Bleg

Here Ian; give this a shot. On the upper right of the home page is Data Explorer, cheers;
http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2012/

Ian,

In my opinion, whatever numbers you find are going to be meaningless anyway. It’s very hard for people to calculate in their heads what they perceive their perceived risk to be. It’s almost certainly to be higher than the actual risk is. But say you ask two people what the risk of being killed by terrorism in the U.S. are …. even though they both know they are very small and regard it so unlikely that it doesn’t affect their behavior one iota, they are also likely to throw out numbers that differ quite a bit from one another … often by orders of magnitude … which fucks up the data. So, again, I don’t think that you’ll extract much meaning from any numerical data on this. Most people really can’t properly numerate just how likely they feel that something is going to happen.

And the numbers are so small. For example if you got data that tells you that Americans perceive the risk of being killed by terrorists to be 100x more likely than the real risk is … with the real risk being .00001 and the perceived risk being .001. Does it mean anything? Not really. People think of it as extremely unlikely. It is extremely unlikely. The 100x doesn’t tell you anything.

The best data you’ll get in my opinion … the most meaningful data … will be from multiple choice questionnaires. There will obviously be some granularity in it, but it’ll be a better measure of the ball park of what they perceive the risk to be and the data can hopefully be binned into something meaningful. I still don’t think that you’ll get a hell of a lot out of it though.

Z

one interesting belief/fear -pseudo-risk is ‘Koro’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)

This is so remarkable because REAL risk is zero, whereas PERCEIVED risk is latent and appears in bursts.
Mainly uneducated people, who react wrt their (unconscious/unreflected) base-beliefs and perceived ‘evidence’, which seems to collapse after some time, under the scrutiny of the more reasonable lot.
…
Koro is a culture-specific syndrome in which the person has an overpowering belief that his penis (or other genitalia) will retract and disappear.
…
Among the Chinese, koro is confined to South China and the lower Yangtze Valley.[11] A 1992 study of self-report questionnaires suggests that in the epidemic area of China, koro victims are mostly Han, male, young, single, poorly educated and fearful of supernatural forces and koro
…
There were a series of epidemic outbursts in 1948, 1955, 1966, and 1974, whenever there was social tension or impending disaster, followed by the last widespread episode in 1984–1985 and a much smaller outbreak in 1987. The 1984–1985 epidemics lasted for over a year and affected over 3,000 persons in 16 cities and counties.
…
Cultural beliefs
Factors of cultural expectation in the genesis of koro can be built upon ideas of sex physiology in the traditional Chinese medicine, with free play of imagination which links fatality with genital retraction.
…
(end of snippets)

In the chinese context this can be tracked down to the Yin/Yang based-belief, where eg the male-female duality is somehow in harmful tension, in the western context to witchcraft, or good-evil duality.

In cases of threat, individuals, which are unable to see trough that, are inevitably thrown back to their base-beliefs, from which they energize their worldview.

Sorry for my digging into the underlyings, and eventually messing up your idea.

May help: Dan Gardner’s “Risk, The Science and Politics of Fear” ISBN 978-0-7535-1553-2

Oh, hell, it’s just easier to point you directly to John Mueller’s paper:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-5.pdf

Also Bruce Schneier, who’s been studying this stuff forever — this is just one of his many essays:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/five_neglects_i.html

American risk perception of global warming (pdf):

http://environment.yale.edu/leiserowitz/pubs_assets/ClimateRiskCommunication.pdf

Majority of Americans Think Near-Term Terrorism Unlikely:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/124547/majority-americans-think-near-term-terrorism-unlikely.aspx

New Poll Reveals a Majority of Americans View H1N1 as a Serious Health Hazard,
Yet Almost 70% Do Not Definitively Plan to Get the Vaccine [oh for God’s sake]:

http://www.silverlink.com/pr/092909.html

There may be a great deal of deliberate complicity going on here, rather than simple ignorance.

No-one half-way sane could have really believed in the Boston mooninite scare, for instance, and the absurdity of it is simply capped off by the fact that the real perpetrator of the bomb threats and planter of the fake bombs was caught and then released by the authorities without so much as a slap on the wrist, while the two hapless commercial artists were treated like terrorists. That this was well known, yet taken entirely in stride, suggests to me that it was essentially common knowledge that the purpose of such scares is to justify a reign of terror–those artists were punks that needed to be shown who’s boss pour encourager les autres, and they weren’t going to get away with their sneaky tactic of escaping punishment by being innocent of the charges.

It’s a way to square the circle of having a supposedly liberal legal regime while still getting to violently wage culture war. The astonishing crackdown on the electronic music scene that occurred around the same time was a similar story, though the hobgoblin in that case was drugs rather than terrorism.

To Celsius 233. Right on the money. Macchiavelli nailed that one in The Prince, “Perception is more important than reality because perception becomes reality.” Especially when it is the perception of the boss or the elite.

Oddly, terrorism is one of those things that is more likely to afflict the elite than the masses. The targets of 9/11 were, after all, Wall Street’s largest building and the Pentagon. The odds of someone on Wall Street or the higher level military getting hit again by terrorism are far more real than the odds of someone in, say Minnesota or Michigan. Their global terrorism is more likely economic and yes, far more likely to hit home.

In fact, the odds of being killed as a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan turned out to be higher than the odds of being hit by another terrorist strike in the U.S. But the victims are a0 more foreign and b) even among Americans, not among the elite.

and in case it wasn’t obvious, inequality is associated with elevated risk for very prevalent, everyday social and medical derangements, such as mental health problems, drug abuse, the plethora of ills associated with chronic stress (cardiovascular disease, obesity, stroke, impaired cognition (particularly prefrontal-hippocampal dysfunction)) , poor education, life expectancy…it’s a long list of risks, far more common than, say, terrorist attacks or lightning strikes. In fact, insofar as chronic stress can occur at any economic level (as we all have glucocorticoid receptors that become increasingly occupied under challenge), everyone is already participating in the fuzzy membership set, to one degree or another. Yes, even the assholes on Wall Street, whose out-sized dependence on reward and sensation-seeking strongly resemble escalated drug abuse. If only our war on drugs included the greed for green.

A paper on real vs. perceived risk of falling among the elderly:

http://www.doctorslounge.com/index.php/news/pb/13437

Interesting, because it breaks the subjects down into different groups who tend to differ in their understanding of risks.

Oh, and using DuckDuckGo, the phrase “disparity between real and perceived risk” yielded some other interesting-sounding links.

Might try your local skeptics’ society, if there is one. They often are aware of such things.

Orwell wrote this to his friend, George Woodcock concerning ex-Fascists: “The central thing one must come to terms with is the argument, always advanced by those advocating repressive legislation, that “you cannot allow democracy to be used to overthrow democracy…if you carry this to its conclusions, there can be no case for allowing any political or intellectual freedom whatever. Evidently therefore it is a matter of distinguishing between a real an a merely theoretical threat to democracy, and no one should be persecuted for expressing his opinions,…unless it can be shown that there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state. ”

When I read this I thought about the fears being inculcated into our population by propaganda. At this time, the govt. specializes in fears having to do with the “stability of the state”. They manufacture those fears and have eliminated our rights in accordance with our population’s willingness to believe those fears, to exchange the most basic rights to be rid of these manufactured fears.

I think it is a very good thing to keep pointing out how unrealistic these fears are and perhaps it would also help to show how they are manufactured. That process is largely opaque. Perhaps if the manufacturing process was clear, it would help to undo the fears and give people intellectual breathing space to see if we really do want to give up our rights?

Here’s a site to look at for statistics: “www.freerangekids.com/