Would add another dimension to car vs. smoke alarms. [1]
Smoke alarms are loud and typically near you (think about the one that goes off in the kitchen because of burning pizza in the oven). So you have to react or you are paralyzed. You fan it almost immediately. You have to.
Car alarm typically you can't do anything (unless it's your car) and the noise, while annoying, is not as close or as loud as a smoke alarm.
[1] Edit: Distance from and the decibels of the alarm and what you can do about the alarm. Of course there are also building alarms (follow procedure) and alarms in your own house "get the noise to stop!"
Yeah, I think this actually may explain things better than specificity. Even if the false alarm rate is low, the rate of actual, life-threatening fires is incredibly low in modern day, so chances are almost every time you hear a fire alarm go off it's alerting you essentially erroneously. I get the impression that in a home the "standard procedure" for dealing with fire alarms is to open windows, fan the smoke away from the thing and/or take the batteries out of the alarm.
It depends. The rate of smoke alarms going off inadvertently while someone is cooking is high compared to the actual incidence of fires. The rate of smoke alarms going of when no one is doing anything heat-related is clearly lower. If you are a person who just burned some toast, that is almost certainly the reason the smoke alarm is going off, and it's entirely reasonable to address the symptoms. If you are a person who woke up to a smoke alarm, and no one else was cooking anything, things are a little different.
I don't know if I've ever experienced personal (home) fire alarms going off for no reason, and I've never had them go off because of an actual fire, but I have had them go off when someone else is cooking (alerting me that someone is cooking, whether or not I knew that), or due to steam from a shower, if they are placed wrong - again, whether or not I knew someone was taking a shower.
In corporate/organizational environments - often in buildings made entirely of concrete - I've had them go off very frequently, but almost never as a result of a dangerous condition - usually either a drill, a small fire that was immediately put out, someone pulling the fire alarm as a prank/protest or something else like someone burning popcorn or something.
My point was that in a (nonadversarial) context where you have known triggers for false alarms, P(problem|alarm) falls dramatically once you have identified the presence of such a trigger, and it's entirely reasonable for our actions to reflect this.
Smoke alarms are loud and typically near you (think about the one that goes off in the kitchen because of burning pizza in the oven). So you have to react or you are paralyzed. You fan it almost immediately. You have to.
Car alarm typically you can't do anything (unless it's your car) and the noise, while annoying, is not as close or as loud as a smoke alarm.
[1] Edit: Distance from and the decibels of the alarm and what you can do about the alarm. Of course there are also building alarms (follow procedure) and alarms in your own house "get the noise to stop!"