Publications

Behavioral decision theory perspectives on risk and safety

Behavioral decision theory can contribute in many ways to the management and regulation of risk. In recent years, empirical and theoretical research on decision making under risk has produced a body of knowledge that should be of value to those who seek to understand and improve societal decisions. This paper describes several components of this research, which is guided by the assumption that all those involved with high-risk technologies as promoters, regulators, politicians, or citizens need to understand how they and the others think about risk. Without such understanding, well-intended policies may be ineffective, perhaps even counterproductive.

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align with preexisting values (Zaller 1992).

Judgment under uncertainty: List of contributors

No abstract is provided for this article.

Numeracy Skill And The Communication, Comprehension, And Use Of Risk-Benefit Information

Current health care policy emphasizes improving health outcomes and the efficacy of health care delivery by supporting informed consumer choices. At the same time, health information often involves uncertainty, and many people may lack the skills and knowledge to process this information, manage their health and health care, and make informed choices. Innumeracy, an element of poor health literacy, is associated with the comprehension and use of important health information. We review this literature and examine what can be done to help less numerate people act more effectively and take charge of their health.

Risk Perception and the Economic Crisis: A Longitudinal Study of the Trajectory of Perceived Risk

We conducted a longitudinal survey of public response to the economic crisis to understand the trajectory of risk perception amidst an ongoing crisis. A nation-wide panel responded to seven surveys beginning in late September 2008 at the peak of the crisis and concluded in October 2009. At least 600 respondents participated in each survey, with 413 completing all seven surveys. Our online survey focused on perceptions of risk (savings, investments, retirement, job), negative emotions toward the financial crisis (sadness, anxiety, fear, anger, worry, stress), confidence in national leaders to manage the crisis (President Obama, Congress, Treasury Secretary, business leaders), and belief in one's ability to realize personal objectives despite the crisis. We employed latent growth curve modeling to analyze change in risk perception throughout the crisis. Our results suggest that, in general, people's perceptions of risk appear to decrease most rapidly during the initial phase of a crisis and then begin to level off. Negative emotion about the crisis was the most predictive of increased risk perception, supporting the notion of risk as feelings. Belief in one's ability to realize personal objectives was also predictive. Confidence in national leaders, however, was not predictive of perceived risk. Finally, our results demonstrate that groups may experience a crisis differently depending on a combination of personal characteristics such as gender, income, numeracy, and political attitude. Risk management and communication should work in sync with these mechanisms and differences across groups.

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues.The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align with preexisting values (Zaller 1992). If the key cueing device in such models is the source credibility heuristic (Mondak 1993), how do people who lack the time and ability to become actual policy experts have the time and capacity to figure out which policy experts are credible? How does this theory explain the coherence some have found in the views of those with limited political knowledge (Goren 2004)? We approach these two questions with the perspective offered by Mary Douglas (1982) and Aaron Wildavsky’s (1987) cultural theory. In brief, we argue that most peoples neither have the time, inclination, and ability to derive policy positions from abstract ideological principles, nor do they have the inclination or resources at-hand to sort through the empirical claims advanced in technical policy debates. Instead, as Wildavsky (1987, 8) said, “ordinary folk” use the orienting force of culture “to generate miles of preferences” from only “inches of fact.” To make the case for this conception of public opinion, we begin with a theoretical overview of how this process, which we call the Wildavsky Heuristic Model, relates to existing accounts of mass political opinion, particularly those featuring ideology. Then, we test some of this model’s core propositions using original national survey data, and finally, we draw out the theoretical and practical implications of those results.

Nuclear wastes and public trust

Citing public fear and mistrust, strong opposition to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site, and less-than-exemplary performance by the Department of Energy (DOE), two private researchers believe present high-level radioactive waste-disposal plans may have to be scrapped. Government and the nuclear industry may have to start over. Policy makers should seek to develop new relationships with communities and states where suitable disposal sites exist. These relationships may require that citizen groups and local institutions be given unprecedented authority in locating and operating such facilities. Contrary to popular impressions, there is still time to take a new approach. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says present on-site storage arrangements offer a safe alternative for 100 years or more. The sense of immediate crisis and cries for immediate solutions should be calmed and a more considered strategy brought to the public debate. For starters, the researchers propose that the problems of defense waste be separated from the problems of commercial waste. They also suggest that DOE be assigned responsibility for defense waste and a new agency be created to handle high-level commercial waste.

The legitimacy of public perceptions or risk.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Analyzing the expert judge: A descriptive study of a stockbroker's decision process.

No abstract is provided for this article.

The Construction of Preference: An Overview

This book is a collection of papers and research articles on preference construction. The central idea is that in many situations we do not really know what we prefer; we must construct our preferences as the situation arises.

Affect, risk, and decision making.

Risk is perceived and acted on in 2 fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described with "the affect heuristic." The authors trace the development of this heuristic across a variety of research paths. The authors also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk, and, more generally, how it influences all human decision making. Finally, some important implications of the affect heuristic for communication and decision making pertaining to cancer prevention and treatment are briefly discussed.

The ‘value’ of smoking: An editorial

Research indicates that many adolescents do not adequately understand and appreciate the risks that smoking entails. Beginning smokers give little conscious thought to risk. They are lured into the behaviour by the prospects of fun, excitement and adventure. Most begin to think of risk only after they have started to smoke regularly, become addicted, and gained what to them is new information and appreciation of smoking's health risks. They then wish they had never begun to smoke. Cigarette advertising and promotion are designed to play a key role in this process by exposing young people to massive amounts of positive imagery associated with smoking. Research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience as well as marketing studies done for and by the tobacco industry demonstrates how powerful such imagery can be in suppressing perception of risk and manipulating behaviour. The message here is that affective feelings are intrinsic to 'value'. These feelings are easily manipulated and exploited. Although statistical and other health-science messages are important in combatting this predatory behaviour, we cannot depend on them alone. We have to learn to play 'the affect game', building images and feelings that promote healthful behaviour and block destructive risk-taking.

Problems of Policy Implementation in Distributed Decision Systems

Wise policies, effectively implemented, are essential to the successful functioning of any complex organization. We can think of policy as being defined at the executive or command level and communicated throughout the organizational hierarchy in order to guide the decisions that must be taken at all levels. In the business world, for example, executive policies may establish the company philosophy regarding price, quality, and quantity. In the military world, policy may specify the appropriate weight to be given to achievement of some strategic objective relative to the risks to life, equipment, and political alliances that military action may place in jeopardy. In the technological world, policies are often framed within the context of a general analytic model such as cost/benefit or decision analysis. Quantitative tradeoff functions or utility curves may be derived to represent, in precise terms, “executive policy.”

Affective reactions and context-dependent processing of negations

Three experiments demonstrate how the processing of negations is contingent on the evaluation context in which the negative information is presented. In addition, the strategy used to process the negations induced different affective reactions toward the stimuli, leading to inconsistency of preference. Participants were presented with stimuli described by either stating the presence of positive features (explicitly positive alternative) or negating the presence of negative features (non-negative alternative). Alternatives were presented for either joint (JE) or separate evaluation (SE). Experiment 1 showed that the non-negative stimuli were judged less attractive than the positive ones in JE but not in SE. Experiment 2 revealed that the non-negative stimuli induced a less clear and less positive feeling when they were paired with explicitly positive stimuli rather than evaluated separately. Non-negative options were also found less easy to judge than the positive ones in JE but not in SE. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that people process negations using two different models depending on the evaluation mode. Through a memory task, we found that in JE people process the non-negative attributes as negations of negative features, whereas in SE they directly process the non-negative attributes as positive features.

Unstable Values in Lifesaving Decisions

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 15 November 2011Sec. Cognition volume 2 - 2011 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00294

Toward understanding and improving decisions

No abstract is provided for this article.

The affect heuristic in early judgments of product innovations

According to the affect heuristic, people often rely upon their overall affective impression of a target to form judgments of risk. However, innovation research has largely characterized risk perception as a function of what the consumer knows rather than how they feel. In three studies, this research investigates the use of the affect heuristic in consumer judgments of product innovations. The findings indicate that judgments of risks and benefits associated with product innovations are inversely related and affectively congruent with evaluations of those innovations. Additionally, more affectively extreme evaluations are associated with increasingly disparate judgments of risk and benefit. This research contributes to our theoretical understanding of both consumers' evaluations of product innovations and the affect heuristic. Implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Role of Trust in Risk Perception and Risk Management, April 1992