# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Orlando shooting: terrorism and gun control debate in USA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Chapman University Survey of American Fears Wave 5 (2018) provides an in-depth examination into the fears of average Americans. In June of 2018, a random sample of 1,190 adults from across the United States were asked their level of fear about ninety-four different phenomena including crime, the government, the environment, disasters, personal anxieties, technology and many others.

Top 10 Fears of 2018

Below is a list of the 10 fears for which the highest percentage of Americans reported being "Afraid," or "Very Afraid."

Top Ten Fears of 2018% Afraid or Very Afraid

1. Corrupt government officials

73.6

2. Pollution of oceans, rivers and lakes

61.6

3. Pollution of drinking water

60.7

4. Not having enough money for the future

57

5. People I love becoming seriously ill

56.5

6. People I love dying

56.4

7. Air pollution

55.1

8. Extinction of plant and animal species

54.1

9. Global warming and climate change

53.2

10. High medical bills

52.9

Government Corruption Tops the List Again

For the fourth year in a row the top fear of Americans is corrupt government officials. And as in the previous four years, the fear that our government is corrupt far exceeds all others we asked about. Nearly 3/4 of Americans said they are afraid or very afraid of corrupt governmental officials in 2018. By comparison, the next highest level of fear was more than 10 points lower at 61.6% (pollution of oceans, rivers and lakes).

Government corruption aside, our top ten list suggest that Americans are preoccupied by fears of three different types. Americans fear for the environment (#s 2, 3, 7, 8, 9), fear bad things happening to loved ones (#s 5 & 6) and worry about their finances (#s 4 and 10). High levels of fear of loved one's becoming ill (#5) and high medical bills (#10) also indicate that health care remains a primary concern of Americans.

Fear in the age of Trump

We now have two years of data collected about American fears since Trump's election. The table below presents the top ten lists for 2016, 2017 and 2018. Since 2016, there are two striking changes in American fears.

Top Ten Fears (2016-2018)

2016 2017 2018

Increasing Fear About the Environment

A striking difference between 2016 and 2017-2018 has to do with the environment. Since Trump's election, Americans' are increasing fearful of pollution, global warming and other environmental disasters. Not a single environmental concern made the top 10 list in 2016. In 2017, four of the top ten fears were related to the environment (#s 3, 4, 8 and 10). By 2018, five of the top ten fears were environmental in nature (#s 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9).

Fear on the Rise

The extent to which Americans are afraid, in general, also appears to be on the rise.

In 2016, the highest level of fear reported by our respondents was for corrupt government officials at 60.6%. From there fear dropped precipitously, with #2 on the list in 2016 (terrorist attack) down to forty-one percent and the rest of the 2016 top ten list all under forty percent.

By 2017, the top fear (corrupt government officials) was up to 74.5% and five of the top ten fears were expressed by more than half of the population.

By 2018 all the top ten fears were held by more than half of Americans. Put another way, by year, the top ten fears have ranged from:

2016: 35.5% to 60.6%

2017: 9% to 74.5%

2018: 9% to 73.6%

Americans are becoming more afraid.

The Complete List of Fears, 2018

The following is a complete, list of all fears addressed by the Chapman University Survey of American Fears Wave 5 (2018), ranked by the percent of Americans who reported being afraid or very afraid.
Sorted by Percent Afraid/Very Afraid

Complete List of Fears (2018)% Afraid or Very Afraid

1. Corrupt government officials

73.6

2. Pollution of oceans, rivers and lakes

61.6

3. Pollution of drinking water

60.7

4. Not having enough money for the future

57

5. People I love becoming seriously ill

56.5

6. People I love dying

56.4

7. Air pollution

55.1

8. Extinction of plant and animal species

54.1

9. Global warming and climate change

53.2

10. High medical bills

52.9

11. Cyber-Terrorism

52.5

12. The U.S. will be involved in another world war

51.6

13. Islamic extremists

49.3

14. White supremacists

49.3

15. Economic/financial collapse

49.2

16. Identity theft

46.6

17. Corporate tracking of \personal data

46.3

18. Government tracking of personal data

46

19. Being hit by a drunk driver

45.3

20. Biological warfare

44.7

21. Becoming seriously ill

44.1

22. Oil spills

44

23. Terrorist attack

43.8

24. Widespread civil unrest

43

25. Nuclear weapons attack

42.9

26. Credit card fraud

42.6

27. Extreme anti-immigration groups

41.6

28. Random mass shooting

41.5

29. Terrorism

39.8

30. North Korea using nuclear weapons

39.2

31. The collapse of the electrical grid

39

32. Pandemic or a major epidemic

38.6

33. Government restrictions on firearms and ammunition

37.8

34. Devastating drought

37.7

35. Iran using nuclear weapons

36.4

36. Losing my data, photos or other important documents in a disaster

36.3

37. Nuclear accident/meltdown

36

38. Break-ins

35.1

39. Devastating tornado

34.7

40. Being unemployed

34.4

41. Heights

33.6

42. Theft of property

33.3

43. Devastating hurricane

32.8

44. Government use of drones within the U.S.

32.3

45. Militia/patriot movement

31.3

46. Devastating flood

31.1

47. Devastating earthquake

30.9

48. Computers replacing people in the workforce

30.7

49. Devastating wildfire

30.7

50. Murder by a stranger

29.7

51. Sharks

29.2

52. Mugging

28.6

53. Racial/hate crime

28.6

54. Dying

27.9

55. Financial fraud (such as a Ponzi scheme, embezzlement, etc.)

27.2

56. Sexual assault by a stranger

27.1

57. Devastating blizzard/ winter storm

27

58. Police brutality

26.6

59. Public speaking

26.2

60. Deep lakes and oceans

25.7

61. Abduction/kidnapping

25.1

62. Reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.)

24.1

63. Stalking

23.7

64. Hell

23.7

65. Walking alone at night

23.5

66. The Devil/Satan

23.1

67. Insects/arachnids (spiders, bees, etc.)

22.6

68. Illegal immigration

21.5

69. Murder by someone you know

21

70. Demons

20.8

71. Antifa

20.7

72. Small enclosed spaces

19.8

73. Sexual assault by someone you know

19.2

74. Large volcanic eruption

18.6

75. Technology I don't understand

17.8

76. Being fooled by 'fake' news

17.5

77. Extreme environmentalists

16.4

78. Apocalypse/Armageddon

16.4

79. God

14.2

80. Germs

13.2

81. Needles

12.9

82. Flying

12.7

83. Significant other cheating on you

12.1

84. Extreme Animal Rightists

11.3

85. Sharing a restroom with a transgender person

9.5

86. Whites no longer being the majority in the U.S.

9.4

87. Zombies

8.4

88. Ghosts

8.3

89. Sexual harassment in the workplace

7.5

90. Clowns

7.1

91. Strangers

7

92. Others talking about you behind your back

6.7

93. Blood

6.3

94. Animals (dogs, rats, etc.)

3.7

Sorted Alphabetically

Complete List of Fears (2018)% Afraid or Very Afraid

Abduction/kidnapping

25.1

Air Pollution

55.1

Animals (dogs, rats, etc.)

3.7

Antifa

20.7

Apocalypse/Armageddon

16.4

Becoming Seriously ill

44.1

Being fooled by 'fake' news

17.5

Being hit by a drunk driver

45.3

Being unemployed

34.4

Biological warfare

44.7

Blood

6.3

Break-ins

35.1

Clowns

7.1

Computers replacing people in the workforce

30.7

Corporate Tracking of \Personal Data

46.3

Corrupt government officials

73.6

Credit card fraud

42.6

Cyber-Terrorism

52.5

Deep lakes and oceans

25.7

Demons

20.8

Devastating blizzard/ winter storm

27

Devastating drought

37.7

Devastating Earthquake

30.9

Devastating Flood

31.1

Devastating Hurricane

32.8

Devastating tornado

34.7

Devastating Wildfire

30.7

Dying

27.9

Economic/financial collapse

49.2

Extinction of plant and animal species

54.1

Extreme Animal Rightists

11.3

Extreme Anti-Immigration Groups

41.6

Extreme Environmentalists

16.4

Financial fraud (such as a Ponzi scheme, embezzlement, etc.)

27.2

Flying

12.7

Germs

13.2

Ghosts

8.3

Global Warming and Climate Change

53.2

God

14.2

Government restrictions on firearms and ammunition

37.8

Government Tracking of Personal Data

46

Government Use of Drones Within the US

32.3

Heights

33.6

Hell

23.7

High Medical Bills

52.9

Identity theft

46.6

Illegal immigration

21.5

Insects/Arachnids (spiders, bees, etc.)

22.6

Iran using nuclear weapons

36.4

Islamic Extremists

49.3

Large volcanic eruption

18.6

Losing my data, photos or other important documents in a disaster

36.3

Militia/Patriot Movement

31.3

Mugging

28.6

Murder by a stranger

29.7

Murder by someone you know

21

Needles

12.9

North Korea using nuclear weapons

39.2

Not having enough money for the future

57

Nuclear accident/meltdown

36

Nuclear weapons attack

42.9

Oil Spills

44

Others talking about you behind your back

6.7

Pandemic or a major epidemic

38.6

People I love becoming seriously ill

56.5

People I love dying

56.4

Police brutality

26.6

Pollution of drinking water

60.7

Pollution of oceans, rivers and lakes

61.6

Public speaking

26.2

Racial/Hate crime

28.6

Random Mass shooting

41.5

Reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.)

24.1

Sexual assault by a stranger

27.1

Sexual assault by someone you know

19.2

Sexual Harassment in the workplace

7.5

Sharing a restroom with a transgender person

9.5

Sharks

29.2

Significant other cheating on you

12.1

Small enclosed spaces

19.8

Stalking

23.7

Strangers

7

Technology I don't understand

17.8

Terrorism

39.8

Terrorist attack

43.8

The collapse of the electrical grid

39

The Devil/Satan

23.1

The U.S. will be involved in another world war

51.6

Theft of property

33.3

Walking alone at night

23.5

White Supremacists

49.3

Whites no longer being the majority in the U.S.

9.4

Widespread civil unrest

43

Zombies

8.4

For more information and articles, visit www.chapman.edu/fearsurvey.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America's Top Fears 2018 - Chapman University Survey of American Fears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Chapman University Survey of American Fears Wave 5 (2018) provides an in-depth examination into the fears of average Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
According to the New America Foundation , jihadists killed 94 people inside the United States between 2005 and 2015. During that same time period, 301,797 people in the US were shot dead, Politifact reports.

At first blush, these numbers might seem to indicate that Donald Trump's temporary ban on immigrants from seven countries-a goal he said was intended to "protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States"-is utterly misguided.

But Trump is right about at least one thing: Americans are more afraid of terrorism than they are of guns, despite the fact that guns are 3,210 times more likely to kill them.

Chapman University has conducted a Survey of American Fears for more than three years. It asks 1,500 adults what they fear most. It organizes the fears into categories that include personal fears, conspiracy theories, terrorism, natural disasters, paranormal fears, and more recently, fear of Muslims.

In 2016, Americans' number-one fear was "corruption of government officials"-the same top fear as in 2015. Terrorist attacks came second. In fact, of the top five fears, two are terror-related. And number five is not fear of guns but fear of government restrictions on guns. Fear of a loved one dying-whether by gun violence or anything else-came next.

One reason people's fears don't line up with actual risks is that our brains are wired by evolution to make fast judgements which are not always backed up by logical reasoning. "Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible-but may not be anymore," Maia Szalavitz, a child psychiatrist, wrote in 2008 in Psychology Today.

Also, fear strengthens memory, she wrote, so that one-off catastrophes like plane crashes or terrorist attacks embed in our memories, while we blank the horrible accidents we see daily on the highway. "As a result, we overestimate the odds of dreadful but infrequent events and underestimate how risky ordinary events are," Szalavitz explained.

Risk perception (pdf) used to be based on an analytical equation: you multiply the probability of an event by the potential damage of its outcome. But Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, understood the powerful role of emotions in decision-making and altered that equation, noting that many things affect how we perceive risk:

do you trust the person you are dealing with

control vs. lack of control (lack of control inflates risk perceptions)

is it catastrophic or chronic (catastrophic inflates risk perceptions)

does it incite dread or anger (dread inflates risk perceptions)

uncertainty (lack of knowledge about something inflates risk perceptions)

"Most people do not distinguish well between a one-in-a-thousand risk and a one-in-a-million risk," said Mark Egan, an associate advisor at the Behavioral Insights Group in London.

Baruch Fischhoff, a decision scientist at Carnegie Mellon, said that the unpredictability of terrorism can make it scarier than something like a car crash. "Terrorism is not like motor vehicle accidents, where past performance predicts future performance," he said. "Terrorism could change and it's not irrational for people to react differently to an uncertain risk."

That's exactly what Americans did after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. People began flying less and driving more. The result, estimated Gerd Gigerenzer, a German risk specialist, was that 1,595 more Americans died in road accidents during the 12 months after 9/11 than would have otherwise.

Michael Rothschild, then an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, calculated some of the risks we face:

One in 6 million: Risk of dying in a plane hijacking, assuming you fly four times a month and hijackers destroy one plane every year. (Just to be clear, since 9/11, hijackers have not destroyed any flights in the US.)

One in 7,000: the risk of dying in a car accident in any given year

One in 600: the risk of dying from cancer in any given year

According to data compiled from the Centers for Disease Control, over 2005-2014, an average of 11,737 Americans a year were shot dead by another American (21 of them by toddlers), 737 were killed by falling out of bed, and nine were killed by Islamic jihadists-who in most cases were US citizens, not immigrants (Nearly twice as many Americans kill themselves with guns as kill each other).

Rothschild blamed politicians for overstating the terrorist risk. Media saturation is also to blame. Having ready access to images of every atrocity known to mankind makes us prone to what behavioral scientists call "availability bias," the tendency to give weight to what comes to mind most easily. The blanket coverage of the Sept. 11th attacks successfully seared the images of terrorism on our brains; shootings, which happen every day and-with the exception of a few mass shootings-are largely ignored, have less of an effect.

"We over-react to visible threats," said Max Bazerman, co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an expert on decision-making. "When there is someone out to get you, it is more visible than when you are silently dying in a hospital."

After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Roxane Cohen Silver and two co-authors looked at what caused more acute stress: being at or near the bombing itself, or being exposed to it in the media. They found "[r]epeated bombing-related media exposure was associated with higher acute stress than was direct exposure."

President Trump may believe he is responding to people's outsized fears of terrorism. Unfortunately, his hastily arranged executive order won't work-not least because, as the Wall Street Journal found (paywall), "of 180 people charged with jihadist terrorism-related crimes or who died before being charged" only 11 came from the seven countries banned in Trump's order. He didn't ban people from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, or Egypt-the home countries of the 19 perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story said that 737 people died annually from being shot by someone else. It is 11,737.

Most Popular

Read full story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The psychology of why 94 deaths from terrorism are scarier than 301,797 deaths from guns

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to the New America Foundation, jihadists killed 94 people inside the United States between 2005 and 2015. During that same time period, 301,797 people in the US were shot dead, Politifact reports. At first blush, these numbers might seem to indicate that Donald Trump's temporary ban on immigrants from seven countries-a goal he said...

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.mediano.nu/

https://www.thomasskov.dk/blog/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.hillerod-lilleskole.skoleintra.dk/Faelles/Beskeder/DKAA-20181012-36101/Studievalgsportfolio-3%20(1).pdf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Har du prøvet at løbe en tur, hvor du har haft svært ved at trække vejret? Det er din kondition, der ikke er helt god nok til, at din krop kan udføre det arbejde, den skal.

# data[].attributes.body
Den var som den skulle være