Review: The Science Of Terrorism, By Daniel Gardner

Your Gut Fears Terrorism How does a person know if they fear terrorism because their head tells them to or if it is their gut that tells them to fear it? In his book, The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner describes this very topic. Gardner explains that our human brains are working both nonconscious and conscious in order to assist us in making decisions (26). According to Gardner these nonconscious decisions are based on our intuition or gut feelings, while conscious decisions are based on logical thinking, those thoughts that can be explained by statistics or probabilities. Terrorism is something seeped in emotion, the very word itself derives from the word terror, which means “a state of intense fear” (“Terror”). Therefore, it is apparent that a person’s fear of terrorism is a person’s gut intuition saying be afraid, be very afraid.

While some may believe that the fear of terrorism is merely common sense because terrorist attacks occur all the time, right? The likelihood of a person to be able to logically support the idea that this fear is

There are those that can’t understand how so many people in this country can fear something that they are most likely not going to be become a victim of. For instance, David Perkins, a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University, believes that most people fear terrorism because they “…have not objectively considered all the facts and are responding to a perceived threat emotionally rather than logically” (par. 6). And in fact, Gardner also supports this idea when he states that “in the last century, fewer than twenty terrorists attacks killed more than a hundred people. Even the September 11 attacks…killed less than one fifth the number of Americans murdered every year by ordinary criminals” (13). So, those individuals that don’t fear terrorism at all, do so with valid reasoning and facts to support their