"Novelty plus dread equals overreaction."


Great piece by security expert has wide implications
Bruce Schneier has a great piece on overreactions.

Everyone had a reaction to the horrific events of the Virginia Tech shootings. Some of those reactions were rational. Others were not.

A high school student was suspended for customizing a first-person shooter game with a map of his school. A contractor was fired from his government job for talking about a gun, and then visited by the FBI when he created a comic about the incident. A dean at Yale banned realistic stage weapons from the university theaters -- a policy that was reversed within a day. And some teachers terrorized a sixth-grade class by staging a fake gunman attack, without telling them that it was a drill.

These things all happened, even though shootings like this are incredibly rare; even though -- for all the press -- less than one percent (.pdf) of homicides and suicides of children ages 5 to 19 occur in schools. In fact, these overreactions occurred, not despite these facts, but because of them.

The Virginia Tech massacre is precisely the sort of event we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare occurrences. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones. There's a lot of research in the psychological community about how the brain responds to risk -- some of it I have already written about -- but the gist is this: Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we've had to deal with throughout most of our species' existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks society forces us face today.

Novelty plus dread equals overreaction.

You should read the whole thing.

And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the same ideas apply beyond security. Global warming apologists also depend on the "dread" factor.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - May 17, 2007 at 01:18 PM  Tag


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