But lifestyle is a much harder message to get across, says Swirsky Gold. “You tell people you need lifestyle change, you need to exercise more, you need to eat more fruits and vegetables and consume fewer calories, they just look at you and walk into McDonald’s.” The problem is that only part of the mind hears and understands the message about lifestyle and health. Head gets it. But Gut doesn’t understand statistics. Gut only knows that lying on the couch watching television is a lot more enjoyable than sweating on a treadmill, that the cigarettes you smoke make you feel good and have never done you any harm, and the Golden Arches call up happy memories of childhood and that clown with the red hair. Nothing to worry about in any of that, Gut concludes. Relax and watch some more TV.
And so we do, until a story on the news reports that a carcinogenic chemical has been detected in the blood of ordinary people. We are contaminated. Now that’s frightening, Gut says. Sit up and pay close attention.
11
Terrified of Terrorism
"The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war. This will require our country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve. Freedom and democracy are under attack.”
When U.S. president George W. Bush spoke these words the morning of September 12, 2001, smoke still curled upward from the rubble that had been the World Trade Center, and the numbing shock had just begun to thaw. With every photograph of the missing, every story of loss, sorrow surged like a flooding river. Every scrap of information about the terrorists was pure oxygen hissing over the red coals of rage. And in the quiet moments, when the television was turned off, the mind marveled at this unholy new world, struggled to imagine what horrors were to come, and felt cold fear.
Seen with the sort of detachment that the passage of years can provide, the dread of terrorism that raced across the United States and the rest of the Western world that fall is understandable.
What happened on September 11, 2001, was—for most of us—as startling and incomprehensible as the appearance of a second moon in the night sky. Who is this “bin Laden”? How did he do this? Why? Our ignorance was almost total. This was radical unfamiliarity—the alarming opposite of the comforting routine that allows villagers to sleep soundly on the slopes of a volcano in the Canary Islands. The only thing we knew is that the threat seemed to be as big as the towers we watched crumble. “Signal value” is the term risk researchers use to describe the extent to which an event seems to inform us of future dangers—and 9/11’s signal value was off the charts.
It also made an enormous difference that we had seen televised images so clear, immediate, and graphic that it was as if we had watched everything through the living-room window. Many even saw the catastrophe live. That magnified the shock. What was happening was so perfectly unanticipated and so horrific that we balked at comprehension even as the images burned into our memories like acid etching steel.
For Gut, these memories remain as a permanent reference. Simply mention the word terrorism and they roar back to consciousness. Gut, using the Example Rule, comes to an urgent conclusion: This will probably happen again.
Then there were the feelings: sorrow, rage, fear. Even for those who had no personal stake in the events of September 11, the emotions of that day, and those that followed, were among the most intense and dreadful we will ever experience. To an unconscious mind so sensitive to feelings that even minor changes in language can influence its perception of a threat, these emotions were the wail of an air-raid siren.
And that was before the anthrax. One week after the attacks, five letters bearing a Trenton, New Jersey, postmark—they were probably dropped in a mailbox just outside Princeton University—entered the U.S. postal system. Four went to New York-based media—ABC, NBC, CBS, and the New York Post—while one went to the Boca Raton, Florida, office of the National Enquirer . Inside each was a granular brown powder containing Bacillus anthracis , anthrax, a deadly organism that occurs naturally in soil. Three weeks later, two more letters were mailed, this time to two Democratic senators. In all, twenty-two people were infected, eleven seriously. Five died. “Death to America. Death to Israel,” the letters proclaimed. “Allah is great.”
One bolt from the blue had been followed by another. Terrorism became a universal obsession. Like ancient hunters watching lions emerge from the long grass, we could see, hear, and smell nothing else.
A Gallup poll taken in mid-October found 40 percent of Americans said it was “very likely” there would be more terrorism “over the next several weeks.” Another 45 percent said it was “somewhat likely.” Only a fringe of optimists thought it “not too likely” (10 percent) or “not at all likely” (3 percent).
The danger was also intimate. Gallup asked, “How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism?” In October, one-quarter of Americans said they were “very worried.” A further 35 percent said they were “somewhat worried.”
These are startling results. One of the many psychological biases we have is what’s called optimism bias or the better-than-average effect—the tendency to see ourselves in a more positive light than the rest of the population. This bias appears in risk perceptions as well, except with risk it drives the perception downward. Ask a young woman how dangerous it is for a young woman to take a late-night walk in a park and she will give one answer; ask a young woman how dangerous it is for her to take a late-night walk in a park and she will give a different estimate—a lower estimate. So when Gallup asked Americans about the risk to “you and your family,” the results were certain to be skewed downward by optimism bias. Despite that, more than half of Americans felt there was a realistic chance they and their families could be injured or killed by terrorists. If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, the terrorists had succeeded.
Humans adapt, though. November came and went without another attack on American soil. And December. By the following spring, the sense of raw fear had ebbed. In an April 2002 poll, only a little more than one-third of Americans said they worried that terrorists might strike them or their families. A March poll found that 52 percent said that over the next several weeks, it was “very” or “somewhat” likely there would be terrorist attacks in the United States—a steep drop from the 85 percent five months earlier.
In psychological terms, this decline in concern was as understandable as the surge had been. Eight months after the attacks, not only had the feared chaos failed to materialize, we knew a great deal about Osama bin Laden, and terrorism was no longer a bewildering novelty. The memories were there to drive the Example Rule, and thoughts of terrorism still stirred black clouds, so Gut still sensed that the risk was high. But it was no longer what it had been that awful autumn.
Then the polls registered something surprising. The decline of fear stopped.
When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 was marked on September 11, 2006, there had not been another terrorist attack in the United States. Five years earlier, almost no one would have predicted that. It was an astonishing and wonderful turn of events. And yet, when Gallup asked Americans how likely it is that there would be acts of terrorism in the United States “over the next several weeks,” 9 percent said it was “very likely” and another 41 percent said “somewhat likely.” That 50 percent total is essentially identical to the 52 percent who said the same thing four and a half years earlier, in March 2002.