Product Description

We are the safest humans who ever lived - the statistics prove it. And yet the media tells a different story with its warnings and scare stories. How is it possible that anxiety has become the stuff of daily life? In this ground-breaking, compulsively readable book, Dan Gardner shows how our flawed strategies for perceiving risk influence our lives, often with unforeseen and sometimes - tragic consequences. He throws light on our paranoia about everything from pedophiles to terrorism and reveals how the most significant threats are actually the mundane risks to which we pay little attention. Speaking to psychologists and scientists, as well as looking at the influence of the media and politicians, Gardner uncovers one of the central puzzles of our time: why are the safest people in history living in a culture of fear?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4756 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
Excellent ... A cheery corrective to modern paranoia --The Economist

Terrific ... exceptionally good - has the clarity of Malcolm Gladwell --Evening Standard

A terrific book, full of wonderful insights, and offering cutting-edge social science in a reader-friendly package. The life you save may be your own! --Cass Sunstein, Director of Harvard University's Program on Risk Regulation, and co-author of 'Nudge'

Review
Terrific ... exceptionally good - has the clarity of Malcolm Gladwell

An excellent book

Review
Compelling

Customer Reviews

both fascinating and extremely reassuring
I chose this book with some trepidation since I am an avid novel reader and not usually a fan of non-fiction. However, I also suffer from that very modern affliction of over-worrying about things that appear in the media such as crime, terrorism, bird flu, etc etc, and after reading a comment in the Economist ('a cheery corrective to modern paranoia') I knew I had to read this book for my own peace of mind.
I was proved very right. Dan Gardner is a truly accomplished writer: he informs the reader about a number of complicated subjects(psychology, neurology, politics to name a few) in a highly readable manner. Not only this, but he provides some fascinating and reassuring statistics on the things we tend to worry about, demonstrating how very unlikely they are. For example, nuclear war, terrorism, bird flu, children being kidnapped by paedophiles, murder and a host of other terrible things regularly appear in the media, making us worry about them. Although undoubtedly horrendous for anyone who suffers these atrocities, they are statistically very unlikely for any one person. Far more common are the every day tragedies such as heart disease, car accidents, diabetes and the other things to which the media gives little attention. Read this book and you'll realise these are the things we would concern ourselves with.
I finished 'Risk' with a host of knowledge about the human mind, the media, advertising and the cynical marketing ploys of companies. I also finished it with a sense of wellbeing and safety, realising as this book rightly says, there has never been a better time to be alive. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

An enjoyable read
The overriding message of this book is that our `gut' feelings about risk are often wrong and we should learn to engage our mind to make more informed judgements.

The problem is, according to Gardner, that we as humans were built, in an evolutionary sense, before the stone age and in the information age we now live in, this is not particularly useful. He explores what he (and others) have called our dual systems of reasoning. System One - Gut (Feeling or unconscious thought) and System Two - Head (Reason or conscious thought). Gut, he says has been very useful to us since we lived in caves, and it takes considerable effort for us to make Head over-ride it.

Gardner does a great job of telling us why our perception of risk is often so wrong and arguing that humans are not naturally good at statistics. He goes into great detail about a number of issues (terrorism, chemicals, shark attacks, and cancer to name a few) and explains why the headlines and resulting perception of risks are wrong. However, whilst he presents a mind boggling array of basic statistical errors we make on a regular basis, he rarely tells the reader what the correct answer is.

Gardner does an excellent job of laying out how `figures' quoted in headlines misrepresent data to either catch readers attention or further their own cause. This isn't to say the journalists are deliberately deceiving us (Gardener is after all a journalist by trade) it is, he says, that we are hard wired to listen out for and take notice of risks that a communicated in a certain way. It's what has kept the human species alive.

However, whilst the book tells me about the things that I shouldn't be worrying about, I can't help feeling slightly frustrated that I don't know more about what I should be worrying about. Although he does mention that if we all paid more attention to lifestyle issues (smoking, drinking, diet, obesity & exercise) and worried less about everything else we'd be much better off.

All in all a thoroughly enjoyable, optimistic, Gladwell-esque, read. But I do wish he'd told me a few more answers rather than leaving me to go look up (which he tells us as humans we are ill equipped for) all the `real' risks.

Perceptive and enjoyable examination of risk
After 9/11, millions of Americans chose their gut over their head, and abandoned planes for cars. That mistake sadly cost the lives of more than 1,500 people. Risk is a book that reveals the often unfortunate triumph of gut over head, of unconscious feeling over conscious reason - and how that succeeds in distorting our fundamental understanding of the risks we face in our daily lives, from cancer to paedophiles, terrorism to asteroids.

Gardner writes with great clarity and perceptiveness, covering quite a broad canvas that touches on politics, the media and the corporate world, as well as devoting a fair bit of attention to the cognitive errors that regularly impinge our judgment. In particular, if you enjoyed Flat Earth News, Bad Science or Irrationality, you will probably enjoy this, as it brings together strands from all three, along with a few others like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. A genuinely good - and reassuring - read.