Tom Guarriello has a useful summary of what sounds an interesting talk by Dan Gilbert.
Gilbert the Harvard psychologist who wrote Stumbling On Happiness, turned his attention to risk and the brain. His claim is that our brains have evolved to be highly sensitized to certain types of risk and totally unconcerned about others. So while anthrax killed absolutely zero people last year, more people are concerned about its risks than are concerned about the flu, which killed upwards of 250,000 since 2001.
Gilbert has a simple 4 part acronym to highlight the biases which influence our perceptions of risk – see Tom’s post for the full SP. Still more reason to hold out the possibility of being wrong in what we think about… well just about anything.
