Operations, Information and Decisions Papers
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
5-2011
Publication Source
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume
115
Issue
1
Start Page
25
Last Page
34
DOI
10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.01.004
Abstract
Although anti-terrorism policy should be based on a normative treatment of risk that incorporates likelihoods of attack, policy makers’ anti-terror decisions may be influenced by the blame they expect from failing to prevent attacks. We show that people’s anti-terror budget priorities before a perceived attack and blame judgments after a perceived attack are associated with the attack’s severity and how upsetting it is but largely independent of its likelihood. We also show that anti-terror budget priorities are influenced by directly highlighting the likelihood of the attack, but because of outcome biases, highlighting the attack’s prior likelihood has no influence on judgments of blame, severity, or emotion after an attack is perceived to have occurred. Thus, because of accountability effects, we propose policy makers face a dilemma: prevent terrorism using normative methods that incorporate the likelihood of attack or prevent blame by preventing terrorist attacks the public find most blameworthy.
Keywords
Judgment, likelihood, risk, probability neglect, outcome bias, hindsight bias, terrorism, policy, blame
Recommended Citation
McGraw, A., Todorov, A., & Kunreuther, H. (2011). A Policy Maker’s Dilemma: Preventing Terrorism or Preventing Blame. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115 (1), 25-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.01.004
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Date Posted: 27 November 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.