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The Science of Fear

Why We Fear the Things We Should Not - and Put Ourselves in Great Danger

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The Science of Fear

By: Daniel Gardner
Narrated by: Scott Peterson
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About this listen

 From terror attacks to the War on Terror, bursting real-estate bubbles to crystal meth epidemics, sexual predators to poisonous toys from China, our list of fears seems to be exploding. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear is running amok, and often with tragic results. In the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly - believing they were avoiding risk - road deaths rose by 1,595. Those lives were lost to fear.

The Science of Fear is a disarmingly cheerful roundtrip shuttle to the new brain science, dissecting the fears that misguide and manipulate us every day. As award-winning journalist Daniel Gardner demonstrates, irrational fear springs from how humans miscalculate risks. Our hunter-gatherer brains evolved during the old Stone Age and struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Numbers, for instance, confuse us. Our "gut" tells us that even if there aren't "50,000 predators...on the Internet prowling for children," as a recent U.S. Attorney General claimed, then there must be an awful lot. And even if our "head" discovers that the number is baseless and no one actually knows the truth - there could be 100,000 or 500,000 - we are still more fearful simply because we heard the big number. And it is not only politicians and the media that traffic in fearmongering. Corporations fatten their bottom lines with fear. Interest groups expand their influence with fear. Officials boost their budgets with fear. With more information, warnings and scary stories coming at us every day from every direction, we are more prone than ever to needlessly worry.

©2008 Daniel Gardner (P)2009 Gildan Media Corp Decision-Making & Problem Solving Psychology
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Critic reviews

"Excellent.... analyses everything from the media's predilection for irrational scare stories to the cynical use of fear by politicians pushing a particular agenda....What could easily have been a catalogue of misgovernance and stupidity instead becomes a cheery corrective to modern paranoia." ( The Economist)

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Enlightening

Would you listen to The Science of Fear again? Why?

I would listen to the first half of this book again. the first half is full of ideas about why we choose to do weird things and put ourselves in danger. The second half is very repetitive and gives more and more examples of the same thing.

What did you like best about this story?

My job is to work out why people get things wrong and put themselves in harms way for no real reason so I find texts like this very interesting. This book analyses some of the reasons why people put themselves in danger (often without realising it), which may seem an irrational response and explains why they have behaved the way they have behaved. I would recommend this book, but probably short bursts are better than long sessions as the narrators voice I found a bit difficult to listen too at times.

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