No abstract is provided for this article.
A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately.However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies such as genocide or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. This might seem irrational but I think this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action.I shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.
In the context of health, safety, and environmental decisions, the concept of risk involves value judgments that reflect much more than just the probability and consequences of the occurrence of an event. This article conceptualizes the act of defining and assessing risk as a game in which the rules must be socially negotiated within the context of a specific problem. This contextualist view of risk provides insight into why technical approaches to risk management often fail with problems such as those involving radiation and chemicals, where scientific experts and the public disagree on the nature of the risks. It also highlights the need for allowing the interested and affected parties to define and play the game, thus emphasizing the importance of institutional, procedural, and societal processes in risk management decisions.
'To understand how people deal with risk, you have to begin with the psychology of risk. To understand the psychology of risk, you have to begin with the work of Paul Slovic. This book is fundamental: Anyone concerned with risk in any of its various and shifting forms absolutely must read it.'-Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
This chapter discusses perception and acceptance of risks from energy systems, with particular emphasis being placed on responses to nuclear power. Despite the importance of these questions, we are only beginning to understand the social and psychological factors that determine public responses to technological risks in general and from energy systems in particular. Evaluation of the risks from energy systems requires, of experts and lay people alike, an appreciation of the probabilistic nature of the world and an ability to think intelligently about unlikely, but consequential events. A characteristic feature of many risk debates is the confrontation between polarized views held with great confidence. The basic research cited above, supplemented by studies of perceptions of specific energy systems, could deepen our understanding of how and why people form attitudes towards those systems and what are the possibilities for greater societal consensus.
About the Contributors PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. The Risks of Active and Passive Smoking - J Samet 2. Profile of Smokers and Smoking - P Jamieson and D Romer PART TWO: PERCEPTIONS OF RISKY ADOLESCENTS AND ADULTS 3. What Do Young People Think They Know About the Risks of Smoking? - P Jamieson and D Romer 4. The Role of Perceived Risk in Starting and Stopping Smoking - D Romer and P Jamieson 5. Smokers' Recognition of Their Vulnerability to Harm - P Slovic 6. Cigarette Smokers: Rational Actors or Rational Fools? - P Slovic PART THREE: MEDIA INFLUENCE ON SMOKING 7. Advertising, Smoker Imagery, and the Diffusion of Smoking Behavior - D Romer and P Jamieson PART FOUR: ADDICTION 8. The Nature of Nicotine Addiction - N Benowitz 9. A Visceral Account of Addiction - G Loewenstein 10. The Catch 22 of Smoking and Quitting - D Romer, P Jamieson, and R Kirkland Ahern PART FIVE: LEGAL AND POLICY PERSPECTIVES 11. The Joint Failure of Economic Theory and Legal Regulation - J Hanson and D Kysar 12. Tobacco and Public Health Policy: A Youth-Centered Approach - R Bonnie Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C References Index
When people attempt to integrate multiple cues into a single judgment, does the cognitive load produced by the integration process lead to simplification of the cue-judgment relationships?Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the strain of integrating information is reduced by treating non-linear cues as though they were linearly related to the object being judged.The experiments differed with respect to task content, number of cues and f~nctional relations between cues and judgments.The results did not support the hypothesis.Scale values derived from single stimulus scales did not differ from those obtained with information integration procedures; there were no significant deviations from bilinearity when the_ cue values were c_'?_mpared across the t'.".'o scale types; .. This• finding was interpreted as support for the assumption in information integration theory that cue values are translated into judgment relevant subjective values before the integration process.
Emotional reactions are an important element in the motivation to help others. Our research examined the role of affective vs. deliberative information processing in the genesis and use of emotional reactions in decisions to provide financial aid to people in distress. In two studies, we investigated whether information processing mode influenced participants' donations, affective reactions, and the relationship between the two. Information processing was manipulated by a priming procedure and a cognitive load paradigm. Participants' empathic emotions were assessed by self‐reported sympathy, compassion, and distress. Additionally, we measured how much better a donation would make participants feel and their anticipated regret for not donating, which were taken as indicators of their motivation to donate as a form of mood management. Results suggest that different mechanisms govern the initial decision to donate money (Stage 1) compared to later decisions on how much money to donate (Stage 2). Motivations for mood management were primarily predictive of donation decisions, whereas empathic feelings were predictive of the donation amount. The potentially disruptive effects of deliberative processing on prosocial behavior are discussed in light of a two‐stage processing model of donations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In July, 1989 the authors produced a report titled Perceived Risk, Stigma, and Potential Economic Impacts of a High-Level Nuclear-Waste Repository in Nevada (Slovic et al., 1989). That report described a program of research designed to assess the potential impacts of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada upon tourism, retirement and job-related migration, and business development in Las Vegas and the state. It was concluded that adverse economic impacts potentially may result from two related social processes. Specifically, the study by Slovic et al. employed analyses of imagery in order to overcome concerns about the validity of direct questions regarding the influence of a nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain upon a person`s future behaviors. During the latter months of 1989, data were collected in three major telephone surveys, designed to achieve the following objectives: (1) to replicate the results from the Phoenix, Arizona, surveys using samples from other populations that contribute to tourism, migration, and development in Nevada; (2) to retest the original Phoenix respondents to determine the stability of their images across an 18-month time period and to determine whether their vacation choices subsequent to the first survey were predictable from the images they produced inmore » that original survey; (3) to elicit additional word-association images for the stimulus underground nuclear waste repository in order to determine whether the extreme negative images generated by the Phoenix respondents would occur with other samples of respondents; and (4) to develop and test a new method for imagery elicitation, based upon a rating technique rather than on word associations. 2 refs., 8 figs., 13 tabs.« less
