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Risk perception of terrorism: a critical examination of competing
explanations
Name: Daan Dijkstra
Student number: 6050042
Instructor: Dr. Stephanie Simon
Bachelor project: Transnational spaces: political geographies of security Submission date: January 28, 2014
Word count: 9548
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Abstract
Empirical data indicates that terrorism is perceived to be more dangerous than other risks with a similar probability of causing harm. In addition, the response to the terrorist threat has been very significant since 9/11. Two ways of explaining the discrepancy between the perception of the terrorist risk and the actual probability of being killed by a terrorist are explored. The first model, based on biases that affect risk perception in general, is shown to apply particularly strongly to terrorism. An alternative model, focusing on the supposed uniqueness of terrorism when compared to other risks, is shown to have less explanatory power. Terrorism appears to be overvalued as a risk due to cultural, societal and cognitive biases, as there is little evidence that terrorism defies the modes of risk that have been prominent since the industrial revolution.
Introduction
With the attacks of September 11, 2001, terrorism has made a grand entrance on the stage of world politics. While terrorism was not a new risk, the way the risk of terrorism is perceived and acted upon has changed radically since 9/11 (Sandler and Enders, 2004: 302). The attacks themselves, and the way governments all over the world have responded to the newly prominent risk of terrorism have deeply affected the way national and international politics and society have developed in the first thirteen years of the 21st century. Among many other measures, the US has engaged itself in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it continues to deploy targeted attacks in other countries, new legislation and measures have been
introduced that affect the civil liberties and privacy of citizens all over the world and new institutions and anti-terrorism agencies have been founded in many countries, including the Netherlands.
The American National Safety Council keeps detailed records of how American citizens die. In the years 2005, 2006 and 2007, not a single American citizen died as a result of a terrorist attack on American soil (National Safety Council, 2011: 19). In 2008, three people were killed in terrorist events. Two people died when a church was targeted by a former truck driver who hated homosexuals and liberals (Website NBC News, 2008) and one suicide bomber was killed in an attack on a law firm that targeted the judicial system as a whole (Website ABA Journal, 2008). From 2005 to 2007 alone, 141 people were killed by lightning
3 strikes in the United States, and 233 people died when their clothing or nightwear ignited or melted (National Safety Council, 2011: 19). With 2001 as the exception to the rule, comparing the amount of deaths in the United States from terrorism to other low-probability risks produces similar results in other years (e.g. Website State Department, 2011; Website CFR, 2012). In 2001, fewer than 3000 people died in the attacks of September 11, while more than 5000 people were killed by unintentional work injuries (National Safety Council, 2011: 53). In 2003, Feigenson et al. conducted a transnational comparison of terrorism risk perceptions. In the United States, the sample estimated the chance that they would be seriously injured or killed in a terrorist attack at 8.27% (Feigenson et al., 2004:996). This would correspond to an estimate that just fewer than 24 million people would be killed or injured in terrorist attacks in 2004. In fact, there were no terrorist attacks in 2004 in the United States or in Canada, where the sample estimated the same chance at 6.04% (ibid). The chance that other, similar people would be injured or killed in a terrorist attack was
estimated even higher in both countries: at 9.36% and 7.13% respectively (ibid, 997). Even if 9/11 had taken place ten times in 2004 in the US, the mortality rate would still have been no higher than 0.013%. Stewart and Mueller (2009), drawing on a wide range of empirical data, estimated the cost per life saved that is generally considered acceptable for other risk
reduction measures at $7.5 million for all government agencies. For terrorism, the amount of extra spending on Homeland Security alone was 8 to 80 times higher even with generous estimates of the amount of lives that were saved by these programs.
By responding in what appears to be a disproportional way to a given risk, the response itself can sometimes cause more danger to come about, or it may simply lead to the shifting of the risk from one person to another. As one example, a 1979 study in the Federal German Republic revealed that the installation of $33 million of safety equipment in nuclear reactors led to one death or 6000 lost man-days on average. The study found that absolute safety was impossible at any rate, because an investment equal to $33 million in saving one life would actually lead to the same amount of deaths, with an additional cost of $33 million (Whipple, 1985:40). If the response is truly disproportionate to the actual capabilities of terrorists, the (opportunity) cost of reducing the terrorism risk could increase the
population’s total exposure to danger. As one way that this might happen, people might refrain from flying if excessive security measures make flying less attractive, and choose to
4 make the same trip by car which is more dangerous (Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011:437). In addition, prevention also increases the potential damage that a terrorist could cause if an attack was successful anyway, because resources that could be used for response have been used for prevention (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982:195).
This information raises the central issue of this thesis. Clearly, not all risks are created and treated equal. Why has terrorism become a salient risk in modern society after 9/11, particularly in the United States, while other risks that are empirically more likely to cause harm are not?
This problem will be approached from two different angles. On the one hand, the way the seemingly irrational risk perception of terrorism comes about through processes of risk selection on an individual and societal level, paying particular attention to the cognitive biases that have been recognized by scholars of risk perception, the cultural dynamics that cause some risks to be selected for particular attention, and structural incentives. On the other hand, the response can also be explained by looking at the risk of terrorism itself on a systemic level. With particular reference to Beck’s thesis of risk society, which suggests that terrorism is a risk of a fundamentally different nature, a ‘new species of trouble’ (Slovic, 2002:425) from the risks that humanity faced in earlier times, the extent to which terrorism can be grasped by the risk management modes of first modernity will be assessed. To clearly delimit the subject and the scope of the thesis, the conclusions and analysis will be limited to the United States in the post-9/11 era. The US has been the victim of the most significant terrorist attack in history, making it the most appropriate case for a study of the perception of terrorism risk, and the uniqueness of this risk.
The thesis will also be divided into two sections. The first section will focus on the perceivers of risk, while the second section will focus on the properties of terrorism itself. The second section will be structured according to two hypotheses. The first is derived directly from Beck, who places particular emphasis on insurability as an indicator of the transition from controllable, modern risks to the unquantifiable risks of second modernity. The second hypothesis is derived from a similar line of argument that terrorists are not rational actors that weigh the merits and demerits of a proposed course of action, because they are motivated by fanaticism and what Frey and Luechinger (2003:5) have aptly called intertemporal utility considerations. In this line of argument, terrorists are not susceptible to
5 deterrence by state actors. Both of these hypotheses would indicate that terrorism belongs to a new type of risk, which can be poorly managed by the risk management structures of first modernity. The thesis will be structured as follows:
• How can we understand the way terrorism is valued as a risk in the United States after 9/11?
o How can the risk perception of terrorism be understood from an account of individual decision making, societal dynamics and cultural factors?
o To what extent is terrorism a risk of a fundamentally different nature from the risks that in Beck’s framework belong to first modernity?
H1: The risk of terrorism is not incorporated into existing insurance frameworks.
H2: Terrorists are not susceptible to deterrence.
The theories put forward in answering the first and second question are not mutually exclusive. However, it is a central premise of this thesis, as stated above, that there is a clear discrepancy between the response to the threat of terrorism and the way it has manifested itself until now. The explanations that focus on individuals’ cognitive biases and societal dynamics are not based on the same conception of risk as the systemic explanations that will be discussed in the second part. The theories of the first part belong to what Beck describes as first modernity: an age where risks are measurable, limited in scope and insurable. These individual explanations rely on calculations of risk to decide if a response is irrational or not. On the other hand, the explanations that discuss the unique nature of the terrorism risk rely on the idea that ‘normal’ methods of risk calculation do not apply to terrorism because of its unique nature. To consider the validity of these theories, the extent to which terrorism has been incorporated into traditional, rational modes of risk management will be assessed. In answering the first question, a wide range of experimentally proven biases and heuristics that govern decision-making on an individual level will be derived from existing literature. These cognitive biases will be applied to the risk of terrorism specifically,
revealing that terrorism resonates very well with most if not all of the emotional shortcuts that cause people to overestimate the probabilities associated with risks. In addition, terrorism will be shown to resonate particularly well with Western cultural values, causing
6 further amplification of perceived risk. Finally, the incentive structures that cause
government agencies, academics and media to not generate competing ideas and to not push for a reevaluation of the risk perception of terrorism will be outlined.
In the second part of the thesis, empirical accounts of the insurance industry’s response to the attacks of September 11th 2001, the most extreme case of terrorism in human history and the largest loss from one event in the history of insurance will be used to show that terrorism has not undermined the foundation of the insurance system, and that the insurance business has always acted under conditions of uncertainty, thus falsifying the first hypothesis derived from Beck. The second hypothesis, that terrorists are not susceptible to deterrence, is partly true; all terrorists are shown to be susceptible to some degree of
deterrence by raising the cost of an attack, but deterrence by denying political goals is only a viable strategy against most organized groups, and less effective against lone wolf terrorists. In conclusion, the aptitude of the first framework in explaining at least a major part of the risk perception of terrorism is demonstrated, while terrorism Is shown to be incorporated reasonably well into the traditional mechanisms of risk management that would not apply well to terrorism if it were indeed more like manufactured uncertainty than like a risk.
Methods
This thesis is structured as a theoretical argument, which relies on engaging existing pieces of literature with each other to produce an explanation of the risk perception of terrorism. Empirical data, including opinion poll data and the results of quantitative studies of risk perception, will be derived from existing studies.
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Theory
The classical economic model of rational decision making has three basic
assumptions, summarized by Abrahms as follows: rational agents ‘(1) possess stable and consistent preferences; (2) compare the costs and benefits of all available options; and (3) select the optimal option, that is, the one that maximizes output’ (Abrahms, 2008:80). Modern decision theory has incorporated the impossibility of complete information in these
assumptions, requiring that preferences and goals are relatively stable, that the costs and benefits of the most obvious options are compared, and that the alternative with the optimal expected utility is selected (ibid). However, even this model has been generally discounted. Clearly, even the most cursory look at the response to the risk of terrorism confirms that no one appears to be using the expected utility model of decision making, and that no one is deciding on their response to the terrorist threat as a perfect homo economicus, even if imperfect information is included in the model. Much of the theories of risk perception that will be discussed below are rooted in prospect theory. Prospect theory is a theory of choice that recognizes several cognitive biases that skew human decision-making away from a ‘rational’ choice. Most notably, people respond very differently to gains than to losses (Kahneman and Tversky, 1992:297).
Interestingly, the two concepts that are most fundamental to this thesis are contested; there is no agreed definition of risk or terrorism. Applied to terrorism, most laypeople might produce a definition that is similar to the following mathematical definition of risk, which is used in a RAND study: ‘Risk = P (attack occurs) * P (attack results in damage) * E (damage)’, or ‘Risk = Threat * Vulnerability * Consequence’ (Willis et al., 2006:10). This type of
calculation is very well suited to the risks of industrial society. However, not all scholars agree that this is still how risk should be analyzed. Beck’s definition of risk, which will be discussed below, is very different from a simple rational calculation. With regards to the risks of second modernity, Beck’s thesis is that these risks are not calculable at all. There is an inherent tension in comparing Beck’s notion of risk with calculations of ‘actual risk’, which are actually calculations of something other than what Beck means by ‘risk’. This is made more difficult by Beck’s ambivalent attitude to the reality of risk: Beck conceptualizes risk both as existing independently of people’s perceptions (realism) and as a direct product of perceptions (constructivism) (Rasborg, 2012:13). Thus, concepts like ‘the actual risk of being
8 killed by a terrorist’ will mean the quantitative result of a calculation of incidence rates and impact, while ‘the risks that belong to second modernity in Beck’s framework’ will apply to Beck’s own conceptualization of risk.
Beck’s model of Risk Society (1992), later elaborated in many articles and other books such as World Risk Society (1999), describes a ‘break within modernity, which is freeing itself from the contours of the classical industrial society and forging a new form – the (industrial)
risk society.’ (Beck, 1992a: 9). The dichotomy between the modern, industrial age and the risk
society is characterized by a shift from risks that are limited to a specific space and time, and which are incurred by a specific set of people in modernity, to non-quantifiable risks that are de-bounded spatially, temporally and socially and which defy the human imagination in the risk society. The risks of the risk society age are no longer tied to the people or institutions that cause the risk to exist. Beck distinguishes between pre-modern dangers, which were fundamentally uncontrollable and were not produced by human activity, the modern industrial risks that were susceptible to insurance, and the large-scale hazards of second modernity, which are produced as a consequence of human decisions while they are not insurable (Rasborg, 2012:7). Giddens (1999) describes a similar development as the shift from calculable ‘external risks’ to ‘manufactured uncertainty’. This new type of risk threatens everyone in equal measure, including generations that have yet to be born. The distribution of risks, rather than the distribution of wealth, will be the main concern for Beck’s risk society (Beck, 1992a: 19-24).
Throughout his work, Beck places particular emphasis on insurability as a defining feature of the risks of first modernity, while the risks of second modernity, such as nuclear disaster, are deemed to be inherently uninsurable due to their unquantifiable nature (Beck, 1992a:22, 1999:76-77, 2002:44). The emphasis on insurability is repeated many times
throughout Beck’s work. ‘The economy itself reveals the boundary line of what is tolerable with economic precision, through the refusal of private insurance (Beck, 1999:55-56).
‘Anyone who inquires as to an operational criterion for this transition has it to hand here: the
absence of private insurance cover. More than that, industrial technical-scientific projects are not
insurable. […] Industrial society, which has involuntary mutated into risk society, […] balances beyond the insurance limit.’ (ibid:77). These hazards ‘undermine and/or cancel the
9 In Beck’s framework, the concept ‘risk’ is fundamentally related to control, because it requires decision-making. The calculation of risk, the most fundamental principle of
insurance, is ‘about calculating the incalculable, colonizing the future’ (ibid: 40). This mechanism falls apart in second modernity, and ‘feigning control over the uncontrollable’ becomes a central issue (ibid:41). These risks defy the four pillars of risk calculus described by Beck: compensation, limitation, security and classification (Beck, 1992b: 102). Also, risks like environmental disaster foster a pluralization of expert opinions about what the risks are, what level of risk is acceptable, and who causes the risks to exist, which leads to a
demystification of science, and to everyone being able to become an expert in his own right (Beck, 1992a: 60;137). Beck also describes similarities and interaction between the risk of terrorism and the risks of financial and ecological disaster. All these risks increase with technical progress. In addition, terrorism as it manifested itself on 9/11 would not have been possible without advanced financial and communication technology. Terrorism can also exploit the latent risks that are brought about by technological advances; in this way, every new development with potentially dangerous consequences becomes part of the terrorist’s arsenal (Beck, 2002:44-46). Terrorism is thus incorporated neatly into the model of risk society, both as a consequence of previous advances on other levels, and as a new causal force behind the emergence of risk society.
Along with Beck, Mary Douglas can be considered to be largely responsible for the establishment of the prominence of the concept of risk in social theory. Douglas and Beck both provide detailed, though very different, social theories of the development of a new politics and culture of risk (Wilkinson, 2001:1). Beck’s theory of risk society, and the implications that Beck’s thesis would have for the empirically observable manifestation of terrorism, have been discussed above. Douglas proposes a social theory of risk perception that focuses on cultural predispositions as a means of dealing with the ‘three peculiarities’ that are most fundamental in the consideration of risk – deep and widespread disagreement exists about risk in the Western world, different people worry about different risks, and the relationship between knowledge and action is out of sync. According to Douglas, ‘whatever programs are enacted to reduce risks, they conspicuously fail to follow the principle of doing the most to prevent the worst damage’ (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982:1). As discussed above and below, this would certainly apply to many of the private and government responses to
10 the terrorist threat since 9/11. For Douglas and Wildavsky, this is a logical consequence of the problem of imperfect knowledge; since it is impossible to know everything about every possible threat that one may face, and certainly more difficult to act upon every danger, acting upon risks requires that risks are prioritized. In the cultural model of Douglas and Wildavsky, there is no mechanical way of valuing one risk over another. It is impossible to produce agreement over the criteria by which risks should be evaluated, and because of these factors it is impossible to know that people prioritize the risks that are actually most likely to bring them harm (ibid: 3-4). What should be normal and acceptable is an inherently normative question (ibid: 32). Accordingly, Douglas focuses on the underlying forms of society, and on the way different structures of social life lead to different responses to danger (ibid: 8).
While Beck’s theory focuses on the uncontrollable risks that are leading humanity to a distinct new phase in its history, Douglas and Wildavsky’s analysis the common
denominator is the ‘collective construction’ of risk, and the way that some risks have been privileged by different social groups throughout history as a source of social cohesion and legitimacy (ibid:186). In addition, risks have always served as a mechanism for maintaining the cohesion of social groups, and risk perceptions have always served to keep some people - the ones who are blamed for a risk – apart, so that the bulk of society can stay together (ibid:37). Thus, while Beck uses an approach that considers risk both to be something that exists independently of our perception and the product of human discourse and deliberation, Douglas and Wildavsky focus exclusively on the cultural aspects of risk. In their model, it is impossible to calculate the total amount of risk, and to know with certainty if one is doing enough to avoid a risk (ibid:15).
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Individual decision making, societal dynamics and cultural factors
It has long been established that people will much more readily accept risks that they have chosen voluntarily, or which they perceive to be within their immediate control (Starr and Whipple, 1980:1114). This applies even when a situation is completely random and the feeling of control is only an illusion, as demonstrated by Langer (1975). Because of its random nature, and because terrorists could strike anywhere that would bring maximum impact and attention, terrorism works like a sort of lottery where everyone participates at no gain.Lichtenstein et al. confirmed in 1978 through a large-n experimental study that people also overestimate the risk of dying from invasive and newsworthy causes like homicide, accidents, floods or tornados, while seriously underestimating the risk of dying from silent killers like asthma, diseases or strokes. A constant overestimation of low frequencies, and a constant underestimation of high frequencies was found. The authors stated that real-world risk perceptions indicate that society’s members do not have perfect information about the risks that face them, and that as society attempts to place more control on risk, more education and rational analysis is necessary to understand if the risks that are present in society reflect what people consider acceptable (Lichtenstein et al., 1978: 558-560;577). Data from opinion polls from 2000 through 2007 shows that Americans are overly afraid of terrorism, that September 11 caused an increase in fear that stayed much longer than reality, with the benefit of hindsight, merited (Friedman, 2011:83).
The distinction between what Slovic (2004) and others have called ‘risk as analysis’ and ‘risk as feelings’ is essential in understanding risk perceptions that appear to be irrational when looking only at the incident rate, impact and response as rational choice theory would suggest. Whereas ‘risk as analysis’ applies logic, reason and scientific
deliberation to the management of risk, most real-world decisions are influenced heavily by ‘risk as feelings’, an intuitive way of risk calculation that relies on affect. Affect is the ‘specific quality of ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ experienced as a feeling’ (Slovic et al., 2004:312). These responses change quickly and automatically on reading different words, or seeing different people walking down the street (ibid). Affective thinking is part of the experiential mode of thinking, which is holistic, oriented towards pleasure and pain, which makes connections by association, which relies on feelings from past experiences, which encodes reality into
12 concrete images and narratives, which processes information rapidly with a view towards immediate action, and which produces self-evident logic because what is experienced is assumed to be the truth. These affective responses serve as orienting mechanisms, helping people to maneuver a world that is uncertain, complex and sometimes dangerous (ibid:313). Slovic emphasizes that these emotional shortcuts are not truly irrational, but that they can be seen as a different kind of rationality from the analytic system, which relies on logical, abstract and evidence-based weighing of information (ibid). Experiential thinking can misguide people in two ways: through deliberate manipulation of affective response by others, and by the way it is unsuitable to some of the abstractions that modern life requires us to make. This is why experiential thinking can lead people to value the reduction from 1 to 0 deaths more strongly than the reduction from 600 to 500 deaths (ibid:319).
Douglas and Wildavsky also point to the availability heuristic to substantiate their theory that risk perception is a cultural process, and add that institutions matter when it comes to availability:
‘People who have recently been through a bad experience, such as an earthquake or a flood, are more able to imagine it happening to themselves again. The more distant the news of a disaster, the more difficult to get the imagination to respond; the more dramatic a story of loss, the easier to remember it. Some institutions keep the story of past trials alive, while others consign bad memories to oblivion and cherish only good ones. In assigning magnitudes to a possible disaster, everything depends on which bits of information are included and which ignored.’ (ibid:88).
The attacks of September 11th in particular were the kind of risk that people are likely to overestimate, because the deaths were dramatic and clustered, and because the event received a very large share of media coverage. As Viscusi and Zeckhauser point out, the attacks required people to fully rethink their conception of the risk of terrorism. The
realization that the set of events that were previously thought to be possible was incomplete, and that the future may hold equally inconceivable events, will be a major contributing factor to the overreaction to the risk of terrorism (Viscusi and Zeckhauser, 2003:2).
13 Sunstein and Zeckhauser (2011) elaborate the cognitive mechanisms by which
fearsome risks lead to overreaction. Fearsome risks are defined as ‘[risks] that stimulate strong emotional responses, such as fear and anxiety’ (ibid:436). These risks tend to have high consequences and ‘extremely low’ possibilities (ibid). First, the availability heuristic leads people to estimate probabilities of events or portions of populations based on how easily they can produce an example. When some risks are very ‘available’, people will take action to reduce the probability or impact of the risk manifesting itself, and this will lead them to overestimate the risk and to take excessive action. Fearsome risks tend to produce what Sunstein and Zeckhauser call probability neglect; the effect that people’s risk
perception seems to change very little when the probability of a fearsome risk changes. This is because people tend to focus on the bad outcome itself, while disregarding the likelihood of the bad outcome occurring, leading to an action bias. This effect is especially pronounced when people can obtain credit for taking action to prevent a bad outcome (Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2011:436-437). Across the studies and situations that Sunstein and Zeckhauser summarize, a reduction of a risk from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1,000,000 or a similar reduction does not result in an equal decrease of the willingness to pay to reduce the risk to zero (ibid: 439-447). The effect of risk reduction is much weaker when emotional descriptions of risks are introduced, or when particularly fearsome risks are mentioned. In one study,
respondents were faced with either a 1 in 100,000 or a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of contracting cancer from arsenic poisoning. Respondents that were given a neutral description of the cancer were willing to pay roughly four times less for a tenfold reduction of the risk, while those that were presented with a gruesome description were willing to pay only 18% less (ibid:441). In another study by Sandman et al. in 1998, the willingness to pay to avert disaster from nuclear waste, a high outrage situation, did not change with a tenfold reduction of the risk. When this exact same risk was relabeled as a risk from radon, a low outrage situation, the perceived risk and the intention to act were almost 4,000 times smaller (ibid:442). The Feigenson et al. study mentioned in the introduction confirms that negative affect is a better indicator of the willingness to take action than the perceived risk to oneself, even if the perceived risk of terrorism to oneself was grossly overestimated in that study (Feigenson et al., 2004:998).
14 The same effect was visible in a study of terrorism risk perception by Johnson et al. that was conducted in 1993, the same year as the World Trade Center bombing. Respondents that were asked for their willingness to pay for flight insurance against terrorism losses wanted to pay more than respondents that were presented with flight insurance against all risks (Sunstein and Zeckhauser,2011:443). Images of terrorism are readily available and thus produced a stronger reaction. The 2009 cost-benefit analysis by Stewart and Mueller of US Homeland Security confirms that counterterrorism is too expensive when compared with the ‘societal considerations of risk acceptability and willingness to pay to save a life’, estimated at $7.5 million by comparing other lifesaving measures.
Using deliberately high estimates of the lives saved by all terrorist plots that were averted in the United States, not only by federal agencies, all the foiled terrorist attacks between 2001 and 2007 saved approximately 1500 lives (Stewart and Mueller, 2009:9). The amount of lives saved annually is estimated between 50 (a 50% reduction of the terrorism risk that existed between 1970 and 2001) and 500 (two full airliners saved each year, although only the December 2001 ‘shoe bomber’ was prevented from destroying an aircraft) (ibid:9-10). In 2008, the increased in Homeland Security spending was at least $31.4b per year
(ibid:6). This only accounts for the increase in departmental spending on Homeland Security, and disregards completely the War on Terror operations abroad, which by 2009 had cost $994b in total (Belasco, 2009:2). With a narrow calculation of the costs involved, the cost per life saved varies from $630 million to $63 million for the lower and upper estimates, and so the cost of lives saved by increased Homeland Security is 8 to 80 times higher than what is generally considered acceptable by society (Stewart and Mueller, 2009:11).
15 Feigenson et al. (2004: 991-992) list the most important biases that affect laypeople’s risk perceptions as follows: 1) the dread associated with a risk, and how ‘unknown’ it is; 2) whether the risk is associated with positive or negative affect; 3) the availability of a risk; 4) whether a risk presents itself as a loss or a gain relative to the status quo; 5) an inability to fully understand very small probabilities and very large numbers; 6) the tendency to believe that other people in the same situation are worse off than oneself, the optimism bias which overlaps to a large extent with the illusion of control; 7) the perceiver’s current emotional state; and 8) the perceiver’s emotional response to the risk itself. To these biases I would add three more derived from Friedman (2011:88): 9) the anchoring effect, a heavy reliance on initial impressions of a risk, discounting later information; 10) the representativeness heuristic, which causes people to estimate the probability of an event based on prior events, rather than by considering all the probabilities that would have to be overcome for the event to happen; and 11) the tendency to see intentional agency, and to make connections, where there are none. Finally, any model that describes the way cognitive biases influence risk perception should include 12) if the risk is considered to be voluntary.
These twelve parameters do not provide an exhaustive account of all the ways that cognitive bias influences the risk perception of terrorism, but they are a reasonable
representation of the most important biases. The interaction of each of these biases with terrorism is summarized in Table 1.
16 Table 1: Cognitive biases and their interaction with terrorism
Bias Application to terrorism
Dread, unknown nature of the risk
Terrorists target people’s fears specifically, and use randomness to keep populations in fear.
Positive or negative affect Terrorism is charged with negative effect and outrage, leading to an action bias.
Availability Images and reminders of terrorism are strongly available in the US, especially because of high coverage and the ‘bandwagon effect’ described by Friedman.
Manifestation as a loss or gain
Terrorism presents itself as a catastrophic loss, dispensed at completely random moments.
Difficulty of small
probabilities The historical probability of being killed by a terrorist is extremely low. Optimism bias Empirical studies have found that people believe that others are
more likely to be impacted by terrorism than themselves.
Emotional state Empirical studies have found that the emotional state can change very quickly when a risk is loaded with negative affect.
Emotional response to the risk
The randomness and impact of a terrorist attack triggers emotional response.
Anchoring effect Terrorism entered the public consciousness with 9/11, which had a very large impact. Given the anchoring effect, people will use 9/11 as a point of reference and discount later information, such as the absence of further similar attacks in the US.
Representativeness heuristic When asked to estimate the probability of a terrorist attack, people will consider the impact of earlier terrorist attacks, without
considering all the odds that have to be overcome for a future attack to be successful.
Agency bias Unrelated media content, events, social groups, people and actions are grouped together into an image of ‘The Terrorist’, who is much larger than the sum of his unrelated parts.
Voluntariness Terrorism works like a perverse lottery that potentially includes everyone, in which no one has agreed to participate and which manifests itself randomly.
The table above summarizes how terrorism interacts with most, if not all of the most significant biases that can lead to overreaction to a risk. It is clear that terrorism interacts strongly with all the established predictors of bias.
17 Sunstein and Zeckhauser maintain that these biases affect government action in democratic countries through public demand, because government officials will have the same thought biases, and because the action bias is especially strong when officials can be rewarded for taking action, while they may be blamed for not taking action. This dynamic is visible in many instances, including the strong reaction to the 1979 Three Mile Island
incident, where a government commission estimated that one case of cancer would be created. The anthrax scare of 2001 is another example, when four people died while government invested disproportionate resources in reducing the likelihood of anthrax infection (ibid:446). Finally, the response to the September 11 attacks is described as ‘arguably the most severe recent example of overreaction to a risk threat’ (ibid:447). Public fear and anxiety contributed public and private costs that were, and continue to be, much higher than the cost of the attacks themselves. The authors suspect that any explanation of the Iraq War should point at least in part to probability neglect and action bias (ibid).
Friedman (2011) agrees with these conclusions, even stating that fear of terrorism ‘is a bigger problem than terrorism’ (ibid:78). In situations of salient low-risk but high-outrage risks, the security market becomes a seller’s market where the public will pay too much for security (ibid:83), as Stewart and Mueller demonstrated.
While Sunstein and Zeckhauser focus on the input of skewed risk perceptions into government action, Friedman stresses the effect of the skewed information that American citizens receive about terrorism, primarily from government sources, on citizens’ risk perceptions. The experts that produce government information are driven by several pressures that drive them to overrespond to the risk of terrorism. Imminent danger is a better justification of foreign policy than ideological statements. Also, the uniquely diffuse power structure in the American government makes raising alarm an effective way of enacting change. ‘Almost every U.S. foreign policy strategy or proposal has been said, by someone in power, to combat terrorism’ (ibid:90). This is true for the invasion of Iraq, but also for foreign aid, trade agreements, anti-drug measures and Arctic drilling (ibid:91). In addition, the bipartisan system offers an incentive to both parties to inflate the risk from terrorism, and appearing to be the party that takes the firmest stance against terrorism. The parties have no incentive to downplay the likelihood of a terrorist attack, because the other party would capitalize and claim that the other is ‘soft on terrorism’. There exists then a type
18 of arms race, where it is rational for neither party to advocate a reduction of anti-terrorist programs (ibid:92). Military and intelligence agencies have a natural incentive to emphasize the significance of their mission, to attract funding, power and recognition (ibid:92-96). Even academics and think tanks have an incentive to write about controlling danger, not about its probability, because the former allows them to advance their careers, attracts more funding, and because it may match academics’ ideological preferences. Finally, the media have no incentive to challenge the dominating risk perception, because there are no competing interests. No strong interest exists in reevaluating the estimations of danger that are commonly shared, and emergency sells.
A rudimentary analysis of media exposure by Feigenson et al. in the months leading up to their study shows that media exposure contributes to risk perception: in Canada, where there was 40% more media coverage of SARS, the risk of SARS was estimated to be higher than terrorism, while in the United States, where there was fourteen times more media coverage of terrorism, the risk of terrorism was estimated to be higher than SARS (Feigenson et al., 2004:1001-1002). It is important to stress that these pressures and incentives do not exist in isolation, but that they reinforce each other and themselves. People adapt their opinion to their peers, because they learn from them and because it is easier to agree than to disagree. Agreement tends to reinforce people’s opinions, and one institution’s self-interested threat inflation will blow back to other institutions, government actors and the public (ibid:97). The self-reinforcing mechanism of anxiety was also demonstrated by Slone (2000:508;519), who found that exposure to media content about terrorism increased anxiety for all participants in her study, but this effect was stronger for people who were already predisposed to worry more about terrorism.
It is possible as Kaufmann (2004) does in an empirical account of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, to attribute threat inflation primarily to conscious elite action. Especially in the case of the Iraq invasion, an analysis of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ falling short of
challenging the dominating view that was put forward by the US government of Iraq as a ticking time bomb, connected to copious amounts of WMD, is highly relevant. A similar argument is made by Cavanaugh (2007) who attributes threat inflation in different historical cases to conscious action by the executive branch of government. However, to fully
19 this only as the product of the machinations of a power elite, and of the lack of an informed public, but a comprehensive explanation should not only account for the heterogeneous range of incentive structures and mutually reinforcing ideas that Friedman and Sunstein and Zeckhauser point to, and to the cognitive mechanisms that cause us to overestimate some risks while underweighting others.
Finally, Ericson (2008) describes how Jihadist terrorism resonates with Western culture and society, because it ‘targets the values, science, technology and law of Western risk societies’ (ibid:58), and it seeks to transform the Western societies into uncertain societies. Terrorists deal explicitly in uncertainty, using randomness to instill fear and
anticipation throughout the social system. The ‘Western obsession with uncertainty and fear of death’ is constructed by the terrorist as weakness and cowardice, as the terrorist faces death in pursuit of glory and rewards in the afterlife with seemingly no interest in survival (ibid). According to Ericson, terrorists exploit the openness and technological possibilities of modern society, in a way that certainly resonates with Beck’s interpretation of terrorism as a risk that is part of the ‘reflexive’ phase of modernity. Just as modernity becomes directed at itself and presented with its own consequences in Beck’s framework, so do terrorists deploy the technology and culture that are the fabric of modern society against that society.
Terrorism strikes at the foundations of modern society, because it reminds us of the limitations of risk assessment and risk management (Ericson and Doyle, 2004:141
Together, the resonance that terrorism has with Western political communities on the individual, societal and cultural level, and the self-reinforcing dynamics that play out on each of these levels, will account for a very significant portion of the total discrepancy between the real chance of being killed in a terrorist attack, and the way that people respond to terrorism in their risk perceptions and actions. Most of these dynamics will most likely also apply to other risks in some way, but the fact that they all apply to terrorism in a way that is mutually reinforcing explains why terrorism is truly what Friedman has called ‘a perfect storm for provoking fear and overreaction’. The perspective on risk perception in this chapter is similar to Douglas and Wildavsky’s, who describe the public perception of risk and its acceptable levels as ‘collective constructs, a bit like language and a bit like aesthetic judgment’ (1982:186).
20
The nature of terrorism
Hypothesis 1: Terrorism is not incorporated into existing insurance frameworks
Ericson and Doyle (2004) provide a detailed empirical investigation of the response of the insurance industry to 9/11. Responding to Beck’s assumptions of the non-insurability of catastrophic losses and of insurance companies therefore abandoning coverage of these losses, three points are made. First, insurance companies have always carefully included and excluded some risks from regular coverage, partnering with governments, creating special arrangements or simply refusing to insure risks like unemployment or flooding in certain regions (ibid:137). Second, many of the risks that Beck describes throughout Risk Society and
World Risk Society as uninsurable, particularly nuclear reactors, are in fact insured through
special arrangements. Insurance companies have always thrived on uncertainty to generate profits, up to the point that some of the risk decisions that insurance companies make are not decisions of frequency and severity, but of threat and opportunity. These decisions are often made with non-scientific methods (ibid). Many dangers have been insured when the source of the loss was not even known, such as asbestosis, or when the underlying predictions have much room for error, in the case of earthquake insurance (ibid:148). Insurance companies make decisions of uncertainty on a daily basis, and these decisions are made in different ways by each individual company. Beck would describe these imaginative responses by the insurance industry as attempts to feign control over the uncontrollable, because these decisions are made without complete knowledge of the possible damages and their
probability (Beck, 2002:41). As Ericson and Doyle point out, these decisions cannot only be understood as a means of feigning a control that is not there: there is a very real need to pay the damages that are covered by an insurance company and once a risk is covered, it is imbedded in the insurance market (Ericson and Doyle, 2004:138). Third, Beck makes his assertions about the insurance industry without looking at empirical evidence of how the industry actually operates in the face of uncertainty. A similar critique is made by Wilkinson (2001:15-16). The insurance industry’s attitude towards risk and uncertainty is summarized very well by an industry executive, quoted by Ericson and Doyle:
21 ‘We love ambiguity. We know how to handle uncertainty. And I think that we know it much better than the average consumer or the buyer of our products. Risk has always two dimensions. It is is a threat, a peril, but is also contains the aspect of opportunity. And the art is to balance these two, threat and opportunity, in a smart and conscious way’. (ibid:148).
The authors demonstrate that the insurance industry responded reasonably well in compensating the losses of 9/11, the largest incident of terrorism to date, and the largest single loss from one single event for the insurance industry. Furthermore, the industry also managed to find new means of preventive security and risk distribution to help it continue providing terrorism coverage (ibid:141). On September 20th 2011, New Orleans International airport was unable to renew its terrorism coverage with any company at any price. Only a short while later, terrorism insurance was available for this airport at a price. Less than a month afterwards, the airport could obtain more coverage for a lower price (Bougen,
2009:27). This is an indication of the way the insurance industry first responded by trying to limit its exposure, but quickly adapted to the new circumstances and landscape.
The event of 9/11 initially led to a ‘pass-the-exposure express’, where insurance companies attempted to cancel or refuse to renew contracts that were deemed unattractive now that terrorism had caused such a massive loss. This development, also described by Makinen (2002:32-35), would be consistent with Beck’s view of terrorism as an
unquantifiable and basically uninsurable risk. One month after 9/11 and during the pass-the-exposure express, terrorism was seen as uninsurable by private insurance in the US –
currently uninsurable because of a temporary lack of knowledge of the ‘new’ risk of global terrorism, not inherently uninsurable due to its nature as the risk society thesis suggests (Bougen, 2009:26). As Ericson and Doyle (2004:152) point out, a similar emotional reaction was seen after other unexpected events, such as the Mount St Helens volcanic eruption of 1980, and terrorism was never fully exempted from coverage. This mechanism is probably more similar to investors dumping a stock when everyone else is doing the same, than to a permanent retreat from an area of risk that undermines the risk calculus that is essential to the insurance system.
22 While 9/11 was a big strain for the insurance industry, Ericson and Doyle’s empirical account shows that the boundaries of private insurance did not dissolve after the attacks, but they were reconfigured in an imaginative way, while the industry quickly adjusted to the new situation by placing greater emphasis on preventive measures, and by developing new modes of calculating the risk of terrorism (ibid:169). While the US government extended partial protection to the insurance industry from the event of further terrorist attacks, Bougen demonstrates that this did not result from the belief that terrorism is an inherently uninsurable danger. Instead, the arrangement was the result of lobbying efforts by the insurance industry, and of a wide range of concerns and analyses on the part of regulators who were seeking to govern the problem of terrorism risk insurability (Bougen, 2009: 24;29). Given this empirical account of the insurance industry’s response to the most extreme incident of terrorism in human history, and the largest single-event loss that the insurance industry has ever faced, it becomes clear that 9/11 has not undermined the existing
frameworks of insurance in a way that would usher in a new era of uninsurable risk. The insurance industry faced initial difficulties immediately after the attacks, since terrorism had manifested itself in a way that was not conceived of previous to the event. However, the insurance industry recovered quickly by finding new and imaginative ways of incorporating the ‘new’ terrorist risk into existing insurance framework. Beck’s distinction between the risks of first modernity, which could be insured with a mathematical certainty, and the risks of second modernity which are not insurable at all is also falsified by this account, because it is revealed that insurance companies have always made delicate balancing acts between risk and uncertainty, with each company making its own decisions about which risks to insure and at what price, even far beyond actuarial tables and mathematical prediction.
Hypothesis 2: Terrorists are not susceptible to deterrence
While Ericson recognizes the political motivations, strategies and rituals that drive the terrorist actor, he advances the view that ‘the deterrent capacity of the legal power to punish is destroyed because terrorists express a desire to die’ (ibid:59). The same view is expressed by Reuter, who Ericson quotes as saying that ‘[Terrorists] annihilate the entire logic of power, since no credible threat can be made against someone who has no desire to survive’ (ibid).
23 The idea of the terrorist who is ‘out there’, who has an explicit desire to die and who cannot be deterred by power structures would certainly be an alarming prospect to most people, and it fits well within Beck’s assumption that the potential force of terrorism is non-quantifiable. The assumption that fanatical terrorists are motivated by ‘intertemporal utility considerations’ such as the glory of martyrdom or great rewards in the afterlife (Frey and Luechinger, 2003:5) and that they cannot be deterred is shared by many scholars of
international relations, and it can also be found in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States (Trager, 2006:87). According to Trager (2006), this view of terrorism rests on three pillars. First, terrorists are thought to be irrational, and not susceptible to the normal cost-benefit analysis that a deterrent strategy would require them to make. Second, terrorists are said to be so highly motivated that they are willing to die and do not fear punishment or any other response to their actions. Third, the suicide terrorist will be dead upon completion of his plans, and so there is no way that the victim of the attack could retaliate against the terrorist (ibid:87-88).
Pape (2003:344) has shown that suicide terrorist attacks are not the result of an irrational willingness to die, but that they generally occur as part of concentrated efforts by groups to achieve specific political goals. While individuals that participate in suicide missions should not all be considered as fully rational agents, the groups that use suicide attacks constantly reiterate their political goals, and stop using suicide terrorism when these have been achieved (ibid:336). Terrorists learn from experience in the same way that other groups would, and most suicide terrorism flows from one of the most fundamental political goals: the right to self-determination (ibid:349). Building on this line of argument, Trager (2006:94) argues that the mix of rational and nonrational behavior described by Pape is not unique to terrorists, and that only some degree of rationality is required for a deterrent strategy to work. Deterrence can be done in two ways. Deterrence by punishment, the threat of holding the terrorists’ political objectives at risk, can be used effectively against all
terrorists, but only temporarily against those whose goals form a zero-sum game with the goals of the deterring state, and who value their goals more strongly than their life.
Deterrence by denial, by hardening targets and demonstrating resolve so as to decrease the perceived benefits of an attack, can be used against all terrorist groups. In 1998, terrorists attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, mainly because these were easier to
24 attack than the more secure facilities in the Middle East. This is one example of the way deterrence by denial can be used even against the most committed terrorists; by making high-value targets less accessible, terrorism can be made to be a less attractive option and terrorists’ motivation can be reduced (ibid: 92-106).
The spread of technologically advanced weapons has not occurred as quickly as some have predicted, because the use of advanced and unpredictable technologies requires central organization, which is hard for a secret network because of police and military interventions. (Friedman, 2011:81). Only organizations like Hezbollah would have the command structure and capacity to use more advanced weapons, but these are bound to a specific territory and a set of political goals, and therefore most susceptible to deterrence of all the types of terrorist groups that were discussed above.
As for the second hypothesis that terrorist actors are not rational because of their nature and therefore not susceptible to deterrence, more detailed investigation of the nature of terrorist actors shows that this is only true to some extent. The networks that have the capacity to plan terrorist attacks using advanced means are highly coordinated, and these networks have political goals that they value. Groups can be deterred by holding their political goals at risk and by decreasing the prospective benefits of an attack. This analysis shows that these terrorist networks are not outside the process of power politics, but that they are political actors who respond to incentives. As for the individual lone wolf terrorists, these are less susceptible to the mechanisms of deterrence described by Trager and Pape, other than the hardening of possible targets and getting them to substitute one target for another. Because these individuals do not represent an organization and because they have already chosen to ignore the primary mechanism of deterrence that governs all individuals, the law, by starting a solitary campaign of terror, deterrence by punishment will be generally ineffective against these individuals. While the solitary terrorist will match the image of the enigmatic and fanatical terrorist better than a terrorist group, the means that are available to individuals are similar to the means that are available to individual criminals, and much less like the means that are available to a well-organized terrorist network. It is therefore unlikely that lone wolf terrorists will usher in a new age of global uncertainty anytime soon.
25
Conclusions
The first part of this thesis has focused on explanations of risk perception that focus on the perceivers of risk; the cognitive, societal and cultural biases that lead people to overestimate some risks while underestimating others. For cognitive biases, twelve key factors that can lead to the overestimation of a risk were discussed. For each of these twelve variables, there is an evident interaction with terrorism as it has manifested itself in the United States. Thus, cognitive biases will make up a significant part of the ‘gap’ between the actual probability of being killed in a terrorist attack, and the probability that risk perceivers ascribe to this event in opinion polls and experimental studies. Individual risk perceptions were also shown to contribute to government action and media coverage, while Friedman stressed the role of government and media actors in providing the information on which people base their risk perceptions. Douglas and Wildavsky emphasized the importance of cultural biases and preferences in selecting risks for special attention. Terrorism has also been shown to resonate strongly with fundamental Western cultural values and with defining features of modern Western societies, providing a further indication that the risk perception of terrorism is shaped by cultural, societal and cognitive processes. Other theories of terrorism focus on the novelty of this risk when compared to the risks that humanity has previously faced. If terrorism is indeed shown to be of a fundamentally different kind, which is not susceptible to rational mechanisms of risk calculation and management, this could also explain why terrorism is selected for particular attention compared to other risks.
These possible explanations were studied according to two hypotheses. The first hypothesis, that terrorism is not incorporated in existing insurance frameworks, was falsified by empirical accounts of the insurance industry’s response to 9/11, the most extreme case of terrorism to date. This event was handled well by existing insurance frameworks. Thus, an explanation of the present-day risk perception of terrorism cannot point to the fact that terrorism defies the means by which industrial society has managed its risks, which would make an ‘overreaction’ no more than logical. Finally, it may be said that terrorism renders historical measurement of risk irrelevant because the destructive logic of terrorism
undermines risk calculation and because terrorists cannot be reasoned with. This assumption is true only for some individual terrorists, and even those terrorists can be deterred by denial by decreasing the expected value of committing an attack. The terrorist networks that can
26 overcome the technological and organizational obstacles to organizing a high-impact attack have political goals, and these are as susceptible to deterrence as other political groups. Accordingly, an explanation of the risk perception of terrorism after 9/11 should focus on the perceivers, and less on the sui generis nature of the risk.
Discussion
There remains the issue if past manifestations of terrorism, or the absence thereof, can be projected into the future. Because of the small amount of terrorist incidents that have happened in history, and because of the fact that terrorism rely explicitly on randomness, this is shaky at best. However, the rarity of ‘real’ terrorist attacks with a large number of fatalities in the US can be taken as an indicator of an absence of terrorists, and as an absence of the means to carry out a terrorist attack. As many people would point out, all it takes is a few determined people and a new way of turning technological progress against itself. This may be an alarming prospect, but given the fact that this has not happened since 2001, it is reassuring as well.
The most recent serious and widely published incident of domestic terrorism in the US, the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013, killed only three people. While hundreds of people were injured, the total impact of this terrorism act was more similar to a large multiple-vehicle collision than to nuclear disaster. The risk of terrorism is culturally
constructed to a very large extent, and it might even be said that there is no objective risk of terrorism that exists independently of people’s risk perceptions. Terrorism is certainly an ‘artificial’ risk because it relies on the sorting of events and actors into categories and definitions that are contested, and because it is imposed on society by way of deliberate action. At the same time, the risk of terrorism is made up of people who seek to maximize their goals, be they political or social, who exist independently of the way their would-be victims think about risk. Perhaps opening the black box that viewing terrorism as an external and non-quantifiable risk presents, and revealing the actors and values that are inside the black box could help us understand terrorism in a different way, and reduce the dread risk that is associated with terrorism.
27 Many of the authors that offer perceiver-level explanations of risk perception would agree that public policy should be grounded in rational and technocratic risk management, including cost-benefit analysis to the extent that this is possible, but the public will not agree with even a sound policy if it contrasts sharply with their own perceptions of a risk. There remains the issue if past manifestations of terrorism, or the absence thereof, can be projected into the future. Because of the small amount of terrorist incidents that have happened in history, and because of the fact that terrorism rely explicitly on randomness, this is shaky at best. However, the rarity of ‘real’ terrorist attacks with a large number of fatalities in the US can be taken as an indicator of an absence of terrorists, and as an absence of the means to carry out a terrorist attack. As Beck would point out, all it takes is a few determined people and a new way of turning technological progress against itself. This may be an alarming prospect, but given the fact that this has not happened since 2001, it is a reassuring one as well.
Therefore, it is necessary to build a greater understanding of the way laypeople develop their risk attitudes, and to inform the public clearly about the risks that they face, because people that believe a risk to be a thousand times greater than it actually is may take precautions that are objectively unwise – such as purchasing a gun. On the other hand, the incentive structures that cause government and media organizations, which have a leading role in producing individuals’ risk perceptions, to not challenge irrational risk perceptions have to be investigated further. Any strategy for reducing the inflation of the terrorist threat should aim to address both these issues.
28
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