Dr. Frank McAndrew

deep down, you know you're safe, right?

You know that this is all make-believe.

But it's realistic enough that you have a chance to mentally rehearse living through something like this.

And so you're learning from the experiences of the people in the movie or whatever it is

the ghost story you're reading.

Here are some things that worked.

I might keep that in mind.

Here are some things you don't want to do.

I'm going to keep that in mind.

And we do the same thing with like Jaws.

When you're exposing yourself voluntarily to scary things, you're learning something about yourself, right?

You're learning, here's what I can handle.

Here's what I can't handle.

People who spend a lot of time watching the news about murders and violent crime and sort of that thing dramatically overestimate the likelihood of that occurring.

Right.

When you ask people to estimate how likely something is to happen,

their estimate is very much based on how quickly they can think of an example.

So if you ask somebody, okay, how likely is it you're going to get attacked by a shark if you go swimming in the ocean?

Or how likely is it that you will die in a plane crash?

They dramatically overestimate the probabilities because they can very easily think of an example, right?