“Perceptions of risk—the intuitive judgments that people make about the hazards of their world,” the historian Michael Willrich observes, “can be stubbornly resistant to the evidence of experts.” We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dangerous creature on earth.
