How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus
The solution isn’t to try to think more carefully. It’s to trust the experts.
When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways — a fact that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated with the help of a hypothetical situation, eerily apropos of today’s coronavirus epidemic, that has come to be known as the Asian disease problem.
Professors Tversky and Kahneman asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian...