No abstract is provided for this article.
102 undergraduates, working in pairs, selected bets for themselves and bets for the "other subject" -to _play.•It was found that persons chose essentially the same probabi'lity of winning for the other person as for themselves, regardless of the sex of the other person.Women's choices .were more conservative•than men's choices..
Despite the wider dissemination of health plan report cards, little is known about whether consumers will use this information in making plan and provider choices. Studies of human judgment and decision making are reviewed, as are their implications for devising strategies to inform consumers. The limitations of human information processing suggest that many consumers will not use performance information in making choices. Strategies are needed to support consumers who prefer to rely on intermediaries as well as those who wish to apply the information for their own use. Many current strategies are based on assumptions not supported by existing decision‐making research. Although there is much to learn about assisting consumers in making informed choices, a great deal is known from decision‐making research. Our approaches and our research agenda must be based on this existing foundation of knowledge.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Nineteen Senior Managers of a major chemical company in the United Kingdom participated in a survey to determine their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions regarding risks from chemicals. Similar surveys had previously been conducted with toxicologists and members of the general public in the United States and Canada. In general, the Senior Managers tended to judge risks to be quite small for most chemicals. Moreover, they had lower risk perceptions than did members of the British Toxicological Society and even far lower perceptions of risk than a comparison group of members of the Canadian public. The managers held views that were similar to British toxicologists working in industry and government and dissimilar to the views of toxicologists working in academia. The observed differences between views of managers, toxicologists, and the public must be recognized and understood in order to facilitate communication and constructive efforts to manage chemical risks.
There is a growing respect for the wisdom of emotion and intuition that has emerged from recent research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This paper reviews a segment of this research dealing with intuitive feelings, which my colleagues and I call affect. The processing of affect by the human brain is indeed sophisticated, contributing greatly to rationality. Nevertheless, our intuitions can sometimes lead us astray. Better understanding of affective intuition is necessary to enable us to maximize the benefits and minimize the errors of this remarkable system.
The effects of time pressure were investigated on choices and judgments of pairs of partially described alternatives. Subjects judged which of two students would be more qualified to follow a university program for school psychologists. Subjects indicated the preferred candidate and the rated attractiveness difference between candidates in each pair, based on information about high school grades in Swedish, Psychology and Natural Sciences. Each candidate in a pair was described by grades in only two of these attributes — one common for the two candidates and one unique. The exposure time for each pair was systematically varied so that time pressure was imposed in some conditions. Contrary to expectations, it was found that common attribute information was used less under time pressure. No support was found for the expected increased importance of negative information under time pressure. Instead, time pressure resulted in a shift toward greater preference for the candidate with the maximum grade. This result is opposite to the ‘harassed decision maker effect’ (Wright 1974). A process model capturing the most frequent decision rules and the effects of time pressure is presented.
The effective regulation of risk poses a singular challenge to democracy. The public welfare of democratic societies depends on their capacity to abate all manner of natural and man-made hazards – from environmental catastrophe and economic collapse to domestic terrorism and the outbreak of disease. But the need to form rational responses to these and other dangers also challenges democratic societies in a more fundamental way: by threatening their commitment to genuinely deliberative policy making. Effective risk regulation depends on* Reprinted from Kahan, D. M., Slovic, P., Braman, D. and Gastil, J. (2006) ‘Fear of democracy: A cultural critique of Sunstein on risk,’ Harvard Law Review, vol 119, pp1071-1109highly technical forms of scientific information – epidemiological, toxicological, economic and the like. Most citizens don’t even have access to such information, much less the inclination and capacity to make sense of it. Why, then, should regulatory law afford any weight to the uneducated opinions of ordinary citizens as opposed to the reasoned judgements of politically insulated risk experts?
Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much greater problem. Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide? Every episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique obstacles to intervention. But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and nations, and by the general public, calls for explanations that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity — a deficiency that, once identified, might possibly be overcome. One fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect involves the capacity to experience affect , the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. I shall draw from psychological research to show how the statistics of mass murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers, fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The reported numbers of deaths represent dry statistics, “human beings with the tears dried off,” that fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action. Recognizing that we cannot rely only upon our moral feelings to motivate proper action against genocide, we must look to moral argument and international law. The 1948 Genocide Convention was supposed to meet this need, but it has not been effective. It is time to examine this failure in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other forms of mass murder.
Perhaps the earliest studies of risk perception with regard to natural hazards were conducted by geographer Gilbert White (1945, 1964) and his students (e.g. Burton and Kates 1964). Later, in 1974, this author joined with White and economist Howard Kunreuther to review this early work in the context of new research in cognitive psychology (Kahneman and Tversky 1972; Tversky and Kahneman 1971, 1973) describing the idiosyncratic ways human minds think about probability, uncertainty and risk (Slovic et al. 1974). This research illustrated the workings of Herbert Simon’s theory of “bounded rationality” (1959), which asserts that human cognitive limitations force decision makers to construct a simplified model of the world in order to deal with it.
Decisionmakers are often presented with explicit likelihood assessments (e.g., there is a 10% chance that an attack will occur over the next three months) and supporting narrative evidence in forecasting and risk communication domains. Decisionmakers are thought to rely on both numerical and narrative information to the extent that they perceive the information to be diagnostic, accurate, and trustworthy. In two studies, we explored how lay decisionmakers varying in numeracy evaluated and used likelihood assessments and narrative evidence in forecasts. Overall, the less numerate reported higher risk and likelihood perceptions. In simple probabilistic forecasts without narrative evidence, decisionmakers at all levels of numeracy were able to use the stated likelihood information, although risk perceptions of the less numerate were more affected by likelihood format. When a forecast includes narrative evidence, decisionmakers were better able to use stated likelihood in a percentage as compared to frequency or verbal formats. The more numerate used stated likelihood more in their evaluations whereas the less numerate focused more on the narrative evidence. These results have important implications for risk analysts and forecasters who need to report the results of their analyses to decisionmakers. Decisionmakers varying in numerical ability may evaluate forecasts in different ways depending on the types of information they find easiest to evaluate.
Recent research in risk perception has examined the role of affect and worldviews as orienting dispositions that guide people's decisions about complex and risky topics such as nuclear energy. This study tests and supports the hypothesis that worldviews and affect‐laden imagery are highly predictive of perceptions of risk from nuclear power and support for that technology. Furthermore, affect and worldviews each contribute independently to the prediction of nuclear support. We find also that a person's affective imagery associated with nuclear power is systematically related to their worldviews. We conclude that affect and worldviews appear to play similar roles as orienting mechanisms, helping people navigate in a complex, uncertain, and sometimes dangerous world. The implication of this view for the practice of risk communication is briefly discussed.
(1977). Empirical Study of Training and Performance in the Marathon. Research Quarterly. American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation: Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 769-777.
Recent research on charitable donations shows that donors evaluate both the impact of helping and its cost. We asked whether these evaluations were affected by the context of alternative charitable causes. We found that presenting two donation appeals in joint evaluation, as compared to separate evaluation, increased the perceived benefit of the cause ranked as more important (Study 1), and decreased its perceived cost, regardless of the relative actual costs (Study 2). Finally, we try to reconcile an explanation based on perceived cost and benefit with previous work on charitable donations.
