This is how most of our conversations about risks go. (They end warmly. She's a fabulous person.) It doesn't matter which risk we're talking about. To my friend, the facts just don't matter. She knows what feels right, and her mind is made up. End of story.
      Here's another example, from a recent news story about resistance to the use of fluoride in drinking water in a Massachusetts community. A doctor who opposes fluoridated drinking water said "I don't base my resistance to fluoride on science. I base it on common sense. Even if it has no ill effects - which it does - I would not force anybody to take a chemical through the water supply for the rest of their life.''
      I absolutely applaud the doctor, and my friend, for their honesty. They don't try to argue their fears in factual terms. They just honestly say, straight out, that the facts on transgenic fish or water fluoridation feel scary to them, and they're not a bit ashamed to say they're letting their gut be their guide. What refreshing candor. Compare that to how many anti-flouride folks, or anti-transgenic fish folks, or the people who are afraid of any risk where the science seems to say the risk isn't all that big (vaccines and autism, cell phones and radiation, the "epidemic" of child abduction) usually argue their case. With the facts. Only the arguments get heated really fast, because they're really not intellectual arguments about the facts at all. They are visceral arguments about how those facts feel. Bravo to the doctor and my friend for admitting honestly, proudly, that their feelings are valid reason enough to be worried. They confidently avoid the hypocrisy of pretending that their positions are purely rational and fact-based.

     But here's the rub. If a lot of us go with our gut, and fear similar things for similar affective/psychological reasons, we end up pressing our government to protect us from what feels dangerous, even if most of the science says it isn't. (Risks like fluoride that are imposed - as the doctor put it "I would not force anybody..." - are scarier to most of us than risks we take voluntarily. Human-made risks like transgenic food and industrially produced chemicals are scarier to most of us than risks that are natural, like naturally hybridized species.) As a result of making risk policy this way, millions of Americans don't have fluoridated water, which an overwhelming scientific consensus (much greater than the scientific consensus on climate change) says is not only safe but one of the top ten advances in public health in the last 50 years. And we might not end up with that more sustainable transgenic salmon. And people are getting measles again because parents of autistic kids grasping for an explanation latched on to a bogus claim about vaccines. And we throw money at relatively smaller risks, like mercury, that probably could save more lives if it were spent to protect us from bigger ones like fine particle air pollution. Except, some of those bigger risks just don't have the psychological characteristics that ring as many alarm bells.
     We need to be honest, like my friend and the doctor. Feelings are real, and understandable, but sometimes we get risk wrong (as a student of the psychology of risk perception I know I sure do) and that can raise risks all by itself. We need to fear those risks too, the risks from being too afraid or not afraid enough. And we should use our understanding of the psychology that explains this potentially dangerous Perception Gap to try and make up our minds about risk a little more carefully, so we make healthier choices for ourselves and society.