The fact human brains are hard-wired for superstition gives fracking opponents a leg up at the outset in the natural gas debate, but facts and good storytelling can overcome that initial advantage, with persistence.

I ain’t superstitious, black cat just cross my trail. – Howlin’ Wolf (actually Willie Dixon)

I talked, in my last post, about how anti-gas activists use the power of storytelling and an out-of-date energy narrative to create uncertainty about the safety of natural gas development. Now, I will try to describe why scientists believe that under conditions of uncertainty, humans may be hard-wired to perceive risks that don’t actually exist.

There is growing acceptance among cognitive scientists that when people need to make decisions in an atmosphere of uncertainty, a kind of built-in error management system may be triggered in our brains, and that this process probably became hard-wired during our remote evolutionary past.

http://naturalgasnow.org/the-hard-wired-truth-about-natural-gas-sup...