The Science of Fear

Gardner, a journalist, examines why people fear the wrong things, working from the psychology of risk perception and from data on actual hazard rates. His organising framework is the dual-process model, which he presents as Gut and Head, and the specific heuristics that make Gut systematically wrong about probability.

The mechanisms he covers are availability, where events that come easily to mind are judged more probable; the anchoring and representativeness effects; the affect heuristic, where a felt reaction determines a probability judgement rather than following from one; and the rule of typical things, where an event is judged by how well it matches a mental prototype. He then examines the institutions that exploit these: news media that select for the vivid and rare, advocacy organisations that need fear to raise money, politicians who gain from threat, and industries that sell protection.

The applications include terrorism, where he documents the additional road deaths caused by Americans driving instead of flying after 2001; crime, where perception has diverged from falling rates for decades; chemical and cancer risk; and child abduction, where the gap between perceived and actual rates has changed how children are raised.

The book is well written and the data is handled carefully. It is from 2008 and several of the psychology studies it cites come from the period whose replication record is poor, though the core availability and affect findings have held up better than most. The argument is not original to Gardner, who draws on Slovic, Kahneman, Gigerenzer and Ropeik, and its contribution is assembly and reporting.