This study investigates older American women's knowledge and risk perceptions about osteoporosis and its treatment. Our results indicate that older U.S. women undervalue the health impact of osteoporosis; they consider it controllable, and neither life threatening nor dreaded relative to other possible diseases or conditions. At least 1/3 of older women in a diagnosed and general sample also confused osteoporosis with arthritis. Women scored highest on osteoporosis knowledge questions related to items under their personal control, such as diet or exercise. Further, women who understood the effects of a particular behavior on osteoporosis were more likely to act in accordance with that knowledge than were women who did not understand those effects.
Public perceptions of risk are a focal point of many debates about the management of hazardous technologies. Different views about what the public knows and wants often lead to quite different beliefs about what policies should be adopted and even about how society's policy-making processes should be structured. Often these views about the public are based on speculation or anecdotal observation. In the interests of having better informed debates, this chapter reviews existing empirical evidence about public risk perceptions. In doing so, it reaches a number of interim conclusions and draws forth their implications for the respective roles of technical experts and laypeople in technology management.
US quarantine announcements do not include information that there is a moderate likelihood that Ebola-exposed people might exhibit symptoms, signalling infectiousness, beyond 21 days. As a result it is possible that if and when there is media coverage in the US of a delayed-symptom case, it might create citizen distrust in public health authorities and information and cause citizens to overestimate the risk of Ebola infection. In this article we report a research study which examined whether openness about post-21-day symptoms would attenuate negative reactions. We ran two experiments with online opportunity (Amazon mTurk) samples of Americans in late October-early November 2014, between the two deaths from Ebola in the US. In these experiments we assessed the reactions of respondents who saw quantitative estimates of post-21-day-symptom likelihood (n = 1413), or were informed about post-21-day symptoms with a rationale for the 21-day period after all saw a mock news story about a US case of 30th-day symptoms (n = 425). We found in both experiments that perceived risk increased and trust declined when people learned of post-21-day symptoms, and disbelief increased that 21 days without symptoms means no Ebola infection. In Study 2, informed persons and controls changed perceived risk and trust relative to baseline; test-group participants distrusted local medical personnel less and wanted shorter quarantines compared to controls who did not receive the information. Our findings suggest that informing Americans about the small likelihood of post-21-days Ebola symptoms would not increase perceived risk and distrust, and might diminish negative reactions to the media reporting a case who developed symptoms of Ebola after 21 days. Thus, public health officials wanting appropriate public responses to potential or actual epidemics may benefit from early communication of unpleasant infectious-disease facts before events reveal them, and signal officials' lack of preparedness for public reactions.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Charitable giving in 2013 exceeded $300 billion, but why do we respond to some life-saving causes while ignoring others? In our first two studies, we demonstrated that valuation of lives is associated with affective feelings (self-reported and psychophysiological) and that a decline in compassion may begin with the second endangered life. In Study 3, this fading of compassion was reversed by describing multiple lives in a more unitary fashion. Study 4 extended our findings to loss-frame scenarios. Our capacity to feel sympathy for people in need appears limited, and this form of compassion fatigue can lead to apathy and inaction, consistent with what is seen repeatedly in response to many large-scale human and environmental catastrophes.
Abstract : The strategy for aiding judgment presented in this report is algorithmic decomposition. To use this approach, a complicated or unknown quantity is decomposed into a number of subproblems that are more manageable or can be estimated more readily. Answers to the component parts of the problem are then combined according to a set of rules (an algorithm) to yield an answer to the original problem. In this experiment we gave subjects questions concerning facts they would be unlikely to know but could estimate and provided subjects with a wrong answer. The subjects' task was to decide whether the given wrong answer was too high or too low. After completing four such items, subjects were given tutorials on how to create algorithms, based on facts they knew or could estimate, to help them in their task. The they completed four more items under instructions to write an algorithm for each one. These efforts to teach subjects to create their own algorithms were successful in the sense that most subjects were able to write algorithms for the questions we gave them. However, the increase in accuracy of their decisions as a result of creating and using algorithms, from 65% to 69%, was only marginally significant and unimpressive in size. (Author) (kr)
Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' 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 as affect heuristic. This article traces the development of this heuristic and discusses some of the important ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk.
Previous work has showed that people are averse to ambiguity and prefer to bet on known probabilities over unknown probabilities. There is also evidence th
Kip Viscusi rejects my critique of his work and restates his view that individuals greatly overestimate the risks from lung cancer and other diseases caused by smoking. But Viscusi's methods are deeply flawed and his analyses, arguments, and conclusions are incorrect. First, he neglects to take into account optimism bias, which leads smokers to believe that they personally are at less risk than other smokers. Second, he fails to demonstrate that smokers appreciate the cumulative nature of smoking risks and the power of addiction that makes it extraordinarily difficult for them to stop smoking when their preferences change and they desire to quit. Third, the quantitative judgments of risk that Viscusi relies upon are so highly determined by methodological biases as to be completely unreliable. A substantial body of evidence supports the conclusion, contrary to Viscusi's, that many young people do not adequately appreciate the risks of smoking. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
No abstract is provided for this article.
No abstract is provided for this article.
This chapter attempts to show the depth and complexity of the public's concerns regarding the risks from pesticides and other chemicals. These concerns transcend national borders and seem to have held remarkably constant for several decades, in spite of views of many toxicologists and other scientists that are quite the opposite from public views. The heavy reliance on testing of chemicals with animals and the quantitative risk assessment that has developed during this same time period may have reinforced and maintained the public's fears of pesticides and other chemicals. Research has also demonstrated that social response to risk is closely related to the position of a hazard within this space. The farther to the right a hazard appears, the higher its perceived risk, the more people want to see its current risks reduced, and the more they want to see strict regulation employed to achieve reduced risk. Risk communication efforts conducted by public relations specialists cannot turn public views around and may, in fact, exacerbate them. Some investigators have taken the limitations of risk science, the difficulty of creating and maintaining trust, and the subjective nature of risk judgments as signs pointing to the need for a radically different approach to dealing with conflicts regarding pesticides and other chemical products.
Older adults need to maintain strong decision‐making capabilities as they age. However, we know little about how age‐related physical and psychological changes affect older adults' judgment and decision processes. This paper reports the results of research comparing older versus younger adults' performance on evaluation and choice tasks about health‐plan options. In particular, comprehension and consistency in judgments (across separate versus joint evaluation contexts) were examined. Results indicated that increasing age was related to greater comprehension errors and inconsistent preferences, even when covariates (education, income, gender, self‐perceived skill and health, decision style, and attitude toward delegation) were taken into account. Discussion of the results emphasizes difficulties in interpreting the meaning of age differences in performance on decision tasks and the need for research that ascertains the seriousness of the consequences of age differences in real‐life tasks. The implications for providing decision‐aiding interventions for older adults are highlighted. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Our world is so constructed that the physical and material benefits we most desire are sprinkled with the seeds of disaster. For example, the search for fertile fields often leads us to floodplains, while our attempt to make less fertile fields productive forces us...
As space scientists and engineers plan new missions to Mars and other planets in our solar system, they will face critical questions about the potential for biological contamination of planetary surfaces. In a society that places ever-increasing importance on the role of public involvement in science and technology policy, questions about risks of biological contamination will be examined and debated in the media, and will lead to the formation of public perceptions of planetary-contamination risks. These perceptions will, over time, form an important input to the development of space policy. Previous research in public and expert perceptions of technological risks and hazards has shown that many of the problems faced by risk-management organizations are the result of differing perceptions of risk (and risk management) between the general public and scientific and technical experts. These differences manifest themselves both as disagreements about the definition (and level) of risk associated with a scientific, technological or industrial enterprise, and as distrust about the ability of risk-management organizations (both public and private) to adequately protect people's health and safety. This report presents the results of a set of survey studies designed to reveal perceptions of planetary exploration and protection from a wide range of respondents, including both members of the general public and experts in the life sciences. The potential value of this research lies in what it reveals about perceptions of risk and benefit that could improve risk-management policies and practices. For example, efforts to communicate with the public about Mars sample return missions could benefit from an understanding of the specific concerns that nonscientists have about such a mission by suggesting areas of potential improvement in public education and information. Assessment of both public and expert perceptions of risk can also be used to provide an advanced signal of aspects of planetary exploration and protection that may be particularly sensitive or controversial and that could prove problematic from a risk-management standpoint, perhaps warranting a more stringent risk-management approach than would otherwise be the case based on technical considerations alone. The design of the study compares perceptions and attitudes about space exploration relevant to a Mars sample return mission between three respondent groups: (1) members of The Planetary Society, a group representing individuals with a strong interest in space-related issues, (2) a group of university-aged students, representing a population relatively sensitive to environmental hazards, and (3) a group of life scientists outside of the space research community. Members of The Planetary Society received the survey as part of a special issue of The Planetary Report on planetary protection, which contained a number of background articles on planetary protection and related topics. A synopsis of the issue was prepared as an introduction to the survey for the other two groups.
