Word: slovic
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...that stills the heart, with words that inject dread into the populace. And Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President George W. Bush used none of them. "The case wasn't made as to why the little guy needs this," says Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk and a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. "The numbers and vague warnings are too abstract...
...Rebrand the Bill The word bailout is a deal killer. "People feel the breaks are being given to financial institutions and not to the consumer," says Slovic. He recommends calling it a Consumer Protection Act. It may be too late for this change to have much impact, but any change in language that acknowledges real people would be an improvement...
...experiences also sway us, goading our brains into assessing risks based on rapid whispers of positive or negative emotion. "If you look at genocide, we just don't react," says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. "With 9/11 we lost 3,000 people in one day, but during 1994 in Rwanda 800,000 people were killed in 100 days - that's 8,000 a day for 100 days - and the world didn't react at all. Now you see the same thing with Darfur...
...suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic. "That's the dread factor." In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening. "It's called probability neglect," says Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor...
Take the lure of the comforting percentage. In one study, Slovic found that people were more likely to approve of airline safety-equipment purchases if they were told that it could "potentially save 98% of 150 people" than if they were told it could "potentially save 150 people." On its face this reaction makes no sense, since 98% of 150 people is only 147. But there was something about the specificity of the number that the respondents found appealing. "Experts tend to use very analytic, mathematical tools to calculate risk," Slovic says. "The public tends to go more on their...