Publications

Risk Communication

Risk communication takes place in a variety of forms, ranging from warning labels on consumer products to interactions among governmental officials, industry representatives, the media, and members of the public on such highly charged situations as Love Canal,...

Comparison of Risk Attitudes and Perceptions in Japan and the United States, 1993

The influence of identifiability and singularity in moral decision making

There is an increased willingness to help identified individuals rather than non-identified, and the effect of identifiability is mainly present when a single individual rather than a group is presented. However, identifiability and singularity effects have thus far not been manipulated orthogonally. The present research uses a joint evaluation approach to examine the relative contribution of identifiability and singularity in moral decision-making reflecting conflicting values between deontology and consequentialism. As in trolley dilemmas subjects could either choose to stay with the default option, i.e., giving a potentially life-saving vaccine to a single child, or to actively choose to deny the single child the vaccine in favor of five other children. Identifiability of the single child and the group of children was varied between-subjects in a 2x2 factorial design. In total 1,232 subjects from Sweden and the United States participated in three separate experiments. Across all treatments, in all three experiments, 32.6% of the subjects chose to stay with the deontological default option instead of actively choosing to maximize benefits. Results show that identifiability does not always have a positive effect on decisions in allocation dilemmas. For single targets, identifiability had a negative or no effect in two out of three experiments, while for the group of targets identifiability had a more stable positive effect on subjects’ willingness to allocate vaccines. When the effect of identifiability was negative, process data showed that this effect was mediated by emotional reactance. Hence, the results show that the influence of identifiability is more complex than it has been previously portrayed in the literature on charitable giving.

Chapter 7. Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity

Chapter 7. Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity was published in The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy on page 126.

When Compassion Fails

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.

The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

This paper re-examines the commonly observed inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit. We propose that this relationship occurs because people rely on affect when judging the risk and benefit of specific hazards. Evidence supporting this proposal is obtained in two experimental studies. Study 1 investigated the inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments under a time-pressure condition designed to limit the use of analytic thought and enhance the reliance on affect. As expected, the inverse relationship was strengthened when time pressure was introduced. Study 2 tested and confirmed the hypothesis that providing information designed to alter the favorability of one's overall affective evaluation of an item (say nuclear power) would systematically change the risk and benefit judgments for that item. Both studies suggest that people seem prone to using an 'affect heuristic' which improves judgmental efficiency by deriving both risk and benefit evaluations from a common source—affective reactions to the stimulus item. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Risk Perception and Behaviors: Anticipating and Responding to Crises

No abstract is provided for this article.

Affect and decision making: a “hot” topic

The seven papers in this special issue represent the breadth and complexity of approaches to the study of affect in judgment and decision processes. Four papers examine the role of arousal or specific emotions in decision making. The three other papers investigate the impacts of uncertainty, time course, and thinking about mood. We briefly describe four functions of affect in decision making (affect as information, as a spotlight, as a motivator, and as common currency) and relate them to the seven special‐issue papers. The role of affect in decisions and decision processes is quite nuanced and deserves careful empirical study in basic and applied research. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Training of Decision Makers.

Abstract : The past 15 years have seen important advances in the understanding of behavioral decision processes. Despite these advances there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the training of decision makers. This report provides a summary of a conference held in July 1976 in Eugene, Oregon to evaluate the state of knowledge regarding the training of decision makers, identify important research questions and recommend directions for future research. The report provides both a brief review of current training programs, including a discussion of key attitudes and skills required for decision making, and a list of the most important research questions that emerged during the conference; Three aspects of the training problem recommended for immediate attention were (1) training specific skills, (2) evaluating the quality of decisions, and (3) implementing the knowledge obtained through decision research. (Author)

Response-induced reversals of preference in gambling: An extended replication in las vegas

The present report describes an expanded replication of the previous experiments in a nonlaboratory real-play setting unique to the experimental literature on decision processes - a casino in downtown Las Vegas.

On the psychology of experimental surprises.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Predicting and Modelling Public Response to a Terrorist Strike

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. Sixteen hypothetical damage scenarios were systematically varied according to non-terrorism vs. terrorism, explosions vs. infectious disease releases, terrorists’ motives as demands to release prisoners vs. solely to instill fear, non-terrorists’ motives as nonintentional vs. intentional (criminal), victims as government officials vs. tourists, non-terrorist incidents as involving no negligence vs. negligence, terrorist acts as non-suicidal vs. suicidal, and number of casualties (0, 15, 495). The setting was a local theme park. Students at a university in San Diego County were randomly assigned to different scenario conditions. For these scenarios, they were asked to address a number of questions regarding their perceptions and likely behaviors during and following an accident or terrorist strike. Results from regression modeling and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) indicated that terrorism and the mechanism used were most influential followed by the presence of suicide or negligence, motive, and victim. Number of casualties made little difference once these other factors were accounted for. To forecast community response, a system dynamics model was introduced that incorporated the study’s survey findings. This model simulated the immediate and mid-term diffusion of fear in a community for different types of accidental and terrorist events. These findings should prove useful to those wishing to predict public response to a variety of different contingencies involving terrorism.

The Perception of Risk

The concept of risk is an outgrowth of our society's great concern about coping with the dangers of modern life. The Perception of Risk brings together the work

Benthin Risk Perception Measure

Perception of Risk Posed by Extreme Events

Extreme events, by definition, cause much harm to people, property, and the natural world. Sometimes they result from the vagaries of nature, as in the case of flood, earthquake, or storm, and thus are truly the outcomes of games against nature. In other cases they follow technological failure or unintentional human error, as in the case of Chernobyl or Bhopal, putting them also into the category of risks that are predictable only probabilistically. More recently we have witnessed another form of extreme hazard, resulting from terrorism. One of us has termed this a new species of trouble (Slovic, in press), since it involves an intelligent and motivated opponent, putting the situations that give rise to these types of extreme events into the domain of economic game theory. The purpose of this brief review is to examine what existing research can tell us about the perception of risk associated with these extreme events. We will also point out issues that remain in need of exploration.

KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT: MEASURING LABILE VALUES

An article of faith among students of value, choice, and attitude judgments is that people have reasonably well-defined opinions regarding the desirability of various events. Although these opinions may not be intuitively formulated in numerical (or even verbal) form, careful questioning can elicit judgments representing people's underlying values. From this stance, elicitation procedures are neutral tools, bias-free channels that translate subjective feelings into scientifically usable expressions. They impose no views on respondents beyond focusing attention on those value issues of interest to the investigator.

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Sociopolitical Determinants of Perceived Risk, 1998