Publications

One Hundred Centuries Of Solitude: Redirecting America's High-level Nuclear Waste Policies

When Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, it directed the Department of Energy to locate, study, license, and develop a deep underground repository for high-level nuclear wastes. As the authors of this study show, by 1987 the program was in shambles, beset by opposition from every state that had a potential storage site. Congress passed amendments to the original legislation that designated Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the only site for study and development.The authors trace the evolution of the political and social turmoil created by this difficult site-selection process, looking at the history of the nation's repository program, the nature of the public's concerns, and the effects of intergovernmental conflict. They also examine how other countries have addressed similar problems. Turning to a promising development--a dry-cask storage method judged by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be safe for a century or more--they urge a full reassessment of the nation's high-level nuclear waste policies and of existing DOE programs.The book concludes with carefully considered recommendations for a new national policy for the storage of hazardous nuclear waste. Everyone concerned about nuclear waste and how it should be managed at the federal, state, and local levels will find valuable information in this in-depth study of the issues at hand.

Affect, Moral Intuition, and Risk

The natural way to deal with moral issues involving risk is to rely on our intuitive feelings. "How bad is it? Well, how bad does it feel?" We can also rely on reason to determine right and wrong but, as Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated, intuition comes first and dominates our responses unless we make an effort to critique and, if necessary, override it. We argue that our intuitive feelings are insensitive to large losses of life and thus mislead us in the face of natural disasters or human disasters associated with poverty, disease, and violence. Our intuitions seduce us into calmly turning away from these catastrophes, when we should be driven by outrage or sorrow to act. We propose ways to overcome this insensitivity through new forms of education and communication coupled with reliance on moral deliberation aimed at designing laws and institutions that compel attention to such problems.

Risk Perception, Trust, and Nuclear Waste: Lessons from Yucca Mountain

(1991). Risk Perception, Trust, and Nuclear Waste: Lessons from Yucca Mountain. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 6-30.

The Social Amplification of Risk

The management of and communication about risks has become a major question of public policy and intellectual debate in the modern world. The social amplification of risk framework describes how both social and individual factors act to amplify or dampen perceptions of risk and through this create secondary effects such as stigmatisation of technologies, economic losses or regulatory impacts. This volume, edited by three of the world's leading analysts of risk and its communication, brings together contributions from a group of international experts working in the field of risk perception and risk communication. Key conceptual issues are discussed as well as a range of recent case studies (spanning BSE and food safety, AIDS/HIV, nuclear power, child protection, Y2K, electromagnetic fields, and waste incineration) that take forward the state-of-the-art in risk amplification theory. The volume also draws attention to lessons for public policy, risk management and risk communication practice.

Cue-How safe is safe enough?

No abstract is provided for this article.

What comes to mind when you hear the words nuclear waste repository '': A study of 10,000 images

Countering the Prominence Effect: How U.S. National Security Lawyers Can Fulfill Non-Prominent Humanitarian Objectives

How do nations decide whether to intervene militarily to prevent or stop genocide? How do military and intelligence officers determine the severity of physical or psychological harm to inflict on terrorism suspects? Should a nation escalate troop deployments during an armed conflict that is assessed to be unwinnable? Public officials confronting policy challenges like these must decide among many interests related to transnational security, morality, politics, and the rule of law. Historical evidence and findings from decision research suggest that officials will often decide in favor of security, even when that choice contradicts stated values and otherwise leads to suboptimal welfare outcomes. This Article explores opportunities for lawyers advising the U.S. president and other national security officials to change those outcomes. The prominence effect describes challenges in making quantitative tradeoffs among competing attributes and the likelihood that individuals will decide in favor of the more inherently important, defensible – i.e., prominent – attribute. This Article presents prominence as an impediment to faithful application of transnational humanitarian law because security considerations are more defensible than humanitarian considerations for decision makers and their advisors. Part I describes the research behind prominence and instances when it has been observed or hypothesized in global crises. Part II provides an overview of the national security attorney’s roles in a variety of U.S. national security settings.Part III proposes ways for those attorneys to help policy makers overcome prominence. Part IV discusses other opportunities to mitigate prominence in strategic decision-making processes.

A Psychological and Linguistic Analysis of “The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth”

A traditional goal of science and environmental communication, including climate communication, has been to encourage disinterested or uninformed audiences to pay more attention to the world around them and to shift disinterest and apathy toward positive engagement with nature and proenvironment lifestyles. We conducted an empirical investigation of audience responses to key aspects of the world scientists' "2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth," focusing on whether the language of this article manages to sway readers to rethink their attitudes toward climate change. Across many variations, the textual prompts we gave to readers did <i>not</i> overwhelmingly move the needle of public attitudes regarding climate change, suggesting that political affiliation and ideologies may be a much stronger indicator of public actions and attitudes than exposure to scientific information. Regarding climate change, we seem to be living in a time of information saturation and ideological entrenchment.

Contingent Weighting in Judgment and Choice

Discover Choices, Values, and Frames, 1st Edition, Daniel Kahneman on Higher Education from Cambridge

Preface

The approach to the study of judgment that this book represents had origins in three lines of research that developed in the 1950s and 1960s: the comparison of clinical and statistical prediction, initiated by Paul Meehl; the study of subjective probability in the Bayesian paradigm, introduced to psychology by Ward Edwards; and the investigation of heuristics and strategies of reasoning, for which Herbert Simon offered a program and Jerome Bruner an example. Our collection also represents the recent convergence of the study of judgment with another strand of psychological research: the study of causal attribution and lay psychological interpretation, pioneered by Fritz Heider.

Making Health Care Quality Reports Easier to Use

Background Although there is evidence that consumers want comparative quality information, most studies indicate that consumers make limited use of the data in decision making. The reasons for the limited use appear to be the complexity of the information and the difficulty of processing and using the amount of information in reports. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether there are approaches to reporting comparative information that make it easier for consumers to comprehend the information. Further, the degree to which consumers who have a low level of skill can accurately use that information when it is presented in a format that is easier to use was examined. Methods The study used an experimental design to examine how different presentation approaches affect the use of information. Participants were randomly assigned to different conditions and were asked to review information and complete a decision task related to using comparative information and making health plan selections. Two separate convenience samples were used in the study: an elderly Medicare sample (N = 253), and a nonelderly sample (N = 239). Results The findings indicate that there are data presentation approaches that help consumers who have lower skills use information more accurately. Some of these presentation strategies (for example, relative stars) improve comprehension among the lower skilled, and other strategies (for example, evaluative labels) appear to aid those in the midrange of comprehension skill. Conclusions Using these approaches in reporting would likely increase the use of the comparative information and increase the efficacy of reporting efforts.

From Shakespeare to Simon: Speculations-and Some Evidence- About Man's Ability to Process Information

Recent experimental evidence is marshalled in support of the position that man's limited memory, attention, and reasoning capabilities lead him to apply simple strain-reducing cognitive strategies for processing information when making judgments and decisions.These strategies portray decision processes in a manner quite different from traditional normative and descriptive models.In some situations, these strategies may produce good decisions; in others, they may lead to serious mistakes.Relevance of these findings for important "real-world" (i.e., non-laboratory) decisions is discussed."What a piece of work is man.How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel.In apprehension how like a god.The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.

Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk

People respond to the hazards they perceive. If their perceptions are faulty, efforts at personal, public, and environmental protection are likely to be misdirected. For some hazards, such as motor vehicle accidents, extensive statistical data are readily available. For other familiar activities, such as the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, assessment of risk requires complex epidemiological and experimental studies. However, even when statistical data are plentiful, the "hard" facts can only go so far toward developing policy. At some point, human judgment is needed to interpret the findings and determine their relevance.

Perceptions of Pesticides as Risks to Human Health

No abstract is provided for this article.

Labile Werte: Ein schwieriges Problem für die Risikoforschung

Werturteile, die ein Anzeichen für die Erwünschtheit möglicher Entscheidungsergebnisse sind, bilden den Kern jedes Risk Assessment. Verfechter der Risikoforschung befürworten im allgemeinen eine Arbeitsteilung zwischen technischen...

Analyzing the Use of Information in Investment Decision Making: A Methodological Proposal

Foresightful investment analysts have long recognized the need to understand more clearly the detailed processes underlying investment decisions-especially decisions made by acknowledged experts. For example, Bernhard observes that, if the mental processes of consistently successful investors are intuitional, that intuitional reasoning must be made understandable.' In a similar vein, others have argued that, by compelling the investment analyst to translate his vague attitudes, opinions, and reasons into explicit quantities, the analyst's thoughts are brought out into the open where they can be observed, evaluated, and tested.2 Researchers in the areas of economics, finance, and psychology have recently taken up the challenge of simulating and describing the judgment process. There are, at present, a number of methods that should be of interest to persons concerned with the dynamics of investment decisions. The objective of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to this work and to present an experiment that illustrates the use of one such method for quantitatively describing the use of information in investment decisions. Due to limitations of the sample of subjects and the particular cases being judged, the reader should view the experiment as a methodological illustration-not a finished empirical investigation.

Importance of test item content: An analysis of a corollary of the deviation hypothesis.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Risk Perception and Affect

Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' 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 as affect heuristic. This article traces the development of this heuristic and discusses some of the important ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk.