Let's put some science into the terror alert debate

Is the U.S. government playing politics with recent terror warnings?  I don’t really care.  What I care about a lot more is: are those warnings effective?  Fortunately, while people arguing the first question are probably not really interested in finding an answer, the second question should yield fairly well to dispassionate analysis.

Hype and political considerations aside, the two most frequently heard arguments in the debate over the value of periodic but vague terror alerts by the U.S. government are:

Con:  The alerts make people apprehensive and afraid.  This hurts our society (the “terrorists have already won” argument) and diminishes the impact of future alerts (the “boy who cried wolf” argument).

Pro: Even though the alerts may make people nervous, they also remind people to be vigilant.  Since information is the most important weapon in the fight against terrorism, an attentive citizenry is worth some disruption to daily life (the “price of freedom is eternal vigilance” argument).

Both points are plausible, but are they true?  I’m not sure, but there’s probably some useful behavioral data out there that could be used to evaluate the competing claims. 

For example, is the “boy who cried wolf” phenomena measurable in the real world?  Surprisingly, not everything named after a fairy tale is completely reliable.  In other words, are people who are repeatedly subjected to false alarms actually less likely to effectively react to a real emergency situation?  After all, most military and emergency workers are constantly drilling with “false” alarms and no one seems to feel that this compromises their readiness.  Of course these teams are repetitively practicing specific skills, not just being repetitively told to be anxious.  Maybe that’s the difference.

Similarly, is the “vigilance” claim accurate?  Are people who are repeatedly told to be on guard actually better able to identify and respond to emergency threats than people who are more relaxed?  Many skydiving or SCUBA instructors go to great lengths to teach their students how to be physically relaxed in dangerous situations; the justification being that an attentive but at-ease mind is more effective at coping with unexpected circumstances.  Does this logic apply to national terror alerts?

These are fairly narrow questions which are well suited to scientific investigation.  Much of this investigation has almost certainly already been carried out in the past half a century.  I’d like to see the media focus on reviewing relevant data from commercial, government and academic sources before bringing on the next set of political experts to fling unverifiable mud at each other.  Ain’t my naïve idealism cute?