Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks

Abstract

Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this paper argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims deserve more protection than others and the degree to which it is appropriate for government to intervene in different areas of social life. The paper supports this argument with evidence drawn from a survey with 3,000 respondents, using pairwise comparisons to elicit novel measures of how respondents perceive nine dimensions of 100 life-threatening risks. Respondents were well-informed about these risks’ relative magnitudes – the correlation between perceived and actual mortality was 0.82 – but those perceptions explained relatively little variation in policy preferences relative to judgments about the status of victims and the appropriate role of government. These findings hold regardless of political party, education, and other demographics. The paper thus argues that the key to understanding Americans’ divergent reactions to risk lies more with their values than with their grasp of factual information. Acknowledgments: This research was partly funded by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California (USC) under award number 2010-ST-061-RE0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect views of DHS, USC, or CREATE. Carter Brace, Ryan Spector, and Samantha Stern provided excellent research assistance. Thanks also to Vittorio Merola, John Mueller, Brendan Nyhan, Kathryn Schwartz, Arthur Spirling, Sean Westwood, and seminar participants at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse for their helpful feedback. Support through ANR Labex IAST is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Priorities for Preventive Action The U.S. government spends over $100 billion per year fighting terrorism, a risk that kills about as many Americans as lightning strikes and accidents involving home appliances (Mueller and Stewart 2016). President Trump has said that one of his primary objectives is reducing violent crime, even though this problem is at historic lows nationwide (Lee 2017). Meanwhile, the looming threat of climate change could cause vast global harm. Extreme weather induced by global warming may already kill more Americans than terrorists do (Mann et al. 2017), yet preventing climate change consistently ranks near the bottom of voters’ policy priorities (Egan and Mullin 2017). What explains Americans’ divergent reactions to risk? In particular, why do Americans’ priorities for reducing risk often seem so uncorrelated with the danger that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes (e.g., Slovic 2000; Loewenstein et al. 2001; Posner 2004; Sunstein 2004; Gigerenzer 2006; Mueller 2006; Gadarian 2010; Slovic 2010; Weber and Stern 2011; Meyer and Kunreuther 2017). Efforts to raise awareness of issues like climate change (IPCC 2015), opioids (Quinones 2016), artificial intelligence (Bostrom 2014), and pandemic disease (Garrett 2000) all assume that voters would assign these issues greater priority if they understood the extent of the damage these problems could cause. By the same token, efforts to combat alarmist views of terrorism (Mueller and Stewart 2016), nuclear power (Weart 2012), and violent crimes committed by immigrants (Nowrasteh 2016) assume that voters would assign these issues less priority if they did not exaggerate the magnitude of those problems. This research connects to a broad literature arguing that misinformation, media bias, and lack of political