Response to a Daily Dish Reader
December 31, 2009 10:42 am UncategorizedThe following is an email I sent to Andrew Sullivan regarding this post. I’m rooting for myself for this to make it onto his blog! Exciting stuff, this blogosphere.
While this reader makes a point about the hazard of automobile accidents vs. that of terrorist strikes (the former, likely to be a far more deadly one, of course), the reality has more to do with the public perception of risk. Peter Sandman, a prominent PhD in communications, developed the equation RISK = HAZARD + OUTRAGE (as described in the following paper by Rolf Schmid (PDF)):
The public … overestimate[s] risk when outrage is high and the hazard is low. Thus, when outrage is high, i.e., when people are angry and frustrated, they tend to perceive the hazard to be high – whether it is or not. Alternatively, when outrage is low, people perceive the hazard to be low too.
Thus it is far more outrageous when someone tries to blow up a plane full of innocent people than when an ice storm causes an 80-car pileup.
