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

by Daniel Gardner

The real starting point for understanding why we worry and why we don’t is the individual human brain. Four decades ago, scientists knew little about how humans perceived risks, how we judged which risks to fear and which to ignore, and how we decided what to do about them. But in the 1960s, pioneers like Paul Slovic, today a professor at the University of Oregon, set to work. They made startling discoveries, and over the ensuing decades, a new body of science grew. The implications of this new science were enormous for a whole range of different fields. In 2002, one of the major figures in this research, Daniel Kahneman, won the Nobel Prize in economics, even though Kahneman is a psychologist who never took so much as a single class in economics. What the psychologists discovered is that a very old idea is right. Every human brain has not one but two systems of thought. They called them System One and System Two. The ancient Greeks—who arrived at this conception of humanity a little earlier than scientists—personified the two systems in the form of the gods Dionysus and Apollo. We know them better as Feeling and Reason. System Two is Reason. It works slowly. It examines evidence. It calculates and considers. When Reason makes a decision, it’s easy to put into words and explain. System One—Feeling—is entirely different. Unlike Reason, it works without our conscious awareness and is as fast as lightning. Feeling is the source of the snap judgments that we experience as a hu...