SecurityRatty: The psychology of risk perception

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The psychology of risk perception

2007-02-24 10:04:37 by Perry Carpenter in Security Renaissance

I guess that I’m on a Bruce Schneier kick this week. My last post was related to an article that he wrote about New York City’s upcoming ability to accept camera phone images and videos in their 911 centers.

Today I’ve been reading and pondering another article by Bruce about how psychology plays into people’s perception of risk. The following chart, from his article, speaks volumes:

Conventional Wisdom About People and Risk Perception

This chart just scratches the surface of the overall content in his article. I encourage you to check it out.

We see examples of this in our lives and in the media everyday. One of the things that we have to guard against, as security professionals, is exploiting this to our advantage. My playing off of people’s irrational fears, we will only lose credibility.

If, in our companies and our communities, we are able to show people how to examine risk logically, we will ultimately gain trust.

We don’t have to be fear-mongers to be successful.