Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11 A group or an individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which readers of the news can imagine themselves. News media gobble the bait and give the atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and people become stricken with a fear that is unrelated to the level of danger. It’s not just the salience of a horrific event that stokes the terror. Our emotions are far more engaged when the cause of a tragedy is malevolent intent rather than accidental misfortune.12 (I confess that as a frequent visitor to London, I was far more upset when I read the headline RUSSELL SQUARE “TERROR” KNIFE ATTACK LEAVES WOMAN DEAD than when I read RENOWNED ART COLLECTOR DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY BUS IN OXFORD STREET TRAGEDY.) Something is uniquely unsettling about the thought of a human being who wants to kill you, and for a good evolutionary reason. Accidental causes of death don’t try to do you in, and they don’t care how you react, whereas human malefactors deploy their intelligence to outsmart you, and vice versa.