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The Psychophysics of Terror Attack Casualty Counts
1Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis
|September 5, 2019
Summary
Public perception of terror attack severity is logarithmic to casualty count, but fear and anger responses do not significantly depend on the number of casualties. Understanding this disconnect is crucial for risk communication.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Risk Communication
- Terrorism Studies
Background:
- Government agencies and organizations need to understand public perception of terror attack severity for effective risk communication.
- Casualty count is a common metric for attack severity, but its impact on public affective and cognitive reactions is unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To characterize the relationship between terror attack casualty counts and public affective (fear, anger) and cognitive (perceived severity) reactions.
- To investigate if casualty count influences public emotional and cognitive responses to terror attacks.
Main Methods:
- Recruited 684 participants via Mechanical Turk.
- Participants read realistic vignettes of biological or radiological terror attacks with varying death tolls (20-50,000).
- Assessed participants' ratings of fear, anger, and perceived attack severity, controlling for plausibility.
Main Results:
- Perceived attack severity ratings showed a logarithmic relationship with casualty count.
- Ratings of fear and anger were not significantly dependent on the casualty count.
- Findings were consistent across different attack types (biological vs. radiological) and casualty time horizons.
Conclusions:
- Public cognitive evaluation of terror attack severity is logarithmic with respect to casualty count.
- Affective responses (fear, anger) to terror attacks appear independent of casualty numbers.
- A potential bifurcation exists between public cognitive and affective evaluations of terror attacks, impacting risk communication strategies.
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