In GCRI’s first public lecture (26 November 2012), Katherine Thompson spoke on the psychology of uncertainty in a talk titled “What We Think About When We Think About Probability: How Our Experience Affects the Way We Perceive the Risk of Rare Events”. Katherine is a PhD student in Psychology at Columbia University and researcher with Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, a group I’m also affiliated with. She’s been working on, among other things, the psychology of disaster preparedness [1].

Global catastrophic risk is fundamentally …