I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do som

I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do some math but whose subconscious prefers to conserve calories and work with simple, easy to understand absolutes. Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture. Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article: > As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts. are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).