The Psychology of Risk Perception Explains Why People Don't Fret the Pacific Northwest'... - 0 views
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what psychology teaches us. Turns out most of us just aren’t that good at calculating risk, especially when it comes to huge natural events like earthquakes. That also means we’re not very good at mitigating those kinds of risks. Why? And is it possible to get around our short-sightedness, so that this time, we’re actually prepared? Risk perception is a vast, complex field of research. Here are just some of the core findings.
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Studies show that when people calculate risk, especially when the stakes are high, we rely much more on feeling than fact. And we have trouble connecting emotionally to something scary if the odds of it happening today or tomorrow aren’t particularly high. So, if an earthquake, flood, tornado or hurricane isn’t immediately imminent, people are unlikely to act. “Perceiving risk is all about how scary or not do the facts feel,”
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This feeling also relates to how we perceive natural, as opposed to human-made, threats. We tend to be more tolerant of nature than of other people who would knowingly impose risks upon us—terrorists being the clearest example. “We think that nature is out of our control—it’s not malicious, it’s not profiting from us, we just have to bear with it,”
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