When it comes to climate change, how we communicate matters much more than what we communicate.
Darell Hammond | Posted 04.25.2012
We as a country have taken playground safety too far. We have crossed the line from common sense to that murky "What if?" territory in which we imagine every conceivable accident.
David Ropeik | Posted 04.04.2012
Risk is a feeling, a subjective interpretation of the facts and numbers through a set of subconscious instinctive and emotional filters that can make the same facts seem more scary, or less.
David Ropeik | Posted 02.14.2012
If you want to know what goes on in your brain as you "think", and you can only read one of the flood of recent books on the subject, you can not do better than Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
David Ropeik | Posted 01.25.2012
To a patient, approving or disapproving coverage of health care based on a comparison of costs against benefits is rationing, in all that word's ugliest meanings. But to everyone suffering from the excessive cost of health care, this sort of decision making is rational.
David Ropeik | Posted 08.23.2011
What is really irrational about arguing that people should be more rational about risks is the argument itself, that we should be reason-based thinkers who only use the facts to figure out what we should be afraid of.
David Ropeik | Posted 11.17.2011
Deep down inside, what the Egyptians are really after is a universal desire of people everywhere -- a feeling of control over their own lives.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
We need to start paying more attention to what the psychology of risk perception has to teach us about why we react to risk the way we do.
David Ropeik | Posted 11.17.2011
Turns out the Year of Fear in Review tells us a lot about how our risk perception system works, and why we're more afraid of some lesser risks, and not afraid enough of some bigger ones.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
What color worried are you today? No-worries Green? Freaked-out Red? A-little-nervous Yellow? Not for long. The color-coded chart of our fears is...
Wray Herbert | Posted 11.17.2011
We think of Spokane and Olympia as psychologically close because they're both in Washington, even though Olympia is actually much closer to Portland, Ore. The mapmaker in our neurons favors the category over actual proximity.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
Germany's ambivalence about nuclear power, common in many developed countries, is again on display following the decision by Chancellor Merkel and the...
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
Bisphenol A. is a classic case of how, as much as we'd like to think our thinking brain can calculate risk based on facts, in the end it's not just about facts, but how those facts feel.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
The human risk perception system evolved to deal with simple dangers, like wolves and bad guys with clubs and the dark, not complex long-term threats involved in the unsustainable way we live on the planet.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
After years of research, the FDA is holding final hearings before deciding whether to approve the first food produced by splicing the genes of one spe...
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
Risks that involve more pain and suffering, like cancer, scare us more than greater actual perils, like heart disease, which don't kill in as-nasty ways.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
The dispersants used to break up the oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill are indeed toxic, but no more so than the oil itself. They reduce the mechanism by which the oil suffocates or harms some wildlife.
David Ropeik | Posted 11.17.2011
Sooner or later, the leak will stop and we'll move on. It makes sense to worry most about what threatens you now, but it's a lousy way to assess the risks we really face.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
The oil spill is a catastrophe, but risks that are catastrophic scare us more than those that are chronic -- even though in many cases, the chronic risks are far bigger threats.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
As a consultant in risk perception, it stuns me that the otherwise smart people who run organizations can't see that it is in their best interest to sincerely put the feelings of others first.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
We need to honestly realize that the imperfect system of human risk perception is not just what greedy corporations do. It's what we all do, the people who make the decisions at those corporations, and you, and I.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
The ability to construct DNA and insert it into living reproducing cells has almost unimaginable promise. But scientists need to tell us what they are doing to keep their work safe.
David Ropeik | Posted 05.25.2011
Giving states veto power over offshore drilling within 75 miles of shore doesn't make it any less likely that oil rigs might collapse, so why does it seem to make the risk of offshore different?
Astrid Caldas | Posted 06.01.2012