How people responded, and how seriously they took the alert, correlated in complicated ways to various social categories. One of the most significant factors for determining who took it seriously was one’s “belief in the probability of war.” That is, if someone felt that war was unlikely because of a lack of “tension” in the “international situation,” then the signal could dismissed, and if you believed war was possible, then you took it seriously. This is the kind of logic that seems plausible but is quite fallacious: most people don’t actually have a great sense of the “international situation,” and have no idea what is happening on the other side of the world at the present moment.4
The study found that there was an interesting relationship between education and taking the signal seriously, but perhaps not an obvious one. Essentially, people who were “poorly educated” didn’t take the signal seriously; the authors concluded that they didn’t know what it was. But people with college educations were more likely to dismiss it than those with just high-school educations. The authors offered up two not-mutually-exclusive explanations for this. One is that the college-educated were “sophisticated and blasé enough to treat the siren cynically.” The other is worth quoting directly:
The higher the rank of an individual within a given social category, the more likely he is to interpret as invalid a signal intended to preface a disastrous situation. A plausible explanation of this is that persons who have achieved or enjoy high social status are less willing to entertain the possibility that a disaster could occur which would spoil everything.
That is, that the dismissal of the warning signal is a sort of psychological defensive mechanism meant to keep one from acknowledging the real possibility of losing everything one has — and those who have more may thus have more incentive to dismiss it. This is an idea that far transcends just nuclear alerts, and feels like it has real relevance in the present moment.
Another factor that was significant was gender: women tended to take the warning signal more seriously than men, and to report a stronger emotional response to it, and they also were more apt to seek out more information about it. The study’s authors suggested that this is because of their having a “generally lower status” than the men (and thus not falling into the defense mechanism posited above), as well as being “covered by a norm which allows them more expression of concern and fear for the well-being of others.” Men, in other words, are afraid of looking scared, and concerned.