Fear can drive frightened citizens to endorse extreme countermeasures without moral deliberation

Evidence

In coping with terrorism, societies are faced with a dual task. The first is how to reduce the number of terrorist acts. The second is how to combat the fear of terrorism. The likelihood of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, but fearfulness is high. Events that are relatively unlikely but that have grave consequences heighten the perception of personal vulnerability and fear. A number of factors can amplify fear arousal. As we noted earlier, people have a low sense of efficacy that they can personally reduce their risk. News broadcasts repeatedly portray the carnage of terrorist strikes worldwide. Debates about national security underscore the vulnerability of the nation’s infrastructure and vital utilities, and a lack of faith in the government’s ability to protect its citizens against terrorist attacks. The Department of Homeland Security’s frequent color-coded alerts of imminent terrorist threats added salience to the threats. Frightened, angry citizens can be easily talked into supporting extreme and misdirected countermeasures, because they do not spend much time agonizing over the morality of lethal modes of self-defense. Later, we will see how politicians have manipulated Americans’ fear to gain support for the war on terrorism. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2115

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s central thesis: low-efficacy anxiety, amplified by security alerts and media, primes citizens to abandon moral scrutiny and back authoritarian, misdirected policy — the psychological mechanism beneath Cooper’s social-conservatism argument and authoritarianism claims. — connects to: Honest climate response requires admitting fear rather than false reassurance — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1368; A larger fear-processing amygdala may make conservatives more susceptible to threats — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 117
• SEED: Angle: ‘Why color-coded terror alerts were a moral-disengagement machine’ — tracing how official anxiety amplification converts infinitesimal risk into license for rights-violating countermeasures.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay loosely, but more directly extends the sacrifice article’s logic: states manufacture and exploit diffuse fear to extract citizen endorsement of harsh policy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2115