The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

The Rothman and Schwarz study also demonstrated how complex and subtle the interaction of Head and Gut can be. The researchers divided people into two groups: those who had a family history of heart disease and those who didn’t. For those who did not have a family history, the results were as outlined above. But those who did have a family history of heart disease got precisely the opposite results: Those who struggled to come up with eight risk-boosting behaviors they engage in rated their chance of getting heart disease to be higher than those who thought of three examples. Why the different result? People with no family history of heart disease have no particular cause for worry and nothing to base their judgment on, so they are more casual in their judgment and they go with the estimate that Gut comes up with using the Example Rule. But people with a family history of heart disease have a very compelling reason to think hard about this, and when they do, Head tells them that Gut is wrong—that, logically, if you engage in eight risk-boosting behaviors, your risk is higher than if you engage in three such behaviors.