It is readers' experience that allows them to "see past the media hype," says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. "They may hear something is going on through television news, but they have direct experience that is at odds with the media imagery. Their ongoing travel experience will be a greater source of information than the media reports."

Travel experience also helps by providing a sense of what the media is not covering, says Fischhoff. "Every risk has a numerator and a denominator. The numerator is how many people got hurt. The denominator is how many people did not get hurt. The numerator is very visible, because it gets the media attention. The denominator is not, because it's not news. When you're actually in a foreign place, you get a concrete feeling for the extent to which nothing happens there."

Why people's risk perception varies so dramatically
One traveler thinks Bali is safe right now, the other does not. Two people can read the same State Department travel advisory and interpret it in different ways, says Fischhoff. He studied the State Department warnings for both Israel and Kenya before his trips there, of course. His interpretation was that they did not make clear the real degree of the danger, and that they might be biased by outside considerations such as international politics.

Another reason two travelers may come up with very different assessments for the same trip is that one may perceive greater benefit in the experience. "The greater the benefit, the more we play down the risk that comes with it," says Ropeik. Many a traveler will be convinced that a certain part of the world is too dangerous . . . until the airfare or cruise price gets chopped in half. "When the price is right," notes Ropeik, "the risk suddenly becomes low." Indeed, most poll respondents (89 percent) believe that now is a good time to travel overseas, mainly because there are great deals to be had.

How overreacting to scary incidents can increase the danger
Travelers' risk perceptions also vary with so-called acute current events. Today, poll respondents are less worried about ordinary travel problems—food poisoning, pickpockets, lost passports, car accidents—than they were back in January, but they are more worried about those extraordinary perils that have been in the news—infectious illnesses, plane crashes, and terrorist attacks. "When awareness of SARS comes along, the risk of having your pocket picked gets played down," Ropeik says. This can be dangerous, since you can be so focused on taking precautions against scary but highly unlikely problems that you neglect to protect yourself against less dramatic but more common ones.

Experts predict that every time there is a terrorist attack or a crisis that grabs the media's attention, the general public will overreact. But after the initial alarm, "their threshold goes up and they form a new sense of what's normal," says Gitlin. For the Condé Nast Traveler reader, this process doesn't take long. Fifty-eight percent of poll respondents say that they would be willing to travel to a place within six months of a terrorist attack there. Indeed, more than a third believe a place is safest soon after a terrorist attack, when security is tighter than it will be after some time has passed. "People are constantly adjusting to a new sense of normality," says Gitlin. "It's now normal for a certain number of U.S. soldiers to be killed in Iraq every week. You adjust to a higher threshold of living with danger."

-Additional reporting by Brook Wilkinson