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
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