Publications

FACTS AND FEARS: UNDERSTANDING PERCEIVED RISK.

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE HEALTH PHYSICS SOCIETY: Abstracts of papers presented at the meeting: PDF Only

It's all connected: Collectivism, climate change, and COVID-19

Incorporating Structural Models into Research on the Social Amplification of Risk: Implications for Theory Construction and Decision Making

A comprehensive approach to managing risk must draw on both the descriptive insights of the behavioral sciences and the prescriptive clarity of the management sciences. On the descriptive side, this study develops structural models to explain how the impact upon society of an accident or other unfortunate event is influenced by the physical consequences of the event, perceived risk, media coverage, and public response. Our findings indicate that the media and public response play crucial roles in determining the impact of an unfortunate event. Public response appears to be determined by perceptions that the event was caused by managerial incompetence and is a signal of future risk. On the prescriptive side, we briefly discuss how these findings based upon structural models can be incorporated into a decision‐analytic procedure known as an influence diagram.

Impact of emotional information in complex decisions

Numeracy and intuitive number sense in decision making

Affect, risk and future optimism after the tsunami disaster

Comparison of Bayesian and Regression Approaches to the Study of Information Processing in Judgment

Greater Emotional Gain from Giving in Older Adults: Age-Related Positivity Bias in Charitable Giving

Older adults have been shown to avoid negative and prefer positive information to a higher extent than younger adults. This positivity bias influences their information processing as well as decision-making. We investigate age-related positivity bias in charitable giving in two studies. In Study 1 we examine motivational factors in monetary donations, while Study 2 focuses on the emotional effect of actual monetary donations. In Study 1, participants (n=353, age range 20-74 years) were asked to rate their affect towards a person in need and then state how much money they would be willing to donate to help this person. In Study 2, participants (n=108, age range 19-89) were asked to rate their affect towards a donation made a few days prior. Regression analysis was used to investigate whether or not the positivity bias influences the relationship between affect and donations. In Study 1, we found that older adults felt more sympathy and compassion and were less motivated by negative affect when compared to younger adults, who were motivated by both negative and positive affect. In Study 2, we found that the level of positive emotional reactions from monetary donations was higher in older participants compared to younger participants. We find support for an age-related positivity bias in charitable giving. This is true for motivation to make a future donation, as well as affective thinking about a previous donation. We conclude that older adults draw more positive affect from both the planning and outcome of monetary donations and hence benefit more from engaging in monetary charity than their younger counterparts.

The Affect Heuristic and the Attractiveness of Simple Gambles

Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of evaluability and the affect heuristic. Evaluators of the “noloss” gamble lack a precise feeling for how good $9 is, hence give it little weight in their judgment. In the second gamble, comparison with the small loss makes $9 “come alive with feeling” and become weighted in the judgment, thus increasing the attractiveness of the gamble. These results demonstrate the importance of contextual factors in determining affect and preference for simple risk-taking opportunities. They show that the meaning, utility, and weighting of even a very familiar monetary outcome such as $9 is not fixed, but depends greatly on these contextual factors.

An analysis-of-variance model for the assessment of configural cue utilization in clinical judgment.

No abstract is provided for this article.

The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework

One of the most perplexing problems in risk analysis is why some relatively minor risks or risk events, as assessed by technical experts, often elicit strong public concerns and result in substantial impacts upon society and economy. This article sets forth a conceptual framework that seeks to link systematically the technical assessment of risk with psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives of risk perception and risk‐related behavior. The main thesis is that hazards interact with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes in ways that may amplify or attenuate public responses to the risk or risk event. A structural description of the social amplification of risk is now possible. Amplification occurs at two stages: in the transfer of information about the risk, and in the response mechanisms of society. Signals about risk are processed by individual and social amplification stations, including the scientist who communicates the risk assessment, the news media, cultural groups, interpersonal networks, and others. Key steps of amplifications can be identified at each stage. The amplified risk leads to behavioral responses, which, in turn, result in secondary impacts. Models are presented that portray the elements and linkages in the proposed conceptual framework.

The 'Wildavsky Heuristic': The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion

In a provocative 1987 article, Aaron Wildavsky asserted that culture operates as the fundamental orienting force in the generation of mass public opinion. The meanings and interpersonal associations that inhere in discrete ways of life, he argued, shape the heuristic processes by which politically unsophisticated individuals, in particular, choose what policies and candidates to support. We systematize Wildavsky's theory and integrate it with existing accounts of mass opinion formation. We also present the results of an original national survey (N = 1843), which found that the cultural orientations featured in Wildavsky's writings accounted for policy-related attitudes on gun control, environment, capital punishment, and gay marriage, even at low levels of political sophistication and after controlling for demographics, left-right ideology, and partisanship. By contrast, much of the predictive power of demographics, left-right ideology, and partisanship on policy attitudes dissipated after taking into account cultural orientations.

Attentional Mechanisms in the Generation of Sympathy

Empathic responses, such as sympathy towards others, are a key ingredient in the decision to provide help to those in need. The determinants of empathic responses are usually thought to be the vividness, similarity, and proximity of the victim. However, recent research highlights the role that attention plays in the generation of feelings. We expanded on this idea by investigating whether sympathy depends on cognitive mechanisms such as attention. In two studies we found that sympathy responses were lower and reaction times were longer when targets were presented with distractors. In addition, online sympathy judgments that allow attentional focusing on a target lead to greater affective responses than judgments made from memory. We conclude that attention is an ingredient in the generation of sympathy, and discuss implications for research on prosocial behaviour and the interaction between attention and emotions.

Why we dehumanize illegal immigrants: A US mixed-methods study

Dehumanization is a topic of significant interest for academia and society at large. Empirical studies often have people rate the evolved nature of outgroups and prior work suggests immigrants are common victims of less-than-human treatment. Despite existing work that suggests who dehumanizes particular outgroups and who is often dehumanized, the extant literature knows less about why people dehumanize outgroups such as immigrants. The current work takes up this opportunity by examining why people dehumanize immigrants said to be illegal and how measurement format affects dehumanization ratings. Participants ( N = 672) dehumanized such immigrants more if their ratings were made on a slider versus clicking images of hominids, an effect most pronounced for Republicans. Dehumanization was negatively associated with warmth toward illegal immigrants and the perceived unhappiness felt by illegal immigrants from U.S. immigration policies. Finally, most dehumanization is not entirely blatant but instead, captured by virtuous violence and affect as well, suggesting the many ways that dehumanization can manifest as predicted by theory. This work offers a mechanistic account for why people dehumanize immigrants and addresses how survey measurement artifacts (e.g., clicking on images of hominids vs. using a slider) affect dehumanization rates. We discuss how these data extend dehumanization theory and inform empirical research.

Examining the Effects of Photographic Attributes on Sympathy, Emotions, and Donation Behavior

We tested assumptions about emotional and behavioral effects of persuasive photography, exploring to what extent photographic attributes regarding expression, gaze, and the number of subjects in images influence sympathy. In addition, we examined whether sympathetic responses were associated with impure altruism, moral disengagement, and willingness to donate money to charitable organizations. We found that sympathetic responses were associated with sad imagery, moral disengagement (negative), feelings of altruism, and willingness to donate. We also found the emotions evoked by exposure to the sad expression of the child converged with negative affect after viewing the photos. However, participants who were exposed to the happy visage did not appear to generate significantly greater feelings of happiness when compared with feelings of sadness.

Consistency of Choice Among Equally Valued Alternatives

Time to rethink nuclear waste storage

No abstract is provided for this article.

Taxonomic Analysis of Perceived Risk: Modeling Individual and Group Perceptions Within Homogeneous Hazard Domains

Previous studies of risk perception have typically focused on the mean judgments of a group of people regarding the riskiness (or safety) of a diverse set of hazardous activities, substances, and technologies. This paper reports the results of two studies that take a different path. Study 1 investigated whether models within a single technological domain were similar to previous models based on group means and diverse hazards. Study 2 created a group taxonomy of perceived risk for only one technological domain, railroads, and examined whether the structure of that taxonomy corresponded with taxonomies derived from prior studies of diverse hazards. Results from Study 1 indicated that the importance of various risk characteristics in determining perceived risk differed across individuals and across hazards, but not so much as to invalidate the results of earlier studies based on group means and diverse hazards. In Study 2, the detailed analysis of railroad hazards produced a structure that had both important similarities to, and dissimilarities from, the structure obtained in prior research with diverse hazard domains. The data also indicated that railroad hazards are really quite diverse, with some approaching nuclear reactors in their perceived seriousness. These results suggest that information about the diversity of perceptions within a single domain of hazards could provide valuable input to risk‐management decisions.