Observer > 2001 > December
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142001Volume 14, Issue10December 2001

Presidential Column

John Darley
John Darley
Princeton University
APS President 2001 - 2002
All columns

In this Issue:
Do We Fear the Right Things?

About the Observer

The Observer is the online magazine of the Association for Psychological Science and covers matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology. The magazine reports on issues of interest to psychologist scientists worldwide and disseminates information about the activities, policies, and scientific values of APS.

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    Disasters like Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut draw massive media coverage, trauma interventions, and financial donations to victims. But psychological research shows the efforts don’t always yield the intended benefits.

Up Front

  • University of Rochester

    Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences The Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences was founded in 1996 to better allow undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research associates, and faculty to pursue interdisciplinary studies of the mind and brain. Advances in neuroscience and in computer science, along with striking progress in the behavioral sciences during the last 15 years, have fundamentally altered the way we approach the study of perceptual, motor, linguistic, and cognitive behaviors. A growing understanding of how the brain performs its computations, and the resulting efforts to characterize this processing via formal models, have brought powerful new insights to our understanding of perception, language, and reasoning. The department was formed so that investigators using these different approaches to understanding the mind and brain-behavioral, neural, and computational-could easily interact and collaborate with one another, and could jointly train the interdisciplinary scientists of the future.

  • Do We Fear the Right Things?

      DAVID G. MYERS "Freedom and fear are at war," President Bush has told us. The terrorists' goal, he says, is "not only to kill and maim and destroy" but to frighten us into inaction. Alas, the terrorists have made progress in their fear war, by diverting our anxieties from big risks toward smaller risks. Flying is a case in point. Even before the horror of September 11 and the ensuing crash at Rockaway Beach, 44 percent of those willing to risk flying told Gallup they felt fearful. "Every time I get off a plane, I view it as a failed suicide attempt," movie director Barry Sonnenfeld has said. After five crashed airliners, and with threats of more terror to come, cancellations understandably left airlines, travel agencies, and holiday hotels flying into the red. Indeed, the terrorists may still be killing us, in ways unnoticed. If we now fly 20 percent less and instead drive half those unflown miles, we will spend 2 percent more time in motor vehicles. This translates into 800 more people dying as passengers and pedestrians. So, in just the next year the terrorists may indirectly kill three times more people on our highways than died on those four fated planes.

Practice

  • University of Rochester

    Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences The Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences was founded in 1996 to better allow undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research associates, and faculty to pursue interdisciplinary studies of the mind and brain. Advances in neuroscience and in computer science, along with striking progress in the behavioral sciences during the last 15 years, have fundamentally altered the way we approach the study of perceptual, motor, linguistic, and cognitive behaviors. A growing understanding of how the brain performs its computations, and the resulting efforts to characterize this processing via formal models, have brought powerful new insights to our understanding of perception, language, and reasoning.

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  • Part Three: Three Ways to Use Databases as Tools for Psychological Research

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