From : The Irrational Economist : Making Decisions in a Dangerous World ,

Dreadful possibilities stimulate strong emotional responses, such as fear and anxiety.! Fortunately, most high-consequence negative events have tiny prob­ abilities, because life is no longer nasty, brutish, and short. But when emo­ tions take charge, probabilities get neglected. Consequently, in the face of a fearsome risk, people often exaggerate the benefits ofpreventive, risk-reducing, or ameliorative measures. In both personal life and politics, the result is harm­ ful overreactions to risks. One salient manifestation ofprobability neglect is that in two situations in­ volving the same dreadful possibility, one much more likely to unfold than the other, indi;:iduals may value risk elimination nearly equally even though probabilities may differ by a factor 20 or more. People focus on the outcome itself, and are inattentive to how unlikely it is to occur-hence their overreaction when the risk is low. In other words, those who suffer from probability neglect will give up too much to wipe out a low-probability risk (moving from 0.001 to 0.000). They will frequently take excessive preventive action.2 Corporations and govern­ ments suffer equivalent fates, in part because they need to respond to indi­ viduals and in part because oftheir own natural tendencies. Anthony Patt and Richard Zeckhauser labeled such overreactions as action bias in a 2000 article in the Journal ofRisk and Uncertainty (Patt and Zeckhauser, 2000). That bias is especially likely if the relevant actors are able to obtain credit from them­ selves or from the public for responding to the risk. It is predictable that following a terrorist attack, the public will both alter its behavior and demand a substantial governmental response. That will be