“It’s a more deliberative process,” said Ellen Peters, the director of the Center for Science Communication Research and a colleague of Dr. “Fast thinking is intuitive, relying on our gut feelings, which come to us very quickly when our attention is turned to some issue.” The feelings tend to be broadly positive or negative, but they boil down to: Should I be afraid of this thing or not? “When we have feelings that are validated through experience, then experience is a very sophisticated and reliable mechanism for helping us get through our day.” Slovic explained that we think in two fundamentally different ways about risk: fast, and slow. Slovic put it: “Our feelings don’t do arithmetic very well.”Ĭiting the work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist, Dr. And I’m not alone.Īs Paul Slovic, the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that studies decision-making, and a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, explained: Assessing new information is difficult mental work, and “the brain is lazy.” It is particularly hard for people to assess risk and act with compassion when we are bombarded with numbers, or as Dr. What I learned was that my brain has become so taxed by all the heavy-lifting around virus decisions that I became indifferent out of self preservation. I wanted to understand why I was having this response, which felt counterintuitive, so I talked to psychologists who have researched risk.
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