How We Perceive Risk


Contributor: John Bordali

Created as part of ENGL 1020: Core Composition I (Spring 2024, taught by Dr. John Tinnell at the University of Colorado Denver) as part of a Data Storytelling unit

  Type of Data Advocacy:  Public Safety   Genre:  Data Storytelling Presentation   Format:  .mp4


This student presentation was created as part of a data storytelling unit in a Spring 2024 first-year writing course.





Project Overview:

This presentation explores the question of how we assess (and often mis-assess) the safety risks associated with various natural environments and social activities. It advances data-backed explanations of common factors that tend to shape the intuitive risk assessments people make everyday, including elements that often mislead our assessments such as, for instance, dramatic media coverage that warps our sense of how likely certain events are to occur.

Type of Data Advocacy: Public Safety
Genre: Data Storytelling Presentation
Format: .mp4

A still from the video presentation. It shows the student—John, a masculine individual with dark black hair and facial hair, wearing a red shirt and over-the-ear headphones—presenting a graphic that shows the difference between public concern or perceived risk and actual hazard or real risk. ‘Terrorist attack’ and ‘plane crash’ have more public concern than actual hazard, and ‘heat,’ ‘traffic accident,’ and ‘cancer’ have more actual hazard than public concern. At the bottom of the graphic, there is a note that reads: ‘Adapted from Susanna Hertrich data visualization (www.susannahertrich.com’)

Caption: A still from the video presentation. It shows the student—John, a masculine individual with dark black hair and facial hair, wearing a red shirt and over-the-ear headphones—presenting a graphic that shows the difference between public concern or perceived risk and actual hazard or real risk. ‘Terrorist attack’ and ‘plane crash’ have more public concern than actual hazard, and ‘heat,’ ‘traffic accident,’ and ‘cancer’ have more actual hazard than public concern. At the bottom of the graphic, there is a note that reads: ‘Adapted from Susanna Hertrich data visualization (www.susannahertrich.com’)