Unpredictability, scale, and uncontrollability make rare attacks terrorize whole publics

Evidence

Terrorist acts include several features that allow a few incidents to incite widespread public fear even though the likelihood of being a victim of a terrorist attack is exceedingly low. The first feature is the unpredictability of who will be targeted and when or where terrorists will strike. Terrorists could attack busy markets, crowded streets, public events, public transportation, or airliners, making anyone a potential victim. The second feature is the gravity of terrorist acts. With the increasing lethality of conventional and improvised weapons, terrorists can wreak destruction on a massive scale. … The third feature is the sense of uncontrollability that they instill. People feel that there is little they can do personally to protect themselves from becoming victims of a terrorist attack. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s theme that perceived threats can be disproportionate to actual risk, driving consent to harmful policy. — connects to: Unmanageable information flows produce a pathological collective panic — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1496; A few random violent incidents generate outsized public fear; Centralized infrastructure makes modern populations radically more vulnerable to single attacks. (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Precisely names the psychological features that let a numerically tiny number of incidents produce outsized political fear.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2111