Summary

Even though Kahneman knew that the chances of a bus being blown up in Israel was minuscule, when he visited the country he would avoid stopping his rental car next to an idling bus. He was ashamed of himself because he knew better, yet fear and worry was in the forefront of his mind. He was assigning a high decision rate to something that had only a scant possibility of occurring. He was driven by a fear in System 1 thinking that associated buses with bombs.

System 2 was well aware that the threat was minimal but its logic and statistical knowledge could not remove the fear captured in System 1. The foregoing scenario is why terrorism is effective. The fear of acts of terror drive people to assign too much decision weight to something that is improbable. At the other end of the spectrum, people...