In recent weeks I have described how people think about risk. They use approaches very different from those implied by the models of quantitative finance and decision theory. They are influenced by what is salient, rather than what is probable. Events that are phenomenally unlikely – the winning of a large prize in the lottery or a child’s abduction by a paedophile – influence their thinking to a disproportionate degree because they grab attention. Few people think of uncertainty in terms of statistical distributions and are able to attach probabilities that add up to one to a well defined set of disparate outcomes. They tell stories about the future instead.
近几周来我描述了人们对风险的看法。他们所使用的方法，与数量金融学和决策理论模型中所隐含的方法截然不同。影响人们对风险看法的是突出的因素，而非可能性高的因素。一些明显不太可能发生的事件，比如抽中大奖或孩子被恋童癖者绑架，对人们思维的影响之大，与这些事件发生的可能性不成比例，其原因就在于这些事件吸引人的注意力。很少有人从统计分布的角度思考不确定性，也很少有人能给一系列不同结果一一赋予概率，并且使概率之和为1。相反，大多数人对未来的事情是凭空想象。