How does the way we get information from our peers affect how we react to threats?
October 23, 2014
Jake J. Smith

Over the past several weeks, a sense of panic has been building around the outbreak of the Ebola virus. The disease has dominated headlines, conversations and social media feeds—and not necessarily to our benefit. How does the way we get information about threats like this affect how we respond to them? To find out, Chicago Harris Assistant Professor Daniel Bennett and his co-authors looked at the 2003 SARS outbreak in Taiwan. The paper, co-authored by Bennett, Chun-Fang Chiang of National Taiwan University and Anup Malani of the University of Chicago Law School, is forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics. What they discovered might make you question what—and how—you’re really learning about the threat of Ebola.

Listen to our conversation with Daniel Bennett on the debut episode of Radio Harris: