730 publications from this institution
This book is a collection of papers and research articles on preference construction. The central idea is that in many situations we do not really know what we prefer; we must construct our preferences as the situation arises.
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Perceptions of risk have been the subject of serious scientific study for over 30 years. Although many experts in risk management and public health believe that the world has become safer during this time, survey results suggest that public fears of technological hazards have increased substantially. One of the clearest signs of this gap is the increasing evidence that certain places, products, and technologies have become stigmatized: shunned by an anxious public not just because of standard perceptions of risk but because a positive condition or expectation has been overturned. In legislatures, courtrooms, and economic markets around the world, stigma represents an increasingly significant factor affecting people's perceptions of their health and influencing the acceptance of scientific and technological innovations. This paper reviews our current understanding of the risk perceptions that lie behind stigma, discusses relevant results from two recent Canadian surveys, and examines recommended management responses.
Environmental events such as natural disasters may influence the public's affective reactions and decisions. Shortly after the 2004 Tsunami disaster we assessed how affect elicited by thinking about this disaster influenced risk perceptions and future time perspective in Swedish undergraduates not directly affected by the disaster. An experimental manipulation was used to increase the salience of affect associated with the disaster. In Study 1 we found that participants reminded about the tsunami had a sense that their life was more finite and included fewer opportunities than participants in the control condition (not reminded about the tsunami). In Study 2 we found similar effects for risk perceptions. In addition, we showed that manipulations of ease-of-thought influenced the extent to which affect influenced these risk perceptions, with greater ease of thoughts being associated with greater perceived risks.
This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate”. We argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic”. In this paper we trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths followed by ourselves and many others. We also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.
In recent years there have been several hundred studies within the rather narrowly-defined topic of information utilization in judgment and decision making. Much of this work has been accomplished within two basic schools of research, which we have labeled the “regression” and the “Bayesian” approaches. Each has its characteristic tasks and characteristic information that must be processed to accomplish these tasks. For the most part, researchers have tended to work strictly within a single approach and there has been minimal communication between the resultant subgroups of workers. Our objective here is to present a review and comparative analysis of these two approaches. Within each, we examine (a) the models that have been developed for describing and prescribing the use of information in decision making; (b) the major experimental paradigms, including the types of judgment, prediction, and decision tasks and the kinds of information that have been available to the decision maker in these tasks; (c) the key independent variables that have been manipulated in experimental studies; and (d) the major empirical results and conclusions. In comparing these approaches, we seek the answers to two basic questions. First, do the specific models and methods characteristic of different paradigms direct the researcher's attention to certain problems and cause him to neglect others that may be equally important? Second, can a researcher studying a particular substantive problem increase his understanding by employing diverse models and diverse experimental methods?
Understanding those factors critical to predicting public response is crucial to our ability to model the consequences of a terrorist strike in an urban area. Sixteen hypothetical damage scenarios were systematically varied according to non-terrorism vs. terrorism, explosions vs. infectious disease releases, terrorists’ motives as demands to release prisoners vs. solely to instill fear, non-terrorists’ motives as nonintentional vs. intentional (criminal), victims as government officials vs. tourists, non-terrorist incidents as involving no negligence vs. negligence, terrorist acts as non-suicidal vs. suicidal, and number of casualties (0, 15, 495). The setting was a local theme park. Students at a university in San Diego County were randomly assigned to different scenario conditions. For these scenarios, they were asked to address a number of questions regarding their perceptions and likely behaviors during and following an accident or terrorist strike. Results from regression modeling and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) indicated that terrorism and the mechanism used were most influential followed by the presence of suicide or negligence, motive, and victim. Number of casualties made little difference once these other factors were accounted for. To forecast community response, a system dynamics model was introduced that incorporated the study’s survey findings. This model simulated the immediate and mid-term diffusion of fear in a community for different types of accidental and terrorist events. These findings should prove useful to those wishing to predict public response to a variety of different contingencies involving terrorism.
The concept of risk is an outgrowth of our society's great concern about coping with the dangers of modern life. The Perception of Risk brings together the work
Very often the risks of driving are expressed in terms of the total number of deaths that occur yearly as the result of motor vehicle operation. Yet, despite the thousands of people who die each year in automobiles in the U.S. alone, driving behavior seems relatively...
Data collected in two nationwide surveys (N=361 and N=788) provide insight into the extent to which smokers recognize the ease of addiction and the difficulty of quitting. Smokers generally acknowledge that addiction occurs quickly and that smokers have considerable difficulty quitting. Youth smokers, however, generally believe that they would have less difficulty than other smokers and that they are less addicted than the average smoker. Adult smokers tend to say they are not different from other smokers in addiction or ability to quit. Nevertheless, both youth and adult smokers who want to quit greatly overestimate the likelihood that they will succeed in the coming year. Few smokers think about how long they will smoke when they first begin, and the reluctance to believe that they could have serious difficulty quitting may help in the progression from experimental to established smoker.
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.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
