Risk Assessment in Software … and Terrorism Threats
This is the kind of article I love: it integrates software development, economics, cognitive bias, risk assessment, and security planning. Read the whole thing for links.
More imagination leads to more movie-plot threats — which contributes to overall fear and overestimation of the risks. And that doesn't help keep us safe at all.
Recently, I read a paper by Magne Jørgensen that provides some insight into why this is so. Titled More Risk Analysis Can Lead to Increased Over-Optimism and Over-Confidence, the paper isn't about terrorism at all. It's about software projects.
Most software development project plans are overly optimistic, and most planners are overconfident about their overoptimistic plans. Jørgensen studied how risk analysis affected this. He conducted four separate experiments on software engineers, and concluded (though there are lots of caveats in the paper, and more research needs to be done) that performing more risk analysis can make engineers more overoptimistic instead of more realistic.
Potential explanations all come from behavioral economics: cognitive biases that affect how we think and make decisions. (I've written about some of these biases and how they affect security decisions, and there's a great book on the topic as well.)
via How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, or Hurt, Homeland Security.