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

by Daniel Gardner

In a revealing study, psychologists Alexander Rothman and Norbert Schwarz asked people to list either three or eight behaviors they personally engage in that could increase their chance of getting heart disease. Strangely, those who thought of three risk-boosting behaviors rated their chance of getting heart disease to be higher than those who thought of eight. Logically, it should be the other way around—the longer the list, the greater the risk. So what gives? The explanation lies in the fact—which Rothman and Schwarz knew from earlier testing—that most people find it easy to think of three factors that increase the risk of heart disease but hard to come up with eight. And it is the ease of recall, not the substance of what is recalled, that guides the intuition.