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Three methods for making a consumer product safety decision were evaluated on scales relating to their perceived acceptability, logical soundness, completeness, and sensitivity to moral and ethical concerns. Two of the methods were formalized techniques: cost‐benefit analysis and risk analysis. The third method involved abiding by standard industry practices. Other factors in the decision‐making context were also varied. The results indicated that formalized techniques were preferred over the standard practices method. Within the formalized methods, cost‐benefit analysis was judged less acceptable than a comparable method that did not involve making explicit value tradeoffs. All methods were judged more acceptable when they led to improved product safety. Knowledge of consequences did not exert direct effect on judgments, though it did interact significantly with other variables. The results are discussed in terms of judgmental processes that people apply when evaluating decision methods.
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No abstract is provided for this article.
Clarifying lay views is a crucial step in characterizing the “social construct” of global change. This article discusses lay perceptions of ecological risks associated with three global environmental change processes: (a) climate change, (b) ozone depletion, and (c) species loss. A psychometric risk perception study obtained judgements from 68 subjects about 65 ecological risk items in terms of 31 scales. The findings show that sources of the three global change processes (eg refrigeration) are viewed quite differently than are the consequences (eg ozone depletion). There seems to be a persistent lack of connection in judgements regarding causes and consequences. Several possible explanations for these patterns are discussed. Implications of these patterns are considered in terms of possible policy responses, and improved risk communication strategies.
The Department of Energy's program for disposing of high-level radioactive wastes has been impeded by overwhelming political opposition fueled by public perceptions of risk. Analysis of these perceptions shows them to be deeply rooted in images of fear and dread that have been present since the discovery of radioactivity. The development and use of nuclear weapons linked these images to reality and the mishandling of radioactive wastes from the nation's military weapons facilities has contributed toward creating a profound state of distrust that cannot be erased quickly or easily. Postponing the permanent repository and employing dry-cask storage of wastes on site would provide the time necessary for difficult social and political issues to be resolved.
In this chapter, we report on three psychometric scaling studies, summarized in Table 1. In each study, participants rated a given set of hazards on a range of risk characteristics and indicated the degree of risk reduction and regulation they desired. Based on this data, we explore the relationships among risk characteristics and a smaller number of dimensions (factors) derived from them. We also relate risk characteristics to people's perception of risk and their desire for risk reduction and regulation. Our work builds on and extends earlier studies with a smaller number of hazards and risk characteristics (Fischhoff et al., 1978).
Risk is perceived and acted on in 2 fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' fast, 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 with affect heuristic. The authors trace the development of this heuristic across a variety of research paths. The authors also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk, and, more generally, how it influences all human decision making. Finally, some important implications of the affect heuristic for communication and decision making pertaining to cancer prevention and treatment are briefly discussed.
Abstract : According to the normative theory of prediction, prior probabilities (base rates) which summarize what we know before receiving any specific evidence, should remain relevant even after such evidence is obtained. In the present study, subjects were asked to estimate the probability that one of two states was true on the basis of (a) information about the prior probabilities of the states and (b) individuating information, specific to the case at hand and known to be accurate with probability p. Subjects' responses were determined predominantly by the specific evidence; the prior probabilities were neglected, causing the judgments to deviate markedly from the normative response. Theoretical and practical implications of this result are discussed.
The “identifiable victim effect” refers to peoples' tendency to preferentially give to identified versus anonymous victims of misfortune, and has been proposed to partly depend on affect. By soliciting charitable donations from human subjects during behavioral and neural (i.e., functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiments, we sought to determine whether and how affect might promote the identifiable victim effect. Behaviorally, subjects gave more to orphans depicted by photographs versus silhouettes, and their shift in preferences was mediated by photograph-induced feelings of positive arousal, but not negative arousal. Neurally, while photographs versus silhouettes elicited activity in widespread circuits associated with facial and affective processing, only nucleus accumbens activity predicted and could statistically account for increased donations. Together, these findings suggest that presenting evaluable identifiable information can recruit positive arousal, which then promotes giving. We propose that affect elicited by identifiable stimuli can compel people to give more to strangers, even despite costs to the self.
No abstract is provided for this article.
In three studies, with samples from different countries (the United States and Israel) and religions (Christians and Jews), we found that individual levels of fear of death significantly predicted lower willingness to register as organ donors (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, after being asked about their organ donation status (i.e., whether they are registered as donors), fear of death significantly increased among unregistered people. This did not occur among registered people, who had already faced the decision to become donors in the past (Study 2). Finally, providing non-registered (non-religious) people with a defense strategy to manage their fear of death increased their willingness to sign an organ donation commitment, partially by increasing their feelings of hopefulness. The implications of these findings for increasing organ donation registration are discussed.
A questionnaire with items that had been used in a national survey of the general public was administered to persons attending an American Nuclear Society meeting. The items asked about risks associated with high‐level nuclear waste (HLNW), trust in nuclear‐waste program managers, costs and benefits of a repository project, and images of a HLNW repository. The results suggest that nuclear industry experts may have very different opinions from the general public about most of these items and their images of a repository indicate a vastly different conceptual framework within which their opinions are formed.
How should the affective component of attitudes be conceptualised and measured? Three studies compared measures based on different conceptualisations. Affective attitudes can be: (1) holistic reactions to objects or responses derived from spontaneous images of the objects; (2) bipolar or unipolar in structure; and finally (3) discrete emotional evaluations (e.g., angry, happy) or more general valenced evaluations (e.g., good, bad). It is recommended that further research with self-reports of the affective component include the holistic, unipolar, discrete emotion (HUE) evaluative measures developed in this paper in combination with a holistic bipolar valenced evaluation measure. Our results also supported a hypothesised affective asynchrony effect. Specifically, an affective measure that required more deliberative thought reduced the correspondence between the affective component and intended behaviours/attitudes. Implications for how the affective component may be represented in memory and the impact of that representation on constructed attitudes are discussed briefly.
: Preference can be inferred from direct choice between options or from a matching procedure in which the decision maker adjusts one option to match another. Studies of perferences between two-dimensional options (e.g., public policies, job applicants, benefit plans) show that the more prominent dimension looms larger in choice than in matching. Thus, choice is more lexicographic than matching. This finding is viewed as an instance of a general principle of compatibility: the weighting of input is enhanced by their compatibility with the output. To account for such effects, we develop a hierarchy of models in which the tradeoff between attributes is contingent on the nature of the response. The simplest theory of this type, called the contingent weighting model, is applied to the analysis of various compatibility effects, including the choice-matching discrepancy and the preference-reversal phenomenon. These results raise both conceptual and practical questions concerning the nature, the meaning and the assessment of preference.
