How Risky Is It, Really?
Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
BBB Library: Personal Success, Operations Management
ISBN: 9780071629690
Editorial Review
You’ve probably seen this phenomenon in your family or friends, or maybe even within yourself, where the fears don’t seem to match the facts. Sometimes we’re more afraid of what the scientific evidence suggests are relatively small risks, but quite often, we aren’t afraid enough of the risks that the evidence suggests we should worry about more. This sort of risk perception is often explained by blaming the media and politicians and marketers and poor risk communication. But that is simplistic, naive, and inadequate. The first goal of this book is to explain where our perceptions of risk actually come from. The second goal is to make the case that this phenomenon, which we’ll call the Perception Gap, can be dangerous, a risk in and of itself. This Perception Gap, the potentially dangerous distance between our fears and the facts, is a risk that we need to recognize so that we can reduce it. And that brings us to the third goal: to propose ways to apply an understanding of where our fears come from, so that we can narrow the Perception Gap and make healthier choices.
Book Reviews
Books on Related Topics
Risk Management methods are many and are fairly new. They are growing in popularity. Some are well-established and highly regarded. Some take a very soft qualitative approach and others are rigorously quantitative. When such methods are measured rigorously, they don't appear to work. The answer for the second question is also
Single Point of Failure: The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management uses analogies and dozens of case histories to describe the risk parasite that infects all supply chains while revealing methods to neutralize that parasite.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes the author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty. We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, or to
The attitude one has towards their business and towards their success or failure is a key component to lead a happy entrepreneurship and successful life. Entering an entrepreneurship can be and is a scary road trip for most, and never did it guarantee instant success. But those who come out strong
Wisdom to Share
Living from one moment to the next forces us to make judgments and decisions when we don’t have all the facts, or enough time to get all the facts, or the intelligence necessary to understand all the facts.
At both the individual level and the societal level, we need to pay more attention to the hidden risk of the Perception Gap, which can threaten us in three ways.
The Perception Gap causes stress. Worrying too much causes clinical stress, and the list of bad things that stress can do to your health is long and sobering.
The Perception Gap can lead to risky personal behavior. After September 11, 2001, a lot of people were so afraid of flying that they drove to distant destinations instead.
The Perception Gap can lead to social policies that don’t maximize the protection of public and environmental health.
We use our minds as well as possible to make judgments about anything, including risks. But if we don’t have all the facts, what else do our minds use to decide?
How you see things, and how you think about them, depends to a large degree on how they are presented.
A lot of the information that we get about risks involves numbers. We’re not very good with numbers. Most of us are, as some have called it, innumerate.
We couldn't find public videos for this title. Please check back later.
