Takeaway: Humans are very bad as understanding risk whenever risk becomes complicated.
The Science of Fear feels like a book that was written specifically for me. It is filled with statistics, it has a good bit of sociology and psychology. Its messages is overwhelmingly that we fear the wrong things, that humans as a whole are not all that good at evaluating risk, and that in the end it is very easy to manipulate people into fear.
That is not to say this is a perfect book. Even for someone as stats obsessed as I am, this book was easily 75 pages too long.
The summary thesis is that we have a rational side and an emotional (gut) side. The gut side is what takes over the majority of the time and only rarely does the rational side come up on top.
There are several psychological or behavioral economic principles that that make it hard for the rational side to hold the gut side at bay. Gardner gives several examples: The Anchoring Rule (if you give a number or example even if completely unrelated to the topic, the listener will use that to anchor the evaluation), the Rule of Typical Things (basically if it sounds right it probably is right: chemicals are bad, rare things must be more dangerous, etc.) and The Example Rule (if you can see that anyone has had this happen to them, then it is probably more frequent than you know). He also uses some of the more familiar principles of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance but focuses more on the behavior economics rather than the older psychological ideas.
So in an example on the fear of serious degenerative diseases from leaks in silicone breast implants you see how this works. The example rule says that is a woman has breast implants and has a degenerative disease then they are probably connected. But if there are a million women with implants and the particular degenerative disease occurs in the general population at 1 percent, then normally 10,000 women with implants should have that disease. It requires large scale epidemiological studies to know if it is likely that the implants and the disease are related. In this case they were not. But the Rule of Typical things says that putting silicone in your body sounds like a bad idea, so it is probably the cause of the disease.
