Our best efforts to gauge threats may be counter-productive. bre pettiss

(SOURCE: http://www.theconversation.edu.au)

Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet few are very good at it, and there are significant consequences of the public’s collective inability to accurately assess risk.

As a first and very important example, most people presume, as an indisputable fact, that the past century has been the most violent in all history — two devastating world wars, the Holocaust, the Rawanda massacre, the September 11 attacks and more — and that we live in a highly dangerous time today.

And yet, as Canadian psychologist (now at Harvard) Steven Pinker has exhaustively documented in his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the opposite is closer to the truth, particularly when normalised by population.

As Pinker himself puts it:

“Believe it or not — and I know most people do not — violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue.

“But I hope to convince you that it’s a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.”

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