Well, I'm not surprised by how the public's perception of "important" differs from experts'. Smoking is a good example, in my opinion. Back in the day, there was a strong push to warn the public on the hazards of smoking which was aimed at smokers: not bystanders inhaling second-hand smoke. How is it that no one thought that standing next to a smoker inhaling his/her smoke wasn't a bad thing? Well, it wasn't the point at the time. The focus was (and still is)to get smokers to stop smoking. Athough there were probably a lot of non-smokers who thought that being in the vicinity of smoke was no big deal, I bet if people working for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Health Canada had been surveyed, they would've probably pointed out that second-hand smoke is just as bad smoking a cigarette. Of course, second-hand smoke is clearly a concern now and is addressed as much as smoking.
# posted by 
: 8:33 PM
: 8:33 PM
It's interesting that you raise the issue of secondhand smoking: LeGault includes it, and global warming, in his list of examples of public perceptions led astray by intuition (i.e., the Blink! theory the book argues against). The rest of his list made sense to me, but those two had me scratching my head, wondering how they hadn't been scientifically validated (which was his argument: more work needs to be done).
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