Why do so many people — especially the high-ranking government officials we’re told to trust — continue to get security so horribly wrong?

One security expert thinks the problem may lie in our genes.

We saw an example of officials getting security horribly wrong last week in Boston, where officials there expended nearly $1 million and inconvenienced nearly everyone in the city, for something that wasn’t a threat. To make matters worse, after they determined that it wasn’t a threat, those same officials continued to spread fear throughout the city by talking about it as if it was the Second Coming of Osama. But instead of Mumbles Menino and the other responsible officials (like Coakley) resigning, as they certainly should have, they managed to extort $2 million from Turner Broadcasting and get the head of the Cartoon Network to resign instead.

Anyway.

In a draft essay entitled The Psychology of Security, security expert Bruce Schneier explores why government so often resorts to expensive “security theater” to make people feel safer, when the operations are completely useless in providing real security, or worse, actually make people less secure — and why people accept it.

The premise is simple, Schneier says: “Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.”

In a fast-paced tour of behavioral economics, the psychology of decision-making and risk, and even some neuroscience, he looks at what we know about how people perceive security and why feelings of security can diverge so much from the reality of security.

Most of the time, when the perception of security doesn’t match the reality of security, it’s because the perception of the risk doesn’t match the reality of the risk. We worry about the wrong things: paying too much attention to minor risks and not enough attention to major ones. We don’t correctly assess the magnitude of different risks. A lot of this can be chalked up to bad information or bad mathematics, but there are some general pathologies that come up over and over again. — Bruce Schneier

Schneier writes that we’ve advanced technologically much faster than we’ve evolved to cope with our own advancement, and therein lies the problem.

We are very well adapted to dealing with the security environment endemic to hominids living in small family groups on the highland plains of East Africa. It’s just that the environment in New York in 2006 is different from Kenya circa 100,000 BC. And so our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security, and we get things wrong. — Ibid.

To find out more about these pathologies of the mind, and to find out Schneier’s shocking conclusion, you’ll have to read the full essay. And even after that, there’s much more research that will need to be done in this area.

Okay, okay. Schneier concludes that a few well-placed bits of security theater, to make people feel more secure, used in conjunction with actual (and presumably unseen) security measures, might be just what the doctor ordered.

For how security really works, rather than how we perceive it, Schneier’s book Beyond Fear, which explains why we really have very little to worry so much about, is required reading.