Availability Cascade - Examples

Examples

An important class of judgments is those concerning risk: the expectation of harm to result from a given threat, a function of the threat's likelihood and impact. Changes in perceived risk result in risk compensation—correspondingly more or less mitigation, including precautionary measures and support for regulation. Kuran and Sunstein offer three examples of availability cascades—Love Canal, the Alar scare, and TWA Flight 800—in which a spreading public panic led to growing calls for increasingly expensive government action to deal with risks that turned out later to be grossly exaggerated. Others have used the term "culture of fear" to refer to the habitual achieving of goals via such fear appeals, notably in the case of the threat of terrorism.

Read more about this topic:  Availability Cascade

Famous quotes containing the word examples:

    There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.
    Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)

    Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
    Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

    In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)