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69 Mo. L. Rev. 971 (2004)
What's Fear Got to Do with It - It's Affect We Need to Worry About

handle is hein.journals/molr69 and id is 981 raw text is: What's Fear Got to Do with It? It's Affect We Need to Worry About Paul Slovic* My objective in this paper is to provide a psychological perspective on the challenges to rational decision making in the face of terrorism and other risk crises. I shall begin with an introduction to the psychology of risk, high- lighting the role of affect and its contribution to what may be called risk as feelings. I shall then address the need to educate and inform citizens about risks from terrorism and some of the particular challenges this entails. The importance of this topic for democratic societies can hardly be over- estimated. Australian sociologist Michael Humphrey writes that, in the West, the state's preoccupation with risk from terrorism neglects the complex nature of crises associated with poverty, disease, hunger, and global warming, in- creasing the vulnerability of the poorest and weakest members of society.' One problem with this risk preoccupation, argues Humphrey, is that it lacks vision.2 It focuses upon endings, disasters, things that may go wrong-not new beginnings. Imagined social futures and solutions are overshadowed by imagined apocalypses. Perhaps by understanding the psychology of risk, we can achieve more balanced and effective policies for dealing with risk crises. I. RISK AS FEELINGS: THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFECT The scientific approach to risk, risk as analysis, brings logic, reason, and scientific argument to bear on hazard management. In contrast, risk as feel- ings refers to our fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Although the visceral emotion of fear certainly plays a role in risk as feelings, I shall focus here on a faint whisper of emotion called affect. As used here, affect means the specific quality of goodness or badness (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demar- cating the positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses oc- cur rapidly and automatically-note how quickly you sense the feelings asso- ciated with the stimulus word treasure or the word hate. Reliance on such feelings can be characterized as the affect heuristic. In this Section, I shall trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths * This paper draws extensively on material presented in a chapter titled The Affect Heuristic, co-authored with Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald Mac- Gregor, appearing in HEURISTICS AND BIASES: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTUITIVE JUDGMENT 397-420 (Thomas Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman eds., 2002). 1. Michael Humphrey, Conference on Risk, Complex Crises and Social Futures (2003) (unpublished proposal). 2. Id.

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