Risk and Liability

What are the Grounds for the Profound Differences?

• The first difference is that engineers and risk experts believe that the public is sometimes mistaken in estimating the probability of death and injury from various activities.
• Risk expert Chauncey Starr has a similarly low opinion of the public’s knowledge of probabilities of harm. He notes that people tend to overestimate the likelihood of low-probability risks associated with causes of death and to underestimate the likelihood of high-probability associated with causes of death. The latter tendency can lead to overconfident biasing, or anchoring.