No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Effective communication between doctors and their patients is essential to successful medication choices and treatments. Our interest in this exploratory paper lies in the quality of communication between doctors and patients: what both parties seek to explain and what they commonly understand, what opportunities and what frictions occur as a result of their respective goals, what gaps exist in their knowledge bases, and how information of different types influences health risks and medication choices. The data reported in this paper come from conversations with doctors about how they communicate with patients when discussing the benefits and risks of prescription medications, and from patients who talked with us about their concerns and the perceived quality of their communications with physicians. Overall, we were surprised by the failure of the assumed decision-making models to explain much of what we heard and observed. In response, we advance a structured decision-making framework, based on decision analysis and value-focused thinking, that provides both descriptive and prescriptive models of physician–patient communication intended to assist in the development of improved communication standards concerning health risk assessments and medication choices.
Cultural Cognition refers to the disposition to conform one's beliefs about societal risks to one's preferences for how society should be organized. Based on surveys and experiments involving some 5,000 Americans, the Second National Risk and Culture Study presents empirical evidence of the effect of this dynamic in generating conflict about global warming, school shootings, domestic terrorism, nanotechnology, and the mandatory vaccination of school-age girls against HPV, among other issues. The Study also presents evidence of risk-communication strategies that counteract cultural cognition. Because nuclear power affirms rather than threatens the identity of persons who hold individualist values, for example, proposing it as a solution to global warming makes persons who hold such values more willing to consider evidence that climate change is a serious risk. Because people tend to impute credibility to people who share their values, persons who hold hierarchical and egalitarian values are less likely to polarize when they observe people who hold their values advocating unexpected positions on the vaccination of young girls against HPV. Such techniques can help society to create a deliberative climate in which citizens converge on policies that are both instrumentally sound and expressively congenial to persons of diverse values.
How is public opinion towards nanotechnology likely to evolve? The ‘familiarity hypothesis’ holds that support for nanotechnology will likely grow as awareness of it expands. The basis of this conjecture is opinion polling, which finds that few members of the public claim to know much about nanotechnology, but that those who say they do are substantially more likely to believe its benefits outweigh its risks1,2,3,4. Some researchers, however, have avoided endorsing the familiarity hypothesis, stressing that cognitive heuristics and biases could create anxiety as the public learns more about this novel science5,6. We conducted an experimental study aimed at determining how members of the public would react to balanced information about nanotechnology risks and benefits. Finding no support for the familiarity hypothesis, the study instead yielded strong evidence that public attitudes are likely to be shaped by psychological dynamics associated with cultural cognition. A sample of 1,862 adults was presented with balanced information on the risks and benefits of nanotechnology. Subjects did not react in a uniform manner, but polarized along lines consistent with cultural predispositions towards technological risk generally.
Environmental events such as natural disasters may influence the public’s affective reactions and decisions. Shortly after the 2004 Tsunami disaster we assessed how affect elicited by thinking about this disaster influenced risk perceptions and future time perspective in Swedish undergraduates not directly affected by the disaster. An experimental manipulation was used to increase the salience of affect associated with the disaster. In Study 1 we found that participants reminded about the tsunami had a sense that their life was more finite and included fewer opportunities than participants in the control condition (not reminded about the tsunami). In Study 2 we found similar effects for risk perceptions. In addition, we showed that manipulations of ease-of-thought influenced the extent to which affect influenced these risk perceptions, with greater ease of thoughts being associated with greater perceived risks.
Graphic displays of information are an important link in the design of user/machine interfaces. However, research on general effectiveness of graphic displays as information organizing formats for judgment and decision making has produced mixed results; graphic formats appear to facilitate judgmental performance in some contexts, but not in others. The two studies reported here examine the relative efficacy of a set of basic graphic display formats, such as might be used to summarize data in an information system, in the context of a task calling for individuals to integrate a set of information cues into an overall judgment. A "lens model" is used as a decompositional framework for representing the relationship between the elements of the information displays and the psychological properties of the multicue judgment task. Combined results from the two studies suggest that judgmental performance is markedly enhanced or degraded by the degree to which the display format provides the user with an organizing structure that facilitates a matching between the relative importance of information and the psychological salience of the display's graphic features.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Designers of programs for informing the public about radiation hazards need to consider the difficulties inherent in communicating highly technical information about risk. To be effective, information campaigns must be buttressed by empirical research aimed at determining what people know, what they want to know, and how best to convey that information. Drawing upon studies of risk perception, this paper describes some of the problems that any information program must confront.
This report provides findings from three surveys conducted during the Fall 1989 as part of the socioeconomic research program sponsored by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. The US Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) in 1982 and defined specific oversight responsibilities, including studies of socioeconomic effects and impacts, to the states in which potential high-level nuclear waste repositories might be located. The NWPA was amended in 1987 and Yucca Mountain, Nevada was designated as the only site to be characterized (studied in detail) as a location for the nation`s first repository. These surveys were conducted so they could provide information to the state of Nevada in its evaluation of the Yucca Mountain project. This report presents information from these surveys on two major areas. First, respondent evaluations of environmental hazards, especially nuclear waste facilities are reported. Second, an analysis is made of the Nevada State Survey to examine the public response to the positions taken by the officials and institutions of Nevada in regard to the Yucca Mountain project. The survey data support a finding that the respondents from all three surveys are seriously concerned about the environmental effects of technological facilities and hazards. The evaluations ofmore » a nuclear waste repository especially is viewed as likely to produce adverse events and impacts in every aspect of its implementation, operation or long-term existence. When compared to other industrial or technological activities, a high-level nuclear waste repository is seen as the most feared and least acceptable. 36 tabs.« less
Electric power transmission lines have recently met a very significant amount of public opposition. The source of such opposition varies from case to case, and is often hard to identify. Stated objections have included land use conflicts, noise created by the lines, aesthetic concerns, and fears of health and safety threats. Despite the sometimes enormous costs and long delays caused by strong opposition to transmission line siting and construction, both utilities and governmental regulators seem baffled at why the public objects so vehemently. At the same time, opponents are often equally baffled at why their objections seem to go unheeded. As a step toward developing satisfactory solutions to the conflict, this article reviews and critiques the literature dealing with attitudes toward electric power transmission lines, and outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the determinants of those attitudes.
The essay contrasts the scientific approach to analyzing and making decisions about risk with the ways that ordinary people perceive and respond to risk. It highlights the importance of trust as a determiner of perceived risk. It describes relatively new research on "risk as feelings" and the "Affect Heuristic". Finally reflects on the importance of this work for risk communication and concludes with some observations about human rationality and irrationality in the face of risk.
: When we feel certain about our factual knowledge, all too often we are wrong. This phenomenon, labeled 'the certainty illusion', is demonstrated in four experiments in which subjects (1) answered questions about a variety of topics and (2) indicated their degree of certainty about each answer. Subjects were wrong frequently on answers judged certain to be correct. Careful tutoring of subjects in the subtleties of expressing their certainty in terms of probabilities and odds did little to reduce the illusion. Feelings of certainty were so strong that subjects were willing to bet on the correctness of their knowledge. Because of the illusion, the bets they accepted were quite disadvantageous to them. The psychological basis for unwarranted certainty is discussed in terms of the inferential processes whereby knowledge is reconstructed from fragments of perceptions and memories.
