Fear, Politics, and the Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic is a very powerful cognitive bias that influences the perception of political threats. It leads individuals to overestimate the probability of events by reflecting on how easily they can remember similar occurrences. Political leaders, when they manipulate this psychological process with messages intended to instill fear, can have an immense impact on public opinion, generally at the expense of good decision making. Fear has proven to be an extremely useful tool throughout history in politics. Powerful narratives have been utilized by states to further policies that would otherwise be unpalatable, ranging from the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War to the mass surveillance agendas justified by the “War on Terror”. ….[READ]
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