= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Ritalin comments on ... And Everyone Loses Their Minds - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (37)
In the terrorism case, the relevant biases are well-known and well-studied. The primary two biases in question are that humans take threats from intent or agencies much more seriously than threats from random chance. The second bias is that people pay more attention to threats which get a lot of coverage or which involve a large number of deaths at the same time. Tversky and Kahneman did studies on this (back when Tversky was still alive), and there's been followup by others since then.
Could you refer me to the relevant bibliography?
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that one of the first papers on this subject was Johnson, Hershey, Meszaros, Kunreuther, "Framing, probability distortions, and insurance decisions" the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 1993 in the in which showed that roughly that people were willing to pay less for insurance for an airplane crashing for any reason than for insurance for an airplane crashing due to a terrorist attack. That this isn't just a form of the conjunction fallacy is shown by subsequent work that I don't have a citation for where people were willing to pay more for the anti-terrorism insurance than insurance against plane crashes due to specific labeled technical problems (e.g. ice on wings, wiring problems).