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

by Daniel Gardner

As always in science, there are many authors and origins of this burgeoning field, but two who stand out are psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Four decades ago, Kahneman and Tversky collaborated on research that looked at how people form judgments when they’re uncertain of the facts. That may sound like a modest little backwater of academic work, but it is actually one of the most basic aspects of how people think and act. For academics, it shapes the answers to core questions in fields as diverse as economics, law, health, and public policy. For everyone else, it’s the stuff of daily life: what jobs we take; who we marry; where we live; whether we have children, and how many. It’s also crucial in determining how we perceive and respond to the endless list of threats—from choking on toast to the daily commute to terrorist attacks—that could kill us. When Kahneman and Tversky began their work, the dominant model of how people make decisions was that of Homo economicus. “Economic man” is supremely rational. He examines evidence. He calculates what would best advance his interests as he understands them, and he acts accordingly. The Homo economicus model ruled economics departments and was hugely influential in public policy circles as well, in part because it suggested that influencing human behavior was actually rather simple. To fight crime, for example, politicians need only make punishments tougher. When the potential costs of crime outweigh the potential b...