NSF And 9/11 >> Assessing Risk Perception
Risk is a fact of life—but how we perceive risk can influence our emotional state. Fear and anger are key components.
Jennifer Lerner and Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University—along with Roxana Gonzalez and Deborah Small, graduate researchers at the time—examined how emotions affect our assessment of risk. Although we may like to think that our judgments about risk are entirely objective, this study demonstrated that emotional responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could affect not only a person’s judgment of risk for future attacks, but also risk estimates for other types of hazards.
Participants exposed to media clips that induced fear held more pessimistic perceptions and were more risk-averse, while participants exposed to media clips that induced anger held more optimistic perceptions and were more risk-seeking. The same research found that respondents felt public health officials had failed to communicate easily understood (and desired) facts about terrorism.
Fear also impacted a study conducted by Leonie Huddy of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and her colleagues. They found that among those who perceive future terrorist attacks to be likely, people who were fearful and anxious after Sept. 11 were less likely to support aggressive military action, opting instead for isolationist policies. More recently, the researchers found that anxious people also had greater difficulty learning factual information about countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq that have been affected by U.S. foreign policy—despite the survey participants’ greater attention to related news coverage.
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