By Jane Spencer and Cynthia Crossen
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

(April 24) - Scott Jordan is not averse to risk. He has flown a small plane,
tried bungee jumping and skied on glaciers. He once drove his sports car on a
public highway at 152 miles an hour, and he is lax about fastening his seat
belt on short trips. He only sometimes wears his helmet when cycling.

But terrorism and severe acute respiratory syndrome have him worried. Mr.
Jordan, chief executive of a small Chicago apparel company, is likely to
cancel his business trip to South Korea next month. "If I go ... and some
crazy person decides to bomb the Hyatt, I'm dead," he says.

Mr. Jordan may not be reading his risk rationally. Even in 2001, when more
than 3,000 people died in a terrorist attack on the U.S., he was 12 times as
likely to lose his life on a highway as at the hands of a hostile fanatic.
But who can blame him?

Today, thanks to research labs, tort law and media hype, danger seems to lurk
in every corner of life, from children's toys to McDonald's coffee, anthrax
to secondhand smoke, West Nile virus to SARS. Faced with a barrage of
warnings -- including the color-coded caveats of the new Homeland Security
department -- it's not surprising that in contemporary America, the safest
society in recorded history, many people feel as though they have never been
more at risk.

"Everyone's nerves are on edge," says Andrew Karam, radiation-safety officer
at the University of Rochester, where he ensures that the use of radiation in
medicine and research complies with federal regulations. "No matter where we
turn, we're reading about something killing us prematurely."

Armed with scientific and technological breakthroughs, Americans have
dramatically reduced their risk in virtually every area of life, resulting in
life spans 60% longer in 2000 than in 1900. Many deadly infectious diseases
were tamed, food and water were purified, drugs and surgery helped forestall
heart attacks, and thousands of safety devices -- window guards, smoke
detectors, circuit breakers, air bags -- protected against everyday mishaps.
Even the risk of financial disaster was reduced by insurance, pensions and
Social Security.

The very safety of modern life in the U.S. may amplify our sense of loss. To
die prematurely today may mean losing 40 years of life instead of 10. And
while humans have learned to control much of their environment, there are
periodically new, unpredictable and catastrophic threats against which they
feel helpless, at least initially, such as AIDS, SARS and anthrax.

The past century also saw the flow of information about risk grow from a
trickle to a tidal wave. Government officials, scientists, marketers and the
media learned to use risk as a way to get people's attention. "It's much
easier to scare than unscare," says Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at
the University of Oregon. "We trust people who tell us we're in danger more
than people who tell us we're not in danger."

Many corporations now do formal risk assessments of their vulnerability both
to financial disturbances and to physical attacks on their offices or
employees. Risks are also presented in a variety of ways -- lifetime risk,
annual risk, potential years of life lost, risk per 100,000 people, risk per
million people -- which makes it difficult to compare them. And scientists,
Mr. Karam says, "aren't very good at talking to people about risk. They won't
say something is safe, they'll say it's low-risk."

Since it began its color alerts in March 2002, the Homeland Security
department has never designated the U.S. to be at less than a "significant"
risk for terrorist attacks -- level yellow. (The two lower levels, green and
blue, haven't been used, and even the safest level -- green -- warns that the
risk is "low," not zero.)

A half-million soldiers have been ordered to get a vaccine for smallpox, a
disease that hasn't been seen in nearly 25 years. At airports, security
guards direct tens of thousands of people to remove their shoes to reduce the
almost-zero risk of shoe bombs. Scientists say it's risky for older women to
use hormone-replacement therapy -- but it used to be risky not to. Every
month, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues recalls of commonplace
items such as travel mugs, baby rattles, sweatshirts, garden chairs and
Halloween "vampire capes and witch brooms."

Marketers and the media have capitalized on people's desire for risk-free
living by appealing to their vulnerability. "If you're alive, you're at
risk," proclaim the ads of Destiny Group, a Newport Beach, Calif., company
that insures against lawsuits. Women are "at risk for breast cancer just
because they're women," declare the developers of a cancer-risk-assessment
model. The Scottsdale, Ariz., company TriVita Way International Inc. sells
its calcium supplements by cautioning in ads, "Chances are, you're at risk."

As more warnings have been dispatched by more Cassandras, however, some
people have started to lose their faith in the traditional authorities --
political leaders, scientists and journalists. "As consumers, we have to
respond in some way to an unstable and complex stream of scientific claims
and counterclaims," wrote Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of
Economics, in his book "The Consequences of Modernity." "We live on the edge
of a technological frontier which no one completely understands and that
generates a diversity of possible futures."

That sense of confusion persuaded Martha Reeves, a 38-year-old nurse at the
Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., not to get the
smallpox vaccination she was offered last fall. "I don't want to be part of a
group that they find out it doesn't work on," Ms. Reeves says. Program
organizers "didn't have a lot of answers for things," she adds. "As with
anything, you don't know how your body is going to react. And if you have an
adverse reaction, then you're out of work."

The very process of scientific discovery, with conflicting studies
recommending different paths, can leave laymen in a muddle. Leslie Rasmussen,
a 53-year-old Pasadena, Calif., attorney, had been confidently taking hormone
replacements until last summer, when a federal study showed that estrogen and
progestin can raise the risk for breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes and
blood clots.

"The fact was, here was something I thought was OK, and suddenly there's a
risk to it," says Ms. Rasmussen. "Either the medical community doesn't have a
clear handle on these issues when they release these studies, or the media
don't present it clearly. Between the two, you aren't sure what you're being
told and why."

Fear is an evolutionary survival technique -- early humans who worried about
other carnivores were more likely to be on guard against them. "We are
hard-wired in our brains to fear first, think second," says David Ropeik,
director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

And some people even find taking risks addictive, which is why there are
people who will climb vertical rock faces, jump off bridges with only a
rubber cord between them and the water or try to jump a motorcycle over
Idaho's Snake River Canyon.

But most people try to reduce the fear in their lives. Unfortunately, once a
person has learned to fear something, he or she may always associate the
experience with fear. That means that over a lifetime, fears tend to
accumulate rather than supplant one another. Furthermore, humans can fear
events they have only read or heard about, which is why people worry about
calamities they have never endured.

"In our current environment, our fear system is almost too powerful because
it's trying to protect against threats that don't really exist," says Karim
Nader, professor of neuroscience in the psychology department at McGill
University in Montreal. "We're not running into predators at every corner."

Tell that to Matthew Felling, media director of the Statistical Assessment
Group, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that studies the way the
media use numbers. "I worry all the time," he says. "When I get on the
subway, I know I'm at risk. I've gotten out of a subway car because I didn't
like the way someone looked." Based on historical data, riding the subway is
much safer than driving to work. But "fear has become a commodity that's
packaged to us," Mr. Felling says. "You know, 'What you don't know about your
envelope-licking can kill you.' "

Before humans became so good at controlling their environment, they were more
resigned to the exigencies of fate -- only prayer could protect them against
natural disaster or plague. But as people became more adept at securing food
and shelter, they became more interested in the future and how to extend it.
When they learned to calculate, they could compute, based on historical data,
what events might threaten their lives.

H.G. Wells once wrote, "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for
efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write." Even Mr. Wells
couldn't have predicted how many statistics people face in their everyday
lives now -- and how poorly trained they are to interpret them. "I teach a
short course on radiation safety in Las Vegas," says Mr. Karam at the
University of Rochester, "and I wonder how I can talk about probability to
people who come there confident they're going to win."

In early April, Farid Tahbaz, marketing manager for a rubber and vinyl
manufacturer in Buena Park, Calif., canceled a business trip to China because
of SARS. "At first I wasn't really that scared," he says. "I didn't think I
was going to catch it, and I figured if I did, I'd just get sick for 10
days." As the trip approached, however, and many people urged him not to go,
Mr. Tahbaz began trying to find information on SARS in newspapers and on the
Internet. While there are still no dependable statistics on the disease, "I
took into account everything I'd read, and decided there was about a 5%
chance that I would contract it," Mr. Tahbaz says. "And then there was a 5%
chance that if I got it, I might die from it. When I thought about the
numbers, it wasn't worth it."

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of risk now is that humans are actually
manufacturing it -- with nuclear power plants, the ozone hole, toxic waste,
global warming, nuclear weapons, even terrorism. Most of these systems are so
huge, complex and relatively new, that the possible consequences of them are
wholly unknown. "We don't know how big or small our risk is," says Baruch
Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in the
study of how decisions are made. "It's possible that the world is in
transition, and there are poorly understood factors that raise questions
about the validity of historical statistics."

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