Risk of Knowing Too Much About Risk

Basic Information

March 6, 2008: The article discusses how dread usually wins out against rational statistical analysis in human decision-making processes, leading people to be far more cautions than warranted, or actually making a more risky choice because the less risky choice is associated with a single terrifying news item.

See Also

• Psychology

Sources

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• This is something that should come into play in any horror or disaster movie plot involving lots of people… lots of panicked people!
• This can be used as justification to censor knowledge of dark secrets and terrible occurrences and keep it from reaching the general population.
  • Heck, "hushing things up" might be part of the job of the player characters - especially if they are Men in Black!
• A decent explanation for why PCs seem to act differently from other people: most people are semi-irrationally risk averse, while the heroes are able to make rational judgements as though they had some kind of faster-than-realtime omniscient perspective (or, in some cases, were possessed by someone treating them as disposable avatars).