Comments on: Crime & Perception

By: Watching Too Much Crime TV Skews Views for the Worse « N e u r o n a r r a t i v e

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:24:59 +0000

[...] in light of recent Gallup stats on public perception of crime as discussed on the blog Neuroworld, here. Crime decreased all through the 1990s, and for the last decade crime rates have remained steady. [...]

By: Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Law & Order: Availablity Bias Unit - True/Slant

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:51:25 +0000

[...] our discussion about crime the other day (how people always think it’s getting worse, even though it’s gotten better)? Well, [...]

By: neuroskeptic

neuroskeptic — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:01:43 +0000

Bit late to the party but – I’d be very surprised if the same were not true of the UK.

The trends in crime have been similar to those in the US (AFAIK the trends are similar in most developed countries) but the perception of crime is that it’s getting worse.

The current opposition party (Conservatives) has adopted the slogan “Broken Britain” and basically claim that the current government has made crime etc much worse. The statistics say otherwise, but no-one trusts them.

By: Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Rising Crime? - True/Slant

Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Rising Crime? - True/Slant — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:54:56 +0000

[...] Why does that sound familiar? [...]

By: Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Comment of the Day - True/Slant

Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Comment of the Day - True/Slant — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:49:07 +0000

[...] On: Crime & Perception [...]

By: Bloodstar » Crime and Perception

Bloodstar » Crime and Perception — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:05:16 +0000

[...] Sager has a fascinating post about perception versus reality on [...]

By: jamesf

jamesf — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:53:56 +0000

Here’s an abstract of research published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Communication that supports my prior post.

Television News and the Cultivation of Fear of Crime
Daniel Romer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Sean Aday

“The results indicate that across a wide spectrum of the population and independent of local crime rates, viewing local television news is related to increased fear of and concern about crime. These results support cultivation theory’s predicted effects of television on the public.”

Wiley InterScience :: JOURNALS :: Journal of Communication

By: The Bleeding And Leading Leads To Perceiving Things Not In Line With Reality « Around The Sphere

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:26:06 +0000

[...] Ryan Sager: With the exception of 2001 and 2002 (9/11 effect?), between 52% and 89% of Americans every year since 1990 have thought that crime is on the rise. That’s a pretty remarkable statistic, given that crime declined steadily nationally throughout the 1990s and has remained essentially level in the 2000s. Whatever the year-to-year correspondence is, we know that people have gotten the big picture wildly wrong, year after year. [...]

By: jamesf

jamesf — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:10:34 +0000

I disagree with your interpretation of the graph. You say “What’s funny, though, is that even as people say things are getting worse every year, they still rate the seriousness of crime every year about the same” but actually the middle graph is saying that a relatively consistent *group of people* think that “the problem of crime is extremely serious/very serious.” That’s not the same thing at all. A relatively consistent *group of people* also get the majority of their information about the world from local venues.

It would be interesting to cross-tab this data with patterns of consumption of news. Local versus network versus newspaper versus none.

By: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Pathological functions

Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Pathological functions — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:19:53 +0000

[...] Ryan Sager (via Sully) highlights a fact that has long fascinated me: [...]