Why We Worry About the Wrong Things

Why, indeed, do we worry most about the things we shouldn't? This TIME article might help enlighten us:

• Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on
  a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most
  creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten
  by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over.
  That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering
  something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least
  quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that
  poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in
  a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic. "That's the dread
  factor." In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get,
  and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds
  of the thing actually happening.
• Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next
  E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous
  one, and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects,
  this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was
  excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to
  any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.
• We similarly misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it,
  even if it's an illusory sense. The decision to drive instead of fly is
  the most commonly cited example, probably because it's such a good one.
  Behind the wheel, we're in charge; in the passenger seat of a crowded
  airline, we might as well be cargo. So white-knuckle flyers routinely
  choose the car, heedless of the fact that at most a few hundred people
  die in U.S. commercial airline crashes in a year, compared with 44,000
  killed in motor-vehicle wrecks. The most white-knuckle time of all was
  post--Sept. 11, when even confident flyers took to the roads. Not
  surprisingly, from October through December 2001 there were 1,000 more
  highway fatalities than in the same period the year before, in part
  because there were simply more cars around. "It was called the '9/11
  effect.' It produced a third again as many fatalities as the terrorist
  attacks," says David Ropeik, an independent risk consultant and a
  former annual instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
• Then too there's what Ropeik and others call "optimism bias," the thing
  that makes us glower when we see someone driving erratically while
  talking on a cell phone, even if we've done the very same thing,
  perhaps on the very same day. We tell ourselves we're different,
  because our call was shorter or our business was urgent or we were able
  to pay attention to the road even as we talked. What optimism bias
  comes down to, however, is the convenient belief that risks that apply
  to other people don't apply to us.
• Finally, and for many of us irresistibly, there's the irrational way we
  react to risky behavior that also confers some benefit. It would be a
  lot easier to acknowledge the perils of smoking cigarettes or eating
  too much ice cream if they weren't such pleasures. Drinking too much
  confers certain benefits too, as do risky sex, recreational drugs and
  uncounted other indulgences. This is especially true since, in most
  cases, the gratification is immediate and the penalty, if it comes at
  all, comes later. With enough time and enough temptation, we can talk
  ourselves into ignoring almost any long-term costs. "These things are
  fun or hip, even if they can be lethal," says Ropeik. "And that
  pleasure is a benefit we weigh."