Emotions Drive Many Homeland Security Decisions, Scholars Say
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By Stew Magnuson and Matthew Rusling
When it comes to spending funds on the nation’s security, the U.S. government must make risk-based decisions, but should they be based on logic or emotions?
There is a small, but increasingly vocal group of scholars who study the psychology of risk, who are questioning the government’s homeland security decisions since 9/11.
Movies and media make rare things seem common place. For example: a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. They are in fact such uncommon occurrences that there isn’t much data to draw upon, said Bruce Schneier, a security consultant and author of “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”
“A movie is much more salient to us than dry data,” he said at a Cato Institute conference examining where homeland security should go in the new administration.
“We are a species of storytellers,” he said. “We respond to stories.”
Schneier said since the government does not have the resources to guard against every threat, it must make risk-based decisions on where to put its dollars.
Too often, it chases after “movie plot threats,” he said. Politicians need to appear as if they are “doing something.”
Emotional decisions often drive the budget, he said.
“The agenda of the government is to overestimate the threat,” he said.
Most people know that the car ride home from the airport is far more dangerous than the trip in the airplane. About 43,000 people die on U.S. roadways each year, but jet travel, with far fewer yearly deaths, invokes the most fear.
The public sees plane crashes on TV and hijacking plots in movies.
Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research, which studies decision-making and risk analysis, said psychologists since the 1950s have studied these internal battles between feelings and reason. Feelings or “gut-instincts” aren’t necessarily bad. They have served mankind well throughout its history.
Psychologists have sought to answer why some hazards concern us, and others don’t. There seems to be more stress about risks that come from humans and less from those that come from nature, he noted.
Terrorist acts — and the images derived from them through the media — are horrific and emotional. When it comes to making decisions on such risks, “rationality goes right out the window,” he said.
We may think we are over 9/11, but those who were alive on that day will probably have the images of the Twin Towers collapsing seared into their memories until the day they die.
“It will have a subtle affect on all aspects of the way we lead our lives,” he predicted.