There are a lot of viral videos right now of people performing security enhancements to hotel rooms,

taping band-aids over peep holes, wedging ironing boards under door handles,

installing extra locks they've brought from home, and using phone apps to sweep the room for hidden cameras or microphones.

And while the tips promise to make you safer, the net effect of doing all this elaborate

booby-trapping might be that you can never fully relax anymore when you stay in a hotel.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Watching these videos can lead us to greatly overestimate the risk we face on any given night away from home,

just like most of us overestimate the risk of all other forms of crime,

while at the same time we

fail to take precautions against far more likely killers like heart disease

humans in general are pretty bad at risk assessment and there's reason to think

today's young adults are living with a lot more misplaced fears than their elders

Ali Volpe is a senior reporter at Vox, where you can read her article, plane crashes,

pandemics, toxic spatulas.

How do we live with so much risk?

Allie, welcome back to think.

Thank you so much for having me.

The world certainly feels especially dangerous to a lot of people right now.

I mean, you mentioned some of them in the title of your article, but what are some of the scary things that you think give us all this sense that threats

exist around every corner? Yeah, indeed. You mentioned those videos, and that was sort of the

inspiration for this story. I've been seeing a ton of those everywhere. And I think it gives people

this false sense that there are menaces lurking around those everywhere. And I think it gives people this false sense that there are

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