prepared to confront every one. “Most people would say ‘never,’ but I just knew I could do it and be the best I could be, and I’d be relentless at going after it, too.” To his credit, almost a year to the day after his accident, Casey strapped on a carbon-fiber energy-storing prosthetic and ran a mile in seven minutes. He was racing competitively within the next year—no easy task for someone with two perfectly workable legs, let alone the survivor of major trauma. Friends found Casey’s unapologetic confidence in his ability to rebuild his life at best admirable and at worst the result of delusion.
Turns out it was both.
Many factors influence people’s perceptions of risk, but perhaps the most powerful one is a sense of personal control, something Casey has in spades. People who feel more in control of outcomes in their lives believe they’re at less risk than those who feel less in control. In that study of students at Cook College, Neil Weinstein sought to discover not only whether comparative optimism existed, but also what factors might make it more likely to occur. So he asked research participants to indicate their perceptions of a number of factors he thought might be associated with greater comparative optimism, including the perceived probability of the negative events, people’s past experience with similar events, and how desirable they thought it was to avoid such events. People’s perception that they could control the events was more strongly related to their degree of comparative optimism than any of these factors. Of the many factors investigated in the three decades since Weinstein’s paper, only the stereotype-driven belief that “this kind of event happens only to a certain kind of person”—people of color, overweight people, old people—seems to be a more powerful predictor of whether people will unrealistically underestimate their own risk.
University of California–Los Angeles psychologist Shelley Taylor coined the term positive illusion to refer to the overestimation of personal control and similarly overblown views of the self. In fact, she and her colleagues have produced more than two decades’ worth of research showing that the vast majority of people carry around such illusions. At first it may seem that she’s saying nearly everyone is delusional. So it’s important to understand that this isn’t exactly what she means. Delusions are extreme misperceptions of reality. People with intense forms of schizophrenia, for instance, may believe they’re the reincarnation of Jesus, are transmitting their thoughts to the television news anchor, are working as secret government spies, or, alternatively, are being monitored by secret government spies. These gross misconstructions are sharply detrimental to normal functioning, often d
estroying jobs, straining relationships, and necessitating hospitalization. In contrast, Taylor and coauthor David Armor write in the Journal of Personality that positive illusions are people’s “mildly distorted positive perceptions of themselves (self-aggrandizement), an exaggerated sense of personal control, and overly optimistic expectations about the future.” We’re not talking about “crazy” here; we’re talking about confident.
So far we’ve argued that having such positive illusions, particularly the overestimation of one’s degree of control, is associated with taking risks. Although being willing to assume such risks helped turn Casey into one’s of Hollywood’s most lauded stuntmen, surely he is the exception. Overconfidence in one’s ability to control situations is bad for the rest of us, right? Surprisingly, in many cases, the science is beginning to show just the opposite.
In the 1970s, as a doctoral student studying organizational behavior at UCLA, Marshall Goldsmith began to notice that certain characteristics and behavior patterns were common among extremely successful people. During the thirty-five years since, Goldsmith has devoted thousands of hours to executives from some of the world’s largest and most influential companies, attempting to understand the qualities that breed success. He’s had dinner with them and spent time in their boardrooms, private offices, and homes. Early on, he noticed something odd.
“These successful people are all delusional!” he says, but cautions, “This is not to be misinterpreted as a bad thing. In fact, being delusional helps us become more effective. By definition, these delusions don’t have to be accurate. If they were totally accurate, your goals would be too low.”
Goldsmith noticed that although illusions of control expose people to risk of failure, they do something else that is very interesting: they motivate people to keep trying even when they’ve failed. “If we have the illusion that we’re great, we’re open to trying more things,” Goldsmith insists. “Successful people fail a lot, but they try a lot, too. When things don’t work, they move on until an idea does work. Survivors and great entrepreneurs have this in common.”
Supersurvivors Page 4