Mortality salience and travel:
Mortality salience is a subset of overall salience bias. Salience bias is defined as making decisions based on easily available information (Mullainathan & Thaler, 2000), because of its vivid, visceral nature keeping it prominent in the mind. Mortality salience, then, is individuals’ awareness of the inevitability of their own death, and the use of this knowledge in their decision-making. The possibility of death is ever-present, yet focusing too much on it causes debilitating existential anxiety. As such, individuals’ evolutionary adaptation has been to ignore the possibility of death and go about living.
We propose that, when terrorist attacks occur they force individuals to confront the reality of death through media coverage and general awareness. This serves as a ‘prime’ for mortality salience, which evokes fear in the individuals. This morality salience, or awareness of the possibility of death, then serves to strongly influence individuals to prefer safer options to ones deemed riskier.
Travel is one such risky activity. Individuals are leaving their reasonably comfortable lives and visiting an unfamiliar place for recreational purposes. Lerner and Keltner (2001) found that feelings of …show more content…
While there is little work exploring the impact of major events like terror attacks to prompt base rate neglect in individuals, we believe it plays a major role.
Base rate neglect occurs when individuals ignore a preponderance of data and focus on the most recent information. We propose that this not only occurs with the most recent data; rather, as a result of salience bias, individuals draw on vivid information, like news of a terror attack. As discussed, this is because the information is stored more prominently in the brain and is thus more easily
Mortality salience is a subset of overall salience bias. Salience bias is defined as making decisions based on easily available information (Mullainathan & Thaler, 2000), because of its vivid, visceral nature keeping it prominent in the mind. Mortality salience, then, is individuals’ awareness of the inevitability of their own death, and the use of this knowledge in their decision-making. The possibility of death is ever-present, yet focusing too much on it causes debilitating existential anxiety. As such, individuals’ evolutionary adaptation has been to ignore the possibility of death and go about living.
We propose that, when terrorist attacks occur they force individuals to confront the reality of death through media coverage and general awareness. This serves as a ‘prime’ for mortality salience, which evokes fear in the individuals. This morality salience, or awareness of the possibility of death, then serves to strongly influence individuals to prefer safer options to ones deemed riskier.
Travel is one such risky activity. Individuals are leaving their reasonably comfortable lives and visiting an unfamiliar place for recreational purposes. Lerner and Keltner (2001) found that feelings of …show more content…
While there is little work exploring the impact of major events like terror attacks to prompt base rate neglect in individuals, we believe it plays a major role.
Base rate neglect occurs when individuals ignore a preponderance of data and focus on the most recent information. We propose that this not only occurs with the most recent data; rather, as a result of salience bias, individuals draw on vivid information, like news of a terror attack. As discussed, this is because the information is stored more prominently in the brain and is thus more easily