On Not Wanting to Know What Hurts You - New York Times

On Not Wanting to Know What Hurts You - New York Times: "'It's not whether I actually bother to control it,' Dr. Sandman said. 'It's whether I feel I can.' The factors that influence worry are often linked. Familiarity, for instance, can moderate the sense of dread, said Paul Slovic, a psychologist with Decision Research, a nonprofit research institution in Eugene, Ore. Car accidents, he noted, are as horrific as cancer, yet 'we don't have the same sense of dread around cars that we do around carcinogens' because we drive all the time.

Faced with unfamiliar diseases, people rely on other measures to calculate risk. For example, they may unconsciously use prevalence as a gauge, said Howard Leventhal, a professor of health psychology at Rutgers.

'Prevalent events are seen as less serious than rare events,' Dr. Leventhal said in an e-mail message. The logic is simple, he said: if lots of people have a disease but are not hospitalized or dying, it must be relatively benign; if it is rare, it might have serious, unknown consequences."