About Risk: Reason and Reality

Fear is good. It helps protect us. But getting risk wrong — worrying more than the evidence says we need to, or not as much as the evidence says we should — produces stress and leads to unhealthy choices for ourselves and for society. We do have to fear fear itself: too much, or too little. Understanding why the gap exists between our fears and the facts is the first step toward managing the potential risk of risk misperception, and making healthy choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities. David Ropeik is an instructor at Harvard, a consultant in risk perception, risk communication, and risk management, author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, principal co-author of RISK: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You, and was a broadcast journalist in Boston for 22 years.

Recent Posts

• 5/22

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• 5/14

  How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous

• 5/04

  Heartland Billboards on Climate Change. The Dangerous Ignorance of Ideology

• 5/01

  Child Abduction. Risk, Reason, and a Reporter's Personal Story

• 4/23

  Thank The Good Journalists

• 4/16

  Democracy. A Dangerous Way to Make Decisions About Some Risks

• 4/11

  Losing a Loved One, and the Heartlessness of Calculating the Value of a Statistical Life.

• 4/03

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• 3/31

  Bisphenol A. Safe? Not Safe? Psychology over Toxicology

• 3/28

  We Ignore the Science of Risk Perception AT OUR PERIL!