Essays On Psychology

You might feel terribly afraid of terrorism, or you might feel like it's not something worth worrying about.

You might feel terribly afraid of terrorism, or you might feel like it's not something worth worrying about.

But both fields go a long way to explain the divergence between the feeling and the reality of security and, more importantly, where that divergence comes from.

There is also direct research into the psychology of risk.

We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member.

Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft.

We make security trade-offs, large and small, every day.

We make them when we decide to lock our doors in the morning, when we choose our driving route, and when we decide whether we're going to pay for something via check, credit card, or cash. These intuitive choices are central to life on this planet.

Understanding how our brains work, and how they fail, is critical to understanding the feeling of security.

These fields have a lot to teach practitioners of security, whether they're designers of computer security products or implementers of national security policy. " Somewhere amidst all of this, there are threads that tie it together, lessons we can learn (other than "people are weird"), and ways we can design security systems that take the feeling of security into account rather than ignoring it. This is something I have written about extensively, and is a notion critical to understanding the psychology of security.

This essay is my initial attempt to explore the feeling of security: where it comes from, how it works, and why it diverges from the reality of security.

Four fields of research--two very closely related--can help illuminate this issue.