And if I continue to pummel you with statistics that say you're more likely to die from the natural carcinogens in peanut butter than from living next to a nuclear power plant, you'll eventually knock me down and stuff jelly up my nose. When the captains of the nuclear industry originally offered the peanut butter equation, it didn't make them very popular with environmentalists and others who think we rely too heavily on half-tamed technologies and chemicals. The environmentalists, in fact, wanted to knock the captains of the nuclear industry down and stuff jelly up their noses. Likewise they can produce a list of things that don't kill many people, but of which we live in dread. And it has revealed a method in our madness.
Risk perception seems to attract scientists with a frisky approach to research.
One experiment, for example, involved dipping a dead, sterilized cockroach into a glass of juice, then noting the percentage of people who wouldn't drink. . Using these and more orthodox approaches, risk-perception researchers have identified some general rules that cause us to greet danger with a yelp or a yawn. Natural risks are less scary. Perhaps this explains why we loathe nuclear power but ignore the radioactive threat of natural radon gas. Risks imposed on us seem worse.