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Hidden Rules Often Distort Ideas of RiskExcerpted from: New York Times, February 1, 1994,
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Too often, psychologists say, people's worries about a given risk are out of proportion, with the fear either far greater than the actual danger or occasionally, less. Now studies are showing that these skews in perception follow hidden psychological rules that can explain why one risk is exaggerated in people's minds while another is played down. These findings on the mismatch between actual and perceived risk are of special interest to public health and environmental officials who, in trying to reach people more effectively with helpful information about hazards, have turned to psychologists to fine-tune their messages. "There are often large discrepancies between the risks experts worried about and those lay people were most concerned about," said Dr. Baruch Fischoff, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who is a leader in the study of risk perception. "We've tried to unravel the bases for these disagreements." In a classic study, Dr. Paul Slovic, director of Decision Research, a consulting firm in Eugene, Ore., compared the responses from two groups, 15 national experts on risk assessment and 40 members of the League of Women Voters, on the relative risks of 30 activities and technologies, and found striking disparities. While the League members rated nuclear power as the No. 1 risk, the experts ranked it 20th, while the experts put Xrays at No. 7, the League members ranked it at No. 22.The perception of a given risk, from exposure to asbestos or toxic waste, is amplified by what psychologists call "outrage factors," which can make people feel that even small risks are unacceptable, according to an article by Dr. Abraham Wandersman, a psychologist at the University of South Carolina, and Dr. William Hallman, a psychologist at Rutgers, that appeared last year in the journal American Psychologist. Other factors determining perception of risk have been identified in a variety of studies, and include these: 1.) Risks that are imposed loom larger than those that are voluntary. People will accept the risk from skiing, for example, but not from food preservatives, even though the potential for injury or ill health from skiing is roughly 1,000 times that from preservatives, according to a 1987 article in the journal Science by Dr. Slovic. 2.) Risks that seem unfairly shared are also seen as more hazardous. "If I'm not getting anything from it, while other people benefit, a risk is more objectionable," said Dr. Fischoff. 3.) Risks that people can take steps to control are more acceptable than those they feel are beyond their control. "What you choose to eat is under your control, but what's in your drinking water is not," said Dr. Slovic. 4.) Natural risks are less threatening than man-made ones. For example, the exposure to radon found naturally in the soil is more acceptable than exposure to the same amount of radon from radioactive mine tailings. 5.) Risks that are associated with catastrophes are especially frightening, the accident at Bhopal, India, amplified people's fears of chemical plants, just as the recent earthquake in Los Angeles has made people's fears of a repeat more vivid. 6.) Risks from exotic technologies create more dread than do those involving familiar ones. A train wreck that takes many lives has less impact on people's trust of trains than would a smaller, hypothetical accident involving recombinant DNA, which might be "perceived as a harbinger of further, possibly catastrophic, mishaps " Dr. Slovic wrote in a 1991 article in Science.
"The greater the number and seriousness of these factors, the greater the likelihood of public concern about the risk, regardless of the scientific data," concluded a 1991 report by Dr. Caron Chess and colleagues at the Environmental Communication Research Program at the Cook College campus of Rutgers University. The report points out that when officials dismiss such concerns as misguided they stir anger and distrust, and advises that officials pay as much attention to these outrage factors as to scientific findings on risk. News coverage is of major importance in people's reaction to a risk the more attention the news media pay to it, the worse it is assumed to be. "If scientists are studying it and the news reports it, people assume it must be worth their attention," said Dr. Fischoff. "That's not a bad rule of thumb, but it can be misleading. A while back there was lots of media attention paid to saccharin as a cancer risk, even though the scientists involved knew it was a relatively minor risk." Health officials are often frustrated when people are casual about risks that are quite immediate for them. A study of hikers at parks in New Jersey known to have high counts of ticks carrying Lyme disease found, for example, that although 84 percent knew about a precaution they could take against getting the disease, only 43 percent took it. "Why don't people take the precautions?" said Dr. Hallman, who did the study. "They discount them in their minds, telling you things like, 'We're just going to be here for a little while,' or that getting Lyme disease is just a matter of bad luck. They have a sense of fatalism." People minimize the risk of Lyme disease for several reasons, Dr. Hallman said, including the fact that it is a natural, as opposed to man-made hazard, and that people who go outdoors put themselves at risk volun tartly. "Moreover, the danger itself_ the ticks_are virtually invisible, the signs of danger are vague and the symptoms are ambiguous," said Dr. Hallman.
Some researchers argue that estimates of some risks like the siting of hazardous waste plants, should be modified to take into account the perceptions of the public, rather than based on expert opinion alone. And some health officials argue that since perceived hazards have real health consequences, because of the psycho Iogical distress they create, they should be factored into risk assessments. Mistrust of Risk Assessment "Government regulators and industry officials look at very different parts of the elephant in assessing risk than do people in the community," said Dr. Wandersman. "Officials look at mortality rates to assess risk while local people worry about their children and potential long-term health risk, which is not part of the standard risk-assessment formula. Local people worry about things like risks from 40 huge trucks filled with hazardous wastes driving by every day. "Psychologists point out that though industry and Federal agencies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to assess the objective risks of hazardous chemicals, nuclear wastes dams and the like_and based regulatory efforts on these assessments_ the public's perception of these risks is little influenced by the scientific, assessments, partly because of wide spread mistrust of technical assessments. Among the forces that erode trust in official estimates of risk, Dr. Slovic reports in an article to be published this year in the journal Risk Analysis is the fact that negative events _ exposure of a lie or an accident at a chemical plant, for example_are far more vivid in people's minds and carry a much stronger impact than do events that might build confidence like the fact that the plant manager lives close by. Dr. Wandersman cited as an example a widely publicized incident ir December 1992 in which radioactive water leaked into the Savannah River from a plutonium-processing plant near Aiken, S.C. "It was a major loca) employer, with 25,000 people working there," said Dr. Wandersman. "If people work there and feel safe, they tell their neighbors it's safe." After the leak, however, "people started to doubt all the assurances of safety they had heard over the years." Dr. Slovic said, "Another idiosyncracy of human psychology is that people put more stock in reports of bad news than in reports that might increase their trust." For example, in a series of investigations Dr. Slovic found
that public trust in studies that use animal exposure to a substance to predict
its effect on human health is not very high when they conclude that the
substance is safe. But when such studies find that a chemical is carcinogenic to
humans, people express great confidence in the validity of the results. |
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