Conservation of Threat
Here’s some interesting research about how we perceive threats. Basically, as the environment becomes safer we basically manufacture new threats. From an essay about the research:
To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task —to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem “threatening.” The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless.
As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of “threatening” to include a wider range of faces. In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered “threats” depended on how many threats they had seen lately.
This has a lot of implications in security systems where humans have to make judgments about threat and risk: TSA agents, police noticing “suspicious” activities, “see something say something” campaigns, and so on.
The academic paper.
Bob Dylan's Itchy Feet • June 29, 2018 10:02 AM
“Basically, as the environment becomes safer we basically manufacture new threats.”
This is no way surprising, because we make stuff up all the time. The most vivid example of this what happens when you stick a person in a sensory deprivation chamber: they will begin hallucination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation
Our minds evolved (at least in part) in response to external stimuli and when there is no stimuli the mind invents it as a way of keeping sane.