PLUME The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

Written simply and clearly. An abstract subject that has been presented in a very easily and simple way, I love books and authors who simplify the subjects in that way this is a good book

But it looks great on my bookshelf

Great book. I've been reading on the field of "propaganda" the past two years, as a hobby. I am interested in how social media is used to spread propaganda messaging. People often "share" commercially produced propaganda items without first "thinking", and they share items that are misquotes, cherry picked, exaggerated, time adjusted, or just not true - in the hopes of influencing their "friends". Much of it is very cleverly designed to create an emotional response within seconds - the message typically sounds "plausible" (as long you ignore the details) - and has a big "Share if you agree!" statement at top or bottom.Unfortunately, most of us are not comfortable pointing out to our friends that what they just shared is not true. As a result, social media has become a friction-less conduit for the spread of propaganda.Propaganda messaging relies on several basic concepts and approaches to effectively persuade others. "Fear" is one of the most powerful methods and it is used frequently to "Scare" us into action or agreement. Daniel Gardner explains how this "culture of fear" is created, maintained and used to manipulate us in to actions or at least to agree with those promoting a cause or goal. He shows numerous real world examples of how activists, business leaders and politicians have used fear to push things that range from not actually true, to great exaggeration of reality. This is successful because (1) people often rely on Kahneman's System 1 "intuitive" thinking versus the rational/data-backed detail thinking of System 2 (also see Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow) and they intuitively arrive at the wrong conclusions, and (2) most people misjudge or evaluate risk incorrectly. The result is that very unlikely scenarios are made to appear quite likely and end up scaring us into action.I've learned from my readings that our media is filled with useless fluff "stories" (not news) and numerous scare mongering "stories" about fictitious projections into the future made by people wishing to influence and manipulate us. This is concept is reiterated by Gardner in Culture of Fear.I highly recommend this book to everyone. Recognizing how everyone has been working overtime to use "fear" to scare us, I've actually seen my own anxiety levels decrease. So much of our media - and "friends" on social media - continue to try to scare us into adopting their own agendas for their own interests. But it is little more than scare mongering. Once you cut through that idea, its easy to begin ignoring it, reduce our anxiety levels and sleep much better at night.If your kids suffer from anxiety consider it might be because the whole world is literally trying to scare them to death, even though we really do live in the best of times, historically. Think about it.

Excellent book, well written, good reasoning, clear logic that allows you to follow his arguments which are well supported by quoted research.

A great book that gives insight into the human nature and how it is exploited in the media and other situations.Highly recommended!