730 publications from this institution
This chapter reviews new insights about thinking and decision making that provide guidelines for reducing the catastrophic impacts from events such as natural disasters and mass atrocities. It describes some pitfalls of intuitions arising from fast thinking that cause problems in the management of disasters and mass atrocities even when one engages in more deliberative thinking. There is thus a need for creating policies, laws, and institutions that highlights the importance of developing long-term strategies for addressing these catastrophic risks while recognizing the tendency for decision makers to exhibit a systematic set of biases and simplified choice rules when thinking about these problems. Decision makers normally deal with risk by combining their intuitive thinking with more deliberative thinking. The recommendations suggested above are designed to address the type of intuitive thinking that decision makers exhibit when dealing with natural disasters, genocide, and other catastrophic events.
In a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What are the emotional and motivational consequences of "not helping all"? In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that negative affect arising from children that could not be helped decreases the warm glow of positive feeling associated with aiding the children who can be helped. This demotivation from the children outside of our reach may be a form of "pseudoinefficacy" that is non-rational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that theoretically equivalent measures of preference, such as choices and prices, can lead to systematically different preference orderings, known as preference reversals. Two major causes of preference reversals are the compatibility effect and the prominence effect. The present studies demonstrate that the combined effects of prominence and compatibility lead to predictable preference reversals in settings where improvements in air quality are compared with improvements in consumer commodities by two methods - willingness to pay for each improvement and choice (For which of the two improvements would you pay more? Which improvement is more valuable to you?). Willingness to pay leads to relatively greater preference for improved commodities; choice leads to relatively greater preference for improved air quality. These results extend the domain of preference reversals and pose a challenge to traditional theories of preference. At the applied level, these findings indicate the need to develop new methods for valuing environmental resources.
Managing risk to human health and safety has, over the past two decades, become a dominant theme in government policy, public debate, media attention and academic research. A striking feature of this growth has been the increased role of social scientists (working in...
This study explored the manner in which the desirability of an event influences its judged probability. Ss gave probability estimates for each of 5 events, only one of which could occur. Monetary payoffs, ranging from lose $5 to win $5, were contingent upon which event did occur. Desirability was found to bias probability estimates in a complex manner which varied systematically between Ss and between estimation trials. In general, it made estimates less reasonable. Rewards for accuracy did not reduce value biases. Instead, they encouraged ``risk-reducing pessimism.'' Individual differences were an important source of variance. Some Ss were consistently optimistic. Others were quite pessimistic.
Human interactions with wildlife are a defining experience of human existence. These interactions can be positive or negative. People compete with wildlife for food and resources, and have eradicated dangerous species; co-opted and domesticated valuable ...Read More
Crisis decisions made by governments typically involve either natural and humanitarian disasters or actions of terrorists or other nations. Making quality decisions for such crises requires a thorough understanding of the objectives to be achieved, the range of alternatives to consider, and their potential consequences. However, once a crisis decision is recognized, the available time to develop such an understanding is often severely limited. This article provides concepts and procedures to help senior policy makers identify in advance the key foundational components of crisis decisions. Then, when a crisis occurs that requires a quick response, the proactively constructed decision foundation provides the basis to fine-tune a specific response quickly. As a result, more of the available time can be focused on important aspects of the specific decision that could not have been examined earlier. This decision-focused proactive preparation should lead to better informed crisis decisions with better consequences for our nation and its citizens.
Studies of risk perception examine the judgments people make when they are asked to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and policy-making by (i) providing a basis for understanding and anticipating public responses to hazards and (ii) improving the communication of risk information among lay people, technical experts, and decision-makers. This work assumes that those who promote and regulate health and safety need to understand how people think about and respond to risk. Without such understanding, well-intended policies may be ineffective.
The practice of risk analysis has steadily increased in prominence during the past several decades, as risk managers in government and industry seek to develop more effective ways to meet public demands for a safer and healthier environment. Dozens of scientific...
Tim O'Riordan made it sound easy when he convinced me to write a brief perspective on hazard management almost four decades after the publication of three seminal articles in Environment on that to...
Benefit-cost analyses of tobacco regulations include estimates of the informed choice of smokers to continue smoking. Few studies have focused on subjective feelings associated with continued smoking. This study estimates how smoker discontent and regret relate to risk perceptions and health concerns.We analysed data from a 2015 nationally representative, online survey of 1284 US adult current smokers. Information was collected on regret, intention to quit, perceived addiction, risk perceptions and health concerns. Multivariate logistic regression adjusting for sociodemographics and health status was used to examine factors associated with smoker discontent.More than 80% of current smokers report high (22.5%) or very high (59.8%) discontent due to inability to quit, perceived addiction and regret about having started to smoke. Higher levels of discontent did not vary significantly by sex, age, race/ethnicity, education or income (adjusted odds ratios (AORs) 0.5-1.2). Compared with the smokers expressing low (5.9%) or very low (3.6%) discontent, those expressing higher levels of discontent perceived their health status as fair/poor (AOR=2.3), worried most of the time about lung cancer (AOR=4.6) and felt they were more likely to develop lung cancer in the future (AOR=5.1).The proportion of smokers who might be characterised as having a preference to continue smoking are greatly outnumbered by addicted, discontent and concerned smokers who want to quit and regret ever having started to smoke. These discontent smokers could have a substantial net welfare gain if new regulations helped them escape their concerns about the health effects from continuing smoking.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Energy and the Environment: Intersecting Global Issues: V. Human Behavior and Global Change
This article describes studies designed to inform policy makers and practitioners about factors influencing the validity of violence risk assessment and risk communication. Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists were shown case summaries of patients hospitalized with mental disorder and were asked to judge the likelihood that the patient would harm someone within six months after discharge from the hospital. They also judged whether the patient posed a high risk, medium risk, or low risk of harming someone after discharge. Studies 1 and 2 replicated, with real case summaries as stimuli, the response-scale effects found by Slovic and Monahan (1995). Providing clinicians with response scales allowing more discriminability among smaller probabilities led patients to be judged as posing lower probabilities of committing harmful acts. This format effect was not eliminated by having clinicians judge relative frequencies rather than probabilities or by providing them with instruction in how to make these types of judgments. In addition, frequency scales led to lower mean likelihood judgments than did probability scales, but, at any given level of likelihood, a patient was judged as posing higher risk if that likelihood was derived from a frequency scale (e.g., 10 out of 100) than if it was derived from a probability scale (e.g., 10%). Similarly, communicating a patient's dangerousness as a relative frequency (e.g., 2 out of 10) led to much higher perceived risk than did communicating a comparable probability (e.g., 20%). The different reactions to probability and frequency formats appear to be attributable to the more frightening images evoked by frequencies. Implications for risk assessment and risk communication are discussed.
The technical reality is that there are few cut-and-dried facts regarding the probabilities of serious reactor mishaps. The nuclear-power technology is so new and the probabilities in question are so small that risk estimates cannot be based on empirical observation. Reliance on imaginability magnifies fears of nuclear power by blurring the distinction between what is remotely possible and what is probable. Reliance on imaginability helps to produce perception gap and also to sustain it, by acting as a barrier to discussions of nuclear safety. Management of nuclear power must be based upon an understanding of how people think about risks. Certainly the risks from nuclear power seem to be prime candidates for exaggeration because of extensive media coverage they receive and their association with the vivid, imaginable dangers of nuclear war. One inevitable consequence of this perception gap is uncertainty and distrust on the part of a public that suspects the actual risks are vastly greater than the experts' assessments.
