Rare but catastrophic events generate fear wildly disproportionate to actual risk

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Aside from the fact that case stories are often fabricated, individual cases are never informative of statistical probabilities. But people generally have a hard time with these probabilities. We are very bad at realistically assessing dangers, fearing air travel more than car travel, for example, even though the numbers clearly show that there is a higher risk of dying in a car accident. Cows cause more deaths worldwide than sharks: the alpine pasture nevertheless seems to us a much safer place than the sea. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 183 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Widespread crash fears created a self-fulfilling prophecy in October 1987 — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 859; Warnings in wilderness fixate on dramatic dangers while real ones go unmentioned. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 524; Unmanageable information flows produce a pathological collective panic — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1496 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Low-probability high-consequence risks inflate fear and enable extreme policies #expands (0.95) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2115
• People fear statistically rare dangers and ignore common ones #expands (0.92) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 183