When an emotionally gripping outcome is at stake, people exhibit 'probability neglect'—they focus on how terrible the outcome would be while ignoring its likelihood; terrorist attacks have this emotional grip while gradual, hard-to-visualize climate change does not.

causalpending

Speaker

Cass Sunstein

Evidence Quote

when there's a vent that has it gets about people's emotions really going then they often neglect probability altogether and they just think how terrible the outcome would be without thinking about the the likelihood that it's going to come to fruition

Source

Cass Sunstein on Worst-case Scenarios 11/19/2007EconTalk
Created: 6/15/2026, 9:17:23 AM

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