Border Bias and Our Perception of Risk
Excerpts (via Wray Herbert @ SciAm)
This curiosity arises because of cognitive mapmaking, which is different from regular mapmaking. Cartographers measure and plot distances over land and water, but when we make a mental map, we rely on categories to help us keep things straight. States are one of these categories. For example, we think of Spokane and Olympia as close because they are both in the state of Washington, even though Olympia is actually much closer to Portland, Ore. The mapmaker in our neurons favors the category over actual proximity.Their choices revealed a clear border bias. Even though they knew that both homes were exactly 200 miles from the disaster, home shoppers perceived in-state home locations to be significantly riskier than out-of-state locations. In other words, they disregarded actual distance and made their risk assessment based on political borders that have nothing to do with seismology.
So far this sounds a lot like the earthquake experiment, but the scientists added a twist by giving the volunteers different maps. Some saw a map in which the Utah-Nevada border was drawn as a thick, dark line, whereas others got a map showing the border as a light, dotted line. The idea was that the dark line would reinforce the biased notion that borders are impermeable—and that states are therefore meaningful categories to rely on for decision making.
And that is just what happened. As reported in October in the online version of the journal Psychological Science, when the radioactive waste was being stored in neighboring Nevada, residents of Salt Lake City perceived much greater risk of contamination if the border was a light, dotted line. In their minds, that light, sketchy border minimized the distinction between Utah and Nevada—and thus increased their perception of risk. The thick, dark border offered psychological protection from radioactivity.
