In the survey, after people were asked to rate the danger posed by guns, they were then asked to imagine that there was clear evidence that their conclusion about the safety of guns is wrong. Would they still feel the same way about guns? The overwhelming majority said yes, they would. That’s pretty clear evidence that what’s driving people’s feelings about the risks posed by guns is more than the perceived risks posed by guns. It’s the culture, and the perception of guns within it.
That culture, Kahan emphasizes, is American, and so the results he got in the poll apply only to the United States. “What an American who has, say, highly egalitarian views thinks about risk may not be the same as what an egalitarian in France thinks about risk. The American egalitarian is much more worried about nuclear power, for example, than the French egalitarian. ” This springs from the different histories that produce different cultures. “I gave you the story about guns and that story is an American story because of the unique history of firearms in the United States, both as tools for settling the frontier and as instruments for maintaining authority in a slave economy in the South. These created resonances that have persisted over time and have made the gun a symbol that evokes emotions within these cultural groups that then generate risk perceptions. Something completely different could, and almost certainly would, happen some place else that had a different history with weapons.”
In 2007, Kahan’s team ran another nationwide survey. This time the questions were about nanotechnology—technology that operates on a microscopic level. Two results leapt out. First, the overwhelming majority of Americans admitted they knew little or nothing about this nano-whatzit. Second, when asked if they had opinions about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, the overwhelming majority of Americans said they did, and they freely shared them.
How can people have opinions about something they may never have heard of until the moment they were asked if they had an opinion about it? It’s pure affect, as psychologists would say. If they like the sound of “nanotechnology, ” they feel it must be low risk and high benefit. If it sounds a little creepy, it must be high risk and low benefit. As might be expected, Kahan found that the results of these uninformed opinions were all over the map, so they really weren’t correlated with anything.
But at this point in the survey, respondents were asked to listen to a little information about nanotechnology. The information was deliberately crafted to be low-key, simple, factual—and absolutely balanced. Here are some potential benefits. Here are some potential risks. And now, the surveyors asked again, do you have an opinion about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology?
Sure enough, the information did change many opinions. “We predicted that people would assimilate balanced information in a way biased by their cultural predispositions toward environmental risks generally,” says Kahan. And they did. Hierarchists and individualists latched onto the information about benefits, and their opinions became much more bullish— their estimate of the benefits rose while the perceived risks fell. Egalitarians and communitarians did exactly the opposite. And so, as a result of this little injection of information, opinions suddenly became highly correlated to cultural world views. Kahan feels this is the strongest evidence yet that we unconsciously screen information about risk to suit our most basic beliefs about the organization of society.
Still, it is early days for this research. What is certain at this point is that we aren’t the perfectly rational creatures described in outdated economics textbooks, and we don’t review information about risks with cool detachment and objectivity. We screen it to make it conform to what we already believe. And what we believe is deeply influenced by the beliefs of the people around us and of the culture in which we live.
In that sense, the metaphor I used at the start of this book is wrong. The intuitive human mind is not a lonely Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend. It is a Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend in the company of millions of other confused Stone Age hunters. The tribe may be a little bigger these days, and there may be more taxis than lions, but the old ways of deciding what to worry about and how to stay alive haven’t changed.
7
Fear Inc.
A little boy grins as he kicks a soccer ball across grass as green and trim as an Augusta fairway. Above, not a wisp of cloud troubles the azure sky. And behind, making this happy moment possible, is a seven-foot electrified fence.
It’s not clear how much juice is in the fence, although I suppose it has to be the low-voltage, zap-and-get-rattled variety, or there would have to be another fence to protect the boy from the first fence. I also don’t know if the boy is inside the fence or out. Just who is being contained here? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. The image appears on a banner put up by the fence manufacturer, and it clearly wasn’t designed to inspire questions. Its message is simple: The world is filled with lurking dangers, but you can protect those you love by taking sensible precautions such as installing a reasonably priced, seven-foot electrified fence. A company spokesperson would be happy to discuss the matter further.
Welcome to Security Essen, a trade show in Essen, Germany, where more than a thousand exhibitors, spread across roughly 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, shill for forty thousand visitors from fifty-five countries at the world’s biggest demonstration of what happens when capitalism meets fear. Military wares aren’t included at Security Essen—although that rule was stretched a bit by the Russian company exhibiting grenade launchers and a silencer-equipped sniper rifle (“for riots and more”)—but there’s just about anything else one could ever need to fend off the forces of darkness. There are batons, pepper sprays, uniforms, sprinkler systems, and handheld chemical analysis units that can detect everything from Ecstasy to anthrax. There is a vast array of home alarms, high-tech ID badges, retinal and fingerprint scanners, software to shut out hackers, shredders to keep identity thieves at bay, transponders that allow children to be tracked like FedEx packages.
But more than anything else, there are cameras. Everywhere I turn, I see my face captured and displayed on laptops and flat-screen televisions by exhibitors promising security through spying. One camera is a tiny thing that fits in a door’s peephole. Another, as big as a bazooka, can see for 18 miles. I turn a corner and my picture is being matched against a database of wanted criminals. Around another corner, an infrared camera generates a spectral image of my face highlighted by the veins pulsing beneath my skin. It can all be a little unnerving. Happily, feelings of twitchy paranoia can be eased with the purchase of a personal countersurveillance kit that comes in a slim briefcase suitable for travel.
For the more discriminating security shopper, Jaguar is displaying a sleek new model whose features include an ivory interior, leather steering wheel, DVD player, bulletproof windows, armored doors, and “under-floor hand grenade protection.” An onboard oxygen system is optional. Anyone that serious about security will also be interested to learn about the heavy steel road barriers on display in an adjacent hall—just the thing to stop suicide truck bombers—and the new filtration systems designed to keep chemical weapons from being slipped into a building’s air-conditioning system. Not that anything like that has ever happened. But you never know.