Putting Terror in Its Place: An Experiment on Mitigating Fears of Terrorism among the American Public

• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211036935
• Date: 01 February 2022
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Author: Daniel Silverman,Christopher Gelpi,Daniel Kent
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 66(2) 191 –216

Putting Terror in Its

Place: An Experiment

on Mitigating Fears of

Terrorism among the

American Public

Daniel Silverman

1

, Daniel Kent

2

,

and Christopher Gelpi

2

Abstract

An American’s yearly chance of being killed by a terrorist attack sits at roughly 1 in

3.5 million. Yet, over 40 percent of Americans consistently believe that they or their

family members are likely to be a terror victim. Can these inflated estimates of the

risks of terrorism be brought closer to reality? With trillions of dollars spent on the

“War on Terror,” this question is not just theoretically but practically important.

In order to investigate, we use an experimental approach assessing whether people

update their beliefs about terrorism when given factual information about the

relative risks it presents. We find that public fear of terrorism and demand for

countering it can be sharply reduced with better information, dropping essentially to

pre-9/11 levels after the treatment and staying that way two weeks later. These

results suggest that countering the indirect costs of terrorism may largely require

providing more context and perspective.

Keywords

terrorism, public opinion, foreign policy, counterterrorism

1

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

2

The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Corresponding Author:

Daniel Silverman, Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University, Posner Hall 386, 5000

Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.

Email: dmsilver@andrew.cmu.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211036935

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Article

192 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(2)

Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed

by a terrorist. It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave

—Former U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

1

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, counterterrorism has arguably become

the central goal underpinning American security policy. According to one key

estimate, the United States spent $5.93 trillion from 9/11 through the end of Fiscal

Year 2019 on efforts to thwart terrorism, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,

the conflicts in Syria and Pakistan, and U.S. homeland security (Crawford 2018).

2

In one sense, the centrality of terrorism for American foreign policy over the last

twenty years seems appropriate in light of the public’s ongoing concern about the

issue. As recently as June 2017, for example, Gallup found that 60 percent of

Americans said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that there would be acts of

terrorism in the country “over the next several weeks.” Even more dramatically,

around 45 percent of respondents in the same poll said they were “very” or

“somewhat” worried that they or someone in their family would become a victim

of terrorism.

3

Moreover, this level of public anxiety over terrorism has changed very

little since late 2001.

But the public’s fear of terrorism persists despite the fact that the risk of death

Americans face from terrorism is remarkably low, even when counting the devastat-

ing but highly unusual attacks of 9/11. According to the Global Terrorism Database

(GTD), from September 11th, 2001 through December 31st, 2018, 3,129 Americans

died in terrorist attacks on American soil, with 2,889 of the deaths taking place on 9/

11 and 240 Americans dying over the following seventeen years.

4

That toll equates

to an expenditure of roughly $1.5 billion for each American killed by terrorists from

2001 through 2018. This cost far outstrips American spending on any other cause of

death. Additionally, according to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, more Amer-

icans have died in U.S. military operations touted as combatting terrorism during the

same time frame (6,950) than have actually been killed by terrorists.

5

The observation that both Americans’ fear of terrorism and their responses to it

have been dangerously excessive is not new. John Mueller (2006) is perhaps most

famous for documenting the inflated American response to 9/11. More recently,

Mueller and his co-author Mark Stewart (2015) examine the extensive institutiona-

lization of this over-reaction across many government bureaucracies, leading to the

expenditure of vast public resources abroad and at home. Yet while we know a great

deal about the country’s exagg erated reactions to the terroris t threat, far less is

known about what could alleviate or mitigate them.

In particular, with regard to the American public’s deeply inflated sense of the

terrorist threat, would knowing more about the real risks of terrorism moderate the

public’s response on this issue? On the one hand, scholarship about terrorism and its

psychological consequences is largely skeptical that increased public knowledge

about the risks of terrorist attacks would have an ameliorating effect on public fears,

perceiving the threat as a psychological “perform storm” (Friedman 2011, 89) that

2Journal of Conflict Resolution XX(X)