Judgements of risk and benefit follow how an option feels rather than what its statistics say.
People judge nuclear power as both high-risk and low-benefit, and vaccines as both low-risk and high-benefit. In reality risk and benefit are largely independent; the correlation lives in the feeling, not the world.
In practice
- A board rejects a warehouse automation project as risky while approving a larger untested marketing spend, because one feels mechanical and the other feels like growth.
- A parent bans a trampoline and drives the children forty minutes to sport four times a week.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors