730 publications from this institution
A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately.
This study extends the current body of work on dehumanization by evaluating the social, psychological, and demographic correlates of blatant disregard for immigrants. Participants ( n = 468) were randomly assigned to read a scenario where 1) an immigrant or 2) an immigrant and their child were caught illegally crossing the southern border of the United States, and then rated how long they should spend in jail if convicted. Participants reported that they would sentence the immigrant to more jail time than the immigrant and child. Those who sent immigrants to jail for more time also viewed them as socially distant and less human, described immigration in impersonal terms, and endorsed other social harms unrelated to immigration (e.g., the death penalty for convicted murderers). Crucially, endorsed social harms accounted for explained variance beyond simply holding conservative views. We position these data within the current literature on dehumanization theory and immigration issues.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that theoretically equivalent measures of preference, such as choices and prices, can lead to systematically different preference orderings, known as preference reversals. Two major causes of preference reversals are the compatibility effect and the prominence effect. The present studies demonstrate that the combined effects of prominence and compatibility lead to predictable preference reversals in settings where improvements in air quality are compared with improvements in consumer commodities by two methods - willingness to pay for each improvement and choice (For which of the two improvements would you pay more? Which improvement is more valuable to you?). Willingness to pay leads to relatively greater preference for improved commodities; choice leads to relatively greater preference for improved air quality. These results extend the domain of preference reversals and pose a challenge to traditional theories of preference. At the applied level, these findings indicate the need to develop new methods for valuing environmental resources.
Diagnostic tests are looked to as an essential tool in the fight to contain the coronavirus and guide the reopening of economies. Much is said about problems with gaining access to these tests. Very little is said about their accuracy. These tests are assumed to be highly accurate. However, unless a test is perfect, accuracy can be greatly affected by the prevalence of infection in the population being tested, also known as the base-rate. Other contextual factors such as symptomatology and prior exposure also need to be taken into account along with base rates. One rarely hears anything about the importance of base rates because, unless one is schooled in their importance, they are not understood, not deemed relevant, and are thus neglected. Relying on diagnostic tests without verifying their accuracy and helping people interpret them will compound the crisis already underway and delay recovery.
Discussions, debates, and decision making pertaining to the storage and disposal of hazardous wastes invariably take place in a highly charged, confrontational atmosphere. It is essential to understand public perceptions of risk in order to design an environment in...
Objectives: Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are effective in curbing the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. All US states have adopted NPI policies, but the compliance to these measures and influence of sociopolitical factors on NPI adherence is unknown. NPI adherence may be approximated by personal mobility in a population that is tracked by anonymous mobile phone data. Study design This is a cross-sectional study of state-level mobility changes across the US. Methods State-level mobility was based on anonymous mobile phone data from multiple participating carriers collected by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (http://www.healthdata.org). Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to examine the strength and direction of the relationship between political affiliations and mobility restriction across states. Multivariable linear regression analyses were used to assess other factors that may impact personal travel. Results All states experienced a decline in personal mobility but had varying nadirs ranging from a 34% to a 69% reduction in mobility, which was not temporally related to the timing of state-level NPI measures. There was a statistically significant linear and negative correlation (r = −0.79) between the proportion of Republicans/leaning Republicans and NPI adherence across US states. The negative association between Republicans and NPI adherence was significant even when adjusting for urbanization, proportion of essential workers, population, Gini index, and poverty rates. Conclusions Political orientation affects risk perception, which may contribute to the unwillingness of some individuals to perceive the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic as a risk and to comply with NPIs. Our results highlight the importance of sociopolitical factors in disease control and emphasize the importance of bipartisan efforts in fighting the pandemic. These results may have implications for the development, dissemination, and communication of public health policies.
Decision Processes, Rationality and Adjustment to Natural Hazards * Cognitive Processes and Societal Risk Taking * Preference for Insuring Against Probable Small Losses: Insurance Implications * Accident Probabilities and Seat Belt Usage: A Psychological Perspective * How Safe Is Safe Enough? A Psychometric Study of Attitudes Toward Technological Risks and Benefits * Rating the Risks * Weighing the Risks: Which Risks are Acceptable? * Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk * Response Mode, Framing and Information-processing Effects in Risk Assessment * The Nature of Technological Hazard * Informing and Educating the Public about Risk * Perception of Risk from Automobile Safety Defects * Perception of Risk * The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework * The Perception and Management of Therapeutic Risk * Perception of Risk from Radiation * Perceived Risk, Trust and the Politics of Nuclear Waste * Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks * Perceived Risk, Trust and Democracy * Adolescent Health-threatening and Health-enhancing Behaviors: A Study of Word Association and Imagery * Technological Stigma * Probability, Danger and Coercion: A Study of Risk Perception and Decision-making in Mental Health Law * Do Adolescent Smokers Know the Risks? * Insensitivity to the Value of a Human Life: A Study of Psychophysical Numbing * Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics and Science: Surveying the Risk-assessment Battlefield * The Affect Heuristic in Judgments of Risks and Benefits*
Why do governments fail to intervene to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities? We examine this question with reference to prospect theory, one of the foundations of behavioral economics. When people rely on their moral intuitions, they behave according to prospect theory’s value function, which implies that the importance of protecting an individual life diminishes as the number of lives at risk increases. In some cases, intuitive valuation of the collective threat may actually decrease as the number of lives at risk increases, which undoubtedly contributes to failures to respond aggressively to mass atrocities. Understanding this failing of moral intuition should help to inform the development of new institutional mechanisms concerned with atrocity prevention. Such new mechanisms are necessary to force us to pursue the hard measures needed to combat massive human rights abuses. Accordingly, we propose several policy recommendations and institutional designs to improve international decision-making in this arena.
Understanding those factors critical to predicting public response is crucial to our ability to model the consequences of a terrorist strike in an urban area. To forecast community response, a system dynamics model was constructed that examines how a community is likely to respond to a terrorist attack along several dimensions. For three scenarios (anthrax attack, bomb blast and propane tank explosion) intensity of investigation, media coverage, public risk perception, diffusion of fear and community intervention are simulated over a six month period. Terrorist attacks generated intense media coverage initially resulting in high perceptions of risk and diffusion of fear. Delays in community intervention contributed to higher and more prolonged levels of fear. Perceptions of risk rose very quickly but declined quite slowly. These findings should prove useful to those wishing to predict public response to a variety of different contingencies involving terrorism.
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Studies show that most Nevada residents and almost all state officials oppose the proposed high-level radioactive waste repository project at Yucca Mountain. Surveys of the public show that individual citizens view the Yucca Mountain repository as having high risk; nuclear experts, in contrast, believe the risks are very low. Policy analysts have suggested that public risk perceptions may be reduced by better program management, increased trust in the federal government, and increased economic benefits for accepting a repository. The model developed in this study is designed to examine the relationship between public perceptions of risk, trust in risk management, and potential economic impacts of the current repository program using a confirmatory multivariate method known as covariance structure analysis. The results indicate that perceptions of potential economic gains have little relationship to opposition to the repository. On the other hand, risk perceptions and the level of trust in repository management are closely related to each other and to opposition. The impacts of risk perception and trust in management on opposition to the repository result from a combination of their direct influences as well as their indirect influences operating through perceptions that the repository would have serious negative impacts on the state`s economy due to stigmatization and reduced tourism.
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Since February 2003, hundreds of thousands of people in the Darfur region of western Sudan have been murdered by government-supported local militias, and millions forced to flee their burnt-out villages for the dubious safety of refugee camps. It is genocide by any definition, yet the world looks away.
