Tag: System 1 thinking

Last week, I wrote about the cognitive dissonance often encountered in risk estimation. Just after writing that post, I came across this photo, which had a few comments that I would like to comment on:

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If there is one thing that people are notoriously bad at, it is estimating risk. There is nothing new about this. People are more afraid of being killed in a terrorist attack than in a traffic accident, despite the odds being significantly higher for the latter. One of the many reasons for this is the fact that news coverage impacts the perceived risk – and there can be little doubt that, due to the massive news coverage given to terrorism, the perceived risk of dying in a terrorist attack is higher than that of dying in a traffic accident.