730 publications from this institution
Accidents, discoveries of pollution, safety violations, product tampering epi sodes and other "unfortunate events" occurring within complex industrial systems can be conceptualised as pebbles dropped in a pond. The impacts of such events ripple outward, encompassing first the directly affected victims and property, then the responsible company or agency, and—in the extreme—engulfing other companies, agencies, and industries. Some events make only small ripples; others make large ones, often labelled "in dustrial crises". This paper explores characteristics of unfortunate events and the ways they are managed that affect the breadth and seriousness of the resulting impacts. In doing so, we point toward the development of models that may help companies forecast and avoid industrial crises.
Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamental ways in which human beings comprehend risk. The analytic system uses algorithms and normative rules, such as probability calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It is relatively slow, effortful, and requires conscious control. The experiential system is intuitive, fast, mostly automatic, and not very accessible to conscious awareness. The experiential system enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution and remains today the most natural and most common way to respond to risk. It relies on images and associations, linked by experience to emotion and affect (a that something is good or bad). This system represents risk as a that tells us whether it's safe to walk down this dark street or drink this strange-smelling water. Proponents of formal risk analysis tend to view affective responses to risk as irrational. Current wisdom disputes this view. The rational and the experiential systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other for guidance. Studies have demonstrated that analytic reasoning cannot be effective unless it is guided by emotion and affect. Rational decision making requires proper integration of both modes of thought. Both systems have their advantages, biases, and limitations. Now that we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between emotion and reason that is essential to rational behavior, the challenge before us is to think creatively about what this means for managing risk. On the one hand, how do we apply reason to temper the strong emotions engendered by some risk events? On the other hand, how do we infuse needed doses of feeling into circumstances where lack of experience may otherwise leave us too coldly rational? This article addresses these important questions.
In February of 1996 a study of current and prior residents of the neighborhood adjacent to the Woolfolk Chemical Works Plant (a.k.a. Canadyne, a.k.a. SureCo, a.k.a. the Dust House) in Fort Valley, Georgia was commissioned to assess psychological and social impacts stemming from the above-named chemical plant. All aspects of the study were informed by the collective expertise of the study team and by extant peer-reviewed literature, on the human of experience of contamination (e.g., Edelstein, 1988; Kraus, Malmfors, & Slovic, 1992; Slovic, 1987).
We present the results from the second in a series of ongoing experimental studies of public perceptions of nanotechnology risks. Like the first study, the current one found that members of the public, most of whom know little or nothing about nanotechnology, polarize along cultural lines when exposed to information about it. Extending previous results, the current study also found that cultural polarization of this sort interacts with the perceived cultural identities of policy advocates. Polarization along expected lines grew even more extreme when subjects of diverse cultural outlooks observed an advocate whose values they share advancing an argument they were predisposed to accept, and an advocate whose values they reject advancing an argument they were predisposed to resist. But when those same advocates were assigned the opposite positions, subjects formed perceptions of nanotechnology risks diametrically opposed to the ones normally associated with their own cultural predispositions. Finally, when there was no consistent relationship between the perceived values of advocates and positions taken on nanotechnology risk and benefits, cultural polarization was neutralized. The significance of these findings for promotion of informed public understanding of nanotechnology is discussed.
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.
In Chapter 5, psychologist Paul Slovic and legal scholar David Zionts discuss psychological constraints that impede individuals' ability to respond to the plight of large numbers of people. As a result, individuals price lives differently depending on the numbers involved—specifically, they succumb to a numbing effect whereby they register a greater emotional and financial response to the loss of a few than to the loss of many.
In a series of five experiments, subjects compared pairs of students with respect to potential college GPA. Both students had scores on one common dimension (e.g., English Skills) and one unique dimension (e.g., Quantitative Aptitude for Student A and Need to Achieve Success for Student B). The results indicated that dimensions were weighted more heavily in the comparison when they were common than when they were unique. Cautioning subjects not to increase the weight of the common dimension did not reduce the effect, nor did “correct answer” feedback with rewards for accuracy. In addition, the effect was substantial whether or not the common and unique dimensions had equal means and standard deviations. The results are congruent with a growing body of research that documents man's limitations as an information processor.
Multidimensional functional learning may be studied by means of a general class of tasks in which a multidimensional stimulus pattern is functionally related to a criterion. Subjects learned to predict a numerical criterion value from three numerical cues, varying in importance. In addition to simple outcome feedback, several sophisticated methods of computer-controlled feedback were employed. Results showed that a task with nonlinear cue-criterion relationships was not learned by discrete-trial outcome feedback whether or not the learners had active control over the stimulus sequence, and whether or not the cues were varied randomly or systematically over trials. Computer displays showing both the task characteristics and the learner's response characteristics produced effective learning. So did partial differential feedback (PDF), a continuous form of feedback in which the stimulus characteristics are controlled by the subject and the numerical criterion is replaced by a tonal frequency. These results suggest that appropriate feedback might enable people to learn far more complex functional relationships than have been thought possible.
The objective of informing and educating the public about risk issues seems easy to attain in principle, but, in practice, may be difficult to accomplish. This paper attempts to illustrate why this is so. To be effective, risk communicators must recognize and overcome a number of obstacles that have their roots in the limitations of scientific risk assessment and the idiosyncrasies of the human mind. Doing an adequate job of communicating means finding comprehensible ways of presenting complex technical material that is clouded by uncertainty and inherently difficult to understand. The problems may not be insurmountable, however, if designers of risk information programs are sensitive to the difficulties.
BACKGROUND: Health policymakers are concerned about the proportion of people who say they are unwilling to receive a blood transfusion. This article examines how social, cultural, and political factors affect the perceived risk of transfusions. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Data were collected as part of a large national telephone survey of 1204 people conducted in the United States in 1997 and 1998. The survey elicited images associated with blood transfusions and contained questions about the perceived risk of the blood supply, sensitivity to stigma, worldviews, trust, and demographics. RESULTS: The results showed that a substantial proportion of people do not consider the US blood supply to be safe and say they would not accept blood if hospitalized. The images evoked most frequently by the stimulus phrase “blood transfusions” were related to AIDS or HIV. The people who tend to perceive the greatest personal and public risk from blood transfusions are female, nonwhite, and less educated, and they have not previously received a transfusion. Sensitivity to stigma, mistrust, one's perceived inability to control hazardous activities and technologies, and fatalistic and egalitarian worldviews tend to be associated with heightened concern about the risk of blood transfusions. CONCLUSION: Risk perceptions need to be monitored to anticipate and deal with problems of public acceptance. Risk management strategies should be tailored to the specific characteristics of individuals that are important determinants of the perceived risk of transfusions.
No abstract is provided for this article.
(1995). Health risk perception in Canada I: Rating hazards, sources of information and responsibility for health protection. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 117-132.
Measuring reaction times to number comparisons is thought to reveal a processing stage in elementary numerical cognition linked to internal, imprecise representations of number magnitudes. These intuitive representations of the mental number line have been demonstrated across species and human development but have been little explored in decision making. This paper develops and tests hypotheses about the influence of such evolutionarily ancient, intuitive numbers on human decisions. We demonstrate that individuals with more precise mental-number-line representations are higher in numeracy (number skills) consistent with previous research with children. Individuals with more precise representations (compared to those with less precise representations) also were more likely to choose larger, later amounts over smaller, immediate amounts, particularly with a larger proportional difference between the two monetary outcomes. In addition, they were more likely to choose an option with a larger proportional but smaller absolute difference compared to those with less precise representations. These results are consistent with intuitive number representations underlying: a) perceived differences between numbers, b) the extent to which proportional differences are weighed in decisions, and, ultimately, c) the valuation of decision options. Human decision processes involving numbers important to health and financial matters may be rooted in elementary, biological processes shared with other species.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Decisions about societal risks require high-level thinking and reasoning on the part of both experts and the public. They require an appreciation of the probabilistic nature of the world and the ability to think intelligently about low-probability events. Nuclear power is frightening because it has the dubious distinction of scoring high on many characteristics that heighten anxiety and stimulate aversion to risk. The risk-benefit conflicts starkly posed by gambles trigger anxiety. One way to counter this anxiety is to deny the uncertainty, to deny that life is a gamble, to view the world as perfectly safe--or at least safe enough so that we don't need to worry about the risk. Although the study of individual human minds is a rather narrow starting point for examining societal risk taking, it appears to lead quickly to important issues that need to be addressed by the entire community of scientists, policy makers, and public citizens.
The social amplification of risk is a theoretical framework that addresses an important deficiency of formal risk assessment methods and procedures. Typically assessments of risk from technological mishaps have been based upon the expected number of people who could be killed or injured or the amount of property that might be damaged. The diverse and consequential impacts that followed in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident make it clear that risk assessments that exclude the role of public perceptions of risk will greatly underestimate the potential costs of certain types of hazards. The accident at Three Mile Island produced no direct fatalities and few, if any, expected deaths due to cancer, yet few other accidents in history have had such costly societal impacts. The experience of amplified impacts argues for the development of a broadened theoretical and methodological perspective capable of integrating technical assessment of risk with public perceptions. This report presents the results to date in an ongoing research effort to better understand the complex processes by which adverse events produce impacts. In particular this research attempts to construct a framework that can account for those events that have produced, or are capable of producing, greater societal more » impacts than would be forecast by traditional risk assessment methods. This study demonstrates that the social amplification of risk involves interactions between sophisticated technological hazards, public and private institutions, and subtle individual and public perceptions and behaviors. These factors, and the variables underlying the intricate processes of social amplification that occur in modern society, are not fully defined and clarified in this report. 19 refs., 9 figs., 10 tabs. « less
Judgments of risk and judgments of benefit have been found to be inversely related. Activities or technologies that are judged high in risk tend to be judged low in benefit, and vice versa. In the present study, we examine this inverse relationship in detail, using two measures of relationship between risk and benefit. We find that the inverse relationship is robust and indicative of a confounding of risk and benefit in people's minds. This confounding is linked to a person's overall evaluation of an activity or technology. Theoretical and practical implications of this risk‐benefit confounding are discussed.
In this chapter, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding some of the ways that affect can influence judgment and decision making. Affect and emotion have been topics of study for centuries and, as a result, the literature is vast. One recent search found more than 5,000 citations to this topic over the previous five years (Cacioppo & Gardner, 1999). In this chapter we will obviously address only small portions of this literature. We hope, however, that the chapter will be viewed as an invitation for further exploration of the impact of affect on decisions. The theory we will introduce demonstrates the importance of affect in guiding evaluations and choices. We offer a parsimonious explanation for many patterns of results revealed in judgment and decision-making research and support the theory with some of our own data. Draft January 10, 2002 C:\Authors_Diana\Melissa\JDM Dance.doc2/18/03 iii
