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Category: Project

Description: In their famous study on risk judgments, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978) concluded that people tend to overestimate the frequencies of dramatic causes of death (e.g., homicide, tornado) and underestimate the frequencies of nondramatic ones (e.g., diabetes, heart disease). Analyses of newspapers indicated that dramatic risks are also overrepresented in the media, suggesting that people’s distorted risk perceptions might be driven by distortions in media coverage. These conclusions have become a staple in the social sciences, even though the patterns were not evaluated statistically in the original analyses. How robust and replicable are they? This project submits Lichtenstein et al.’s data, as well as data from two more recent replications, to a quantitative analysis and aggregates the data meta-analytically.