Thinking, Fast and Slow

13: Availability, Emotion, and Risk
because of brain damage
: Damasio’s idea is known as the “somatic marker hypothesis”
and it has gathered substantial support: Antonio R. Damasio, 
Descartes’ Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain
(New York: Putnam, 1994). Antonio R. Damasio, “The
Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex,”
Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences
351 (1996): 141–20.
risks of each technology
: Finucane et al., “The Affect Heuristic in Judgments of Risks and
Benefits.” Paul Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor, “The
Affect Heuristic,” in Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds.,
Heuristics and Biases
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 397–420. Paul
Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor, “Risk as Analysis and
Risk as Feelings: Some Thoughts About Affect, Reason, Risk, and Rationality,” 
Risk
Analysis
24 (2004): 1–12. Paul Slovic, “Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics, and Science:
Surveying the Risk-Assessment Battlefield,” 
Risk Analysis
19 (1999): 689–701.
British Toxicology Society
: Slovic, “Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics, and Science.” The

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technologies and substances used in these studies are not alternative solutions to the same
problem. In realistic problems, where competitive solutions are considered, the correlation
between costs and benefits must be negative; the solutions that have {ns problems,the
largest benefits are also the most costly. Whether laypeople and even experts might fail to
recognize the correct relationship even in those cases is an interesting question.
“wags the rational dog”
: Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A
Social Institutionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” 
Psychological Review
108 (2001):
814–34.
“‘Risk’ does not exist”
: Paul Slovic, 
The Perception of Risk
(Sterling, VA: EarthScan,
2000).
availability cascade: Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk
Regulation,” 
Stanford Law Review
51 (1999): 683–768. 
CERCLA
, the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, passed in 1980.
nothing in between
: Paul Slovic, who testified for the apple growers in the Alar case, has a
rather different view: “The scare was triggered by the CBS 
60 Minutes
broadcast that said
4, 000 children will die of cancer (no probabilities there) along with frightening pictures of
bald children in a cancer ward—and many more incorrect statements. Also the story
exposed EPA’s lack of competence in attending to and evaluating the safety of Alar,
destroying trust in regulatory control. Given this, I think the public’s response was
rational.” (Personal communication, May 11, 2011.)