On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change
48 Pages Posted: 7 Jun 2006
There are 2 versions of this paper
On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change
Abstract
Two of the most important sources of catastrophic risk are terrorism and climate change. The United States has responded aggressively to the risk of terrorism while doing very little about the risk of climate change. For the United States alone, the cost of the Iraq war is now in excess of the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol. The divergence presents a puzzle; it also raises more general questions about both risk perception and the public demand for legislation. The best explanation for the divergence emphasizes bounded rationality. Americans believe that aggressive steps to reduce the risk of terrorism promise to deliver significant benefits in the near future at acceptable cost. By contrast, they believe that aggressive steps to reduce the risk of climate change will not greatly benefit American citizens in the near future - and they are not willing to pay a great deal to reduce that risk. This intuitive form of cost-benefit analysis is much influenced by behavioral factors, including the availability heuristic, probability neglect, outrage, and myopia. All of these contribute, after 9/11, to a willingness to support significant steps to respond to terrorism and to relative indifference to climate change. It follows that Americans are likely to support such steps in response to climate change only if one of two conditions is met: the costs of those steps can be shown to be acceptably low or new information, perhaps including a salient incident, indicates that Americans have much to gain from risk reduction in the relatively near future.
Keywords: risk, catastrophic risk
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Cultural Cognition and Public Policy
By Dan M. Kahan and Donald Braman
-
Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception
By Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, ...
-
Fear of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation of Sunstein on Risk
By Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, ...
-
Cultural Cognition of the Risks and Benefits of Nanotechnology
By Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, ...
-
More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions
By Donald Braman and Dan M. Kahan
-
Culture and Environment in the Pacific Northwest
By Richard Ellis and Fred Thompson
-
Cultural Cognition and Public Policy: The Case of Outpatient Commitment Laws
By Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, ...
-
Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
By Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-smith, ...
-
Fixing the Communications Failure
By Dan M. Kahan