The Cost of Fearing Strangers

So which would scare you more: an Amer­i­can Mus­lim fam­ily you knew noth­ing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would prob­a­bly get this wrong; most of us are ter­ri­ble at risk assess­ment. Stephen J. Dub­ner on why the things we fear the most are sim­ply irra­tional:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger ques­tion than I can answer here (not that I’m capa­ble any­way), but it prob­a­bly has to do with the heuris­tics — the short­cut guesses — our brains use to solve prob­lems, and the fact that these heuris­tics rely on the infor­ma­tion already stored in our mem­o­ries.
And what gets stored away? Anom­alies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dra­matic, so unpre­dictable, and per­haps world-changing, that they imprint them­selves on our mem­o­ries and con us into think­ing of them as typ­i­cal, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extra­or­di­nar­ily rare.