From what I understand, even among sharks actually trying to eat humans is pretty rare. It happens sometimes with species like tiger sharks (which are pretty widely regarding as being angry at the world), but most other encounters are usually mistaken identity or curiosity.
I like to think of it as ratios; the number of shark "attacks" far outweighs the number of people killed by sharks. Great whites have been known to be like "yum, a seal!", take a bite, go "what the hell is this??" and then let the person go. Except because they're an enormous shark, the person still has a huge chunk taken out of them in the process, not because the shark was actively hunting a person and was fought off.
Whales, on the other hand, have more ways to do this; they seem more willing to brush and nudge and otherwise interact with things before taking a chomp, which can be seen in some of their non-person-in-the-water interactions with boats and people on piers.