Improving Risk Communication (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix C: Risk- A Guide to Controversy
Appendix C: Risk- A Guide to Controversy
Pages 211-319
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Its form is that of a "diagnostic guide," showing participants and observers how to characterize risk controversies 211
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It is hoped that the guide will help make risk controversies more comprehensible and help citizens and professional risk managers play more effective roles in them. The guide was written for the committee by one of its members.
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APPENDIX C Debates Over Substance May Disguise Battles Over Form, and Vice Versa, 275 Laypeople and Experts Disagree About What Is Feasible, 277 I,aypeople and Experts See the Facts Differently, 278 Summary, 280 V STRATEGIES FOR RISK COMMUNICATION.. Concepts of Risk Communication, 282 Some Simple Strategies, 283 Conceptualizing Communication Programs, 286 Evaluating Communication Programs, 291 Summary, 298 213 .282 VI PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES IN COMMUNICATION DESIGN..e..ee..e..ee.e..eeeeee...e.e.e....eeeeeeeeeeeee.eee 299 People Simplify, 299 Once People's Minds Are Made Up, It Is Difficult to Change Them, 300 People Remember What They See, 301 People Cannot Readily Detect Omissions in the Evidence They Receive, 301 People May Disagree More About What Risk Is Than About How Large It Is, 302 People Have Difficulty Detecting Inconsistencies in Risk Disputes, 303 Summary, 304 VII C O N C L U SIO N 305 Individual Learning, 305 Societal Learning, 307 BIBI,IOGRAPHY 309
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Thus, experts wright respect the public more if they were better able to predict its behavior, even if they would prefer that the public behave otherwise. Sirn~larly, understanding the basics of risk analysis might make disputes among technical experts seem less capricious to the lay public.
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What are the alternatives for designing risk communication programs? What are the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches?
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At no time, however, will diagnosis be simple or human behavior be completely predictable. All that this, or any other, diagnostic guide can hope to do is ensure that significant elements of a social-political-psychological process are not overlooked.
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Indeed, in many cases, the risks prove to be a side issue, upon which are hung disagreements about the size and distribution of benefits or about the allocation of political power in a society. In all cases, though, some understanding of the science of risk is needed, if only to establish that a rough understanding of the magnitude of the risk is all that one needs for effective participation in the risk debate.
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"~. Often those who have the relevant information refuse to divulge it because it might reveal proprietary secrets or turn public opinion against their cause.
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It does, however, help users exploit all they know-and acknowledge what they leave out. Some protocols that can be used in looking at risk analyses are the causal model, the fault tree, a materials and energy flow diagram, and a risk analysis checklist.
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Each is described generically as well as by specific control actions. Thus control stage 2 would read: "You can modify technology choice by substituting public transit for automobile use and thus block the further evolution of the motor vehicle accident sequence arising out of automobile use." The time dimension refers to the ordering of a specific hazard sequence; it does not necessarily indicate the time scale of managerial action.
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, which lays out the sequence of events that must occur for a particular accident to happen (Green and Bourne, 1972; U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1983~.
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In the former case, failure to ban EDB looks much more callous than in the latter. A Risk Analysis Checklist The fourth aid (Figure IT.4)
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discipline, such as toxicology and biochemistry, involved in pesticide management, when suddenly they were confronted with a new procedure-risk analysis. In principle, risk analysis does no more than organize information from substantive disciplines in a way that allows overall estimates of risk to be computed.
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7. Does the risk analysis disclose the confidence limits for its projections and the method of arriving at those confidence limits?
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One reason for the survival of such simplistic and contradictory positions is political convenience. Some people want the lay public to participate actively in hazard management decisions, and need to be able to describe the public as competent; others need an incompetent public to legitimate an expert elite.
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"~. Table IT.1 expresses their judgments in a common format and reveals even more dramatic effects of question phrasing on expressed risk perceptions.
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Similar discrepancies occurred with other questions and other hazards. One consequence for risk communicators is that whether laypeople intuitively overestimate or underestimate risks (or perceive them accurately)
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This risk estimate is considerably more in line with scientific thinking so that an investigator asking this question would have a considerably more optimistic assessment of the state of public understanding. Unfortunately, it is also completely inconsistent with the single-case estimates produced by the same individuals.
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power plant looming on the opposite shore. They asked "Would you pay $1, $2, $3?
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230 APPENDIX C issues are formulated (e.g., social discount rates, minuscule probabilities, or megadeaths)
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In the United States, married people are generally happier than unmarried people. Reminding them of that aspect of their life apparently changed the information that they brought to the happiness question.
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Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. The accepted scientific estimate of the consequences of the program are as follows: If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
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Listeners feel that they "knew it all along" and that the social scientist was just "affirming the obvious" or "validating common sense." One possible antidote to this feeling is to point out the evidence showing that, in hindsight, people exaggerate how much they could have known in foresight, leading them to discount the informativeness of scientific ~ 40 > LL o LL J In So at o z 20 LL ILL , T _ _ it, it" \ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 F M A M J J A S O N D 1972 YEAR , _ _ , _ NORC SRC Illlllillllllll F M A M J J A S O N D F M A M J J A S O N D 1971 1973 1974 FIGURE II.7 Trends in self-reported happiness derived from sample surveys of the noninstitutionalized population of the continental United States aged 18 and over. Error bars dem ark Al standard error around sample estimate.
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, endoscopy (Roling et al., 1977) , and oral contraceptives (Applied Management Sciences, 1978; Joubert and Lasagna, 1975~.
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The surprising nature of these results may tell us something about ourselves as well an about the people we observe. One of the most robust psychological discoveries of the past 20 years has been identification of the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to view ourselves as highly sensitive to the demands of varying situations, but to see others as driven to consistent behavior by dominating personality traits (Nisbett and Ross, 1980~.
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. Many, of course, do not, and none could learn the hard questions about all of the sciences impinging on complex risk issues.
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~. 0~ science introduced into an environmental dispute, whether it be a single rodent bioassay or a full-blown risk analysis, is whether it actually represents a bit of science.
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Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1975~. As noted in Figure IT.2, a fault tree consists of a logical structuring of what would have to happen for an accident (e.g., a meltdowns to occur.
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Example: The partial protection afforded by dams and levees gives people a false sense of security and promotes development of the flood plain. Thus, although floods are rarer, damage per flood is so much greater that the average yearly loss in dollars is larger than before the dams were built (Burton et al., 1978~.
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The judgments incorporated in risk assessments are typically those of esteemed technical experts, but they are judgments nonetheless, taking one beyond the realm of established fact and into the realm of educated opinions that cannot immediately be validated. Judgment arises whenever materials scientists estimate the failure rates for valves subjected to novel conditions (Joksimovich, 1984; ·Ostberg et al., 1977)
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However, detailed treatments of the judgments they make in the absence of firm evidence are seldom forthcoming (Federal Register 49~100~:21594-21661~. There appear to be several possible causes for this neglect.
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These include both procedures used to assess discrete hazards (e.g., accidents) , such as probabilistic risk analysis, and procedures used to assess continuous hazards (e.g., toxicity)
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For example, listing all possible mistakes that operators of a process-control industry might make is different than estimating how frequently each mistake will be made. The former requires heavy reliance on memory for instances of past errors, whereas the latter requires aggregation across diverse experiences and their extrapolation to future situations.
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As one might expect, considerably more is known about the judgmental processes of laypeople than about the judgmental processes of experts performing tasks in their areas of expertise. It is simply much easier to gain access to laypeople and create tasks about everyday events.
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surveyed published articles in a respected psychological journal and found very low power. Even under the charitable assumption that all underlying effects were large, a quarter of the studies had less than three chances in four of showing statistically significant results.
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critique of the historiography of the ideological roots of Nazism; looking back from the Third Reich, one can trace its roots to the writings of many authors from whose writings one could not have projected Nazism. A third form of hindsight bias, also called "presentism,~ is to imagine that the participants in a historical situation were fully aware of its eventual importance t"Dear Diary, The Hundred Years' War started today" "Fischer, 1970~.
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Since no magic will provide certainty, our plans must work without it" (WohIstetter, 1962:401~. Judging Probabilistic Processes After seeing four successive heads in flips of a fair coin, most people expect a tails.
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One depressing failure by experts to appreciate this fact is seen in Campbell and ErIebacher's (1970) article, "How regression artifacts in quasi-experimental evaluations can mistakenly make compensatory education Took harmful" (because upon retest, the performance of the better students seems to have deteriorated)
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Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1975) was an important step toward formalizing the role of risk in technological systems, although a subsequent review was needed to clarify the extent to which these estimates were but the product of fallible, educated judgment (U.S.
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Particle physicists' estimates of the value of several physical constants are bracketed by what might be called confidence intervals, showing the range of likely values within which the true
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However, the confidence intervals define what constitute surprises in terms of current physical theory. Unless the
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1986 by the American Association of Physics Teachers.
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Sections IV through VI deal with the human anchors for risk controversies: the nature of their political tensions, the strategies that risk communicators can take in them, and psychological barriers to risk communication. The next section (~)
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Even technical experts may fall prey to partisanship as they advance views on political topics beyond their fields of expertise, downplay facts they believe will worry the public, or make statements that cannot be verified. Although a careful delineation between values and facts can help prevent values from hiding in facts' clothing, it cannot assure that a complete separation will ever be possible (Bazelon, 1979; Callen, 1976~.
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to keep "unnecessary" records on occupational hazards, or innovators protect proprietary information (Lave, 1978; Pearce, 1979; Schneiderman, 1980~. Whereas individual scientists create data, it is the community of scientists and other interpreters who create facts by integrating data (Levine, 19743.
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comparison of the risks of different energy sources, he succeeded in creating a new perspective that was deleterious to the opponents of nuclear power. As mentioned earlier, incorrect intuitions regarding the statistical power of statistical designs can lead to research that implicitly values chemicals more than people (Page, 1978, 1981~.
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Do all uses of asbestos make up a single industry or are brake linings, insulation, and so forth to be treated separately? Do hazardous wastes include residential sewage or only industrial solids (Chemical and Engineering News, 19803?
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The choice of definition can affect the outcome of policy debates, the allocation of resources among safety measures, and the distribution of political power in society. Dimensionality of Risk The risks of a technology are seldom its only consequences.
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APPENDIX C 259 the technology's net benefit. In addition, risk itself is seldom just a single consequence.
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offer an insightful discussion of some of these issues in the context of imported steel; the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1983)
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Hazardous technologies can evoke such concern even when they are functioning perfectly. Some of the response may be focused and purposeful, such as attempts to reduce the risk through personal and collective action.
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It is the former that deterrn~nes actual concern; however, using it would mean penalizing some technologies for evoking unjustified concerns and rewarding others for having escaped the public eye. MEASURING BENEFITS Although the term risk management is commonly used for dealing with potentially hazardous technologies, few risk policies are concerned entirely with risk.
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There are two natural places to Took for guidance regarding the evaluation of benefits: what people say and what people do. Methods relying on the former consider expressed preferences; methods relying on the latter consider revealed preferences.
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, sensitive (in the sense of theoretically allowing people to say whatever they want) , specifiable (in the sense of allowing one to ask the precise questions that interest policymakers)
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The price paid for this potential simplification is the need to answer large numbers of simple, formal, and precise questions. Where it becomes impossible to bring the question "down" to the level of the respondent, there still may be some opportunity to bring the respondent "up" to the level of the question.
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If today's society inhibits people's ability to act in ways that express their fundamental values, then revealed preference procedures lose their credibility (whereas expressed preferences, at least in principle, allow people to raise themselves above today's reality)
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, and what levels of technological risk escape further regulation (Fischhoff, 1983; U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1982~.
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Understanding these interdependencies is essential to, on the one hand, discerning the objective content versus inherently subjective science and, on the other hand, directing science to serve socially desired ends. An understanding of these relationships is also necessary to appropriately interpret the conflicts between lay and expert opinions that constitute the visible core of many risk controversies.
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A majority of the top corporate executives and a plurality of lenders believed that "American society is overly sensitive to risk," whereas a large majority of congressional representatives and federal regulators believed that "we are becoming more aware of risk and taking realistic precautions. A sample of the public endorsed the latter statement over the former by 78 to 15 percent.
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inevitably contain some element of judgment on the part of the scientists who produce them. In this light, what is commonly called the conflict between actual and perceived risk is better thought of as the conflict between two sets of risk perceptions: those of ranking scientists performing within their field of expertise and those of anybody else.
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Because they mix questions of fact and value, such views might be better thought of as the opinions of experts rather than as expert opinions, a term that should be reserved for expressions of substantive expertise. It would seem as though members of the public are the experts when it comes to striking the appropriate trade-offs between costs, risks, and benefits.
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As a result, risk experts are only beginning to reach consensus on basic issues of terminology and methodology, such as how to define risk (see Section Ill)
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Once they have been repeated often enough, ideas such as the importance of voluntariness or catastrophic potential tend to assume a life of their own. It does not go without saying that society should set a double standard on the basis of voluntariness or catastrophic potential, however they are defined.
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Once the options and consequences are specified, "acceptable risk" might be used to denote the risk associated with the most acceptable alternative. When using that designation, it is important to remember its context dependence.
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When people from outside the risk community enter risk battles, they may try to master the technical details or they may concentrate on monitoring and shaping the risk management process itself. The latter strategy may exploit their political expertise and keep them from being outclassed on technical issues.
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At the other extreme, debates about political processes may underlie disputes that are ostensibly about scientific facts. As mentioned earlier, the definition of an acceptable-risk problem circumscribes the set of relevant facts, consequences, and options.
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that they can make a difference, personally or collectively. In this light, their decision-making process depends on a concern that is known to influence other psychological processes: perceived feelings of control (Seligman, 1975~.
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At times, the technical knowledge or can-do perspective of the experts may lead them to see a broader range of feasible actions. At other times, laypeople may fee!
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For example, Lord Rothschild (1978) has noted that the BBC does not like to trouble its listeners with the confidence intervals surrounding technical estimates.
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They may have been around long enough to note that many of the confident scientific beliefs of yesterday are confidently rejected today (Franker, 1974~. Such lay skepticism would suggest expanding the confidence intervals around the experts' best guess at the size of the risks.
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. The following section begins by explaining the consequences of such stereotyping for risk communication by discussing the sort of communication strategies that can follow from simplistic interpretations of the controversy.
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One way of diagnosing the nature of specific risk communication processes is in terms of the philosophies that guide those who design them. The following discussion describes some generic strategies in terms of their strengths and limitations.
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The following are some of the more common of these simple strategies for dealing with risk controversies, presented in caricature form to highlight their underlying motivations and inherent limitations. Give the Public the Pacts The assumption underlying this strategy is that if laypeople only knew as much as the experts, they would respond to hazards in the same way.
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Examples in the United States include the Delaney clause, prohibiting carcinogenic additives in foods, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's "safety goals for nuclear power," describing how risky it will allow the technology to be. Each policy is stated in terms of levels of acceptable risk, as though laypeople are too unsophisticated to understand, in the context of technology management, the sort of risk-benefit trade-offs that they routinely make in everyday life, such as when they undergo medical treatments or pursue hazardous occupations.
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Exa~nples might include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's reliance on a single spokesperson as the Three Mile Island incident wore on and the assumption of center stage by the president of Union Carbide after the chemical gas leak in Bhopal, India. This strategy can reduce the confusion created by incomplete conflicting messages, although only if the manager has good communication skills or is sensitive to listeners' information needs; that is, there must be both substance and style.
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How can the preceding observations about risk perceptions (and the research literature from which they were drawn) be used to design better procedures for dealing with risk controversies?
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Such information may be the result of accidents at various distances away and attributed to various causes (e.g., malfunctions, human error, sabotage) or of mere "incidents," such as newspaper exposes, siting controversies, false alarms, or government inquiries.
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/ ~ ~Low High Low Low information \/ ~ \/ \ Move · Low High Low Low I\ Inaction - · High Negligible Low Medium \ High / Ventilate · Low Medium High Low Low High Low Low \ Move · Low High Low Low FIGURE V.1 The radiation hazard in homes from the residents' perspective. SOURCE: Svenson and FischhoR, 1985.
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The procedures offered in Section II as ways for the public (or the media) to discover what risk issues are all about might also be used proactively as ways to tell the public (or the media)
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, concluding, say, that screaming is more effective than fighting because, among women who escape, 80 percent do the former and only 20 percent do the latter. Taking the details of risk perceptions seriously means reconciling
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Avoiding frustration with the failures and with the public that seems responsible for them will help us keep the mental health and mutual respect needed to get through it all. EVALUATING COMMUNICATION PROGRAMS Resting Risky Treatments If they were creating risks rather than explaining them, risk communicators would be subject to various political, legal, and social constraints.
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In evaluating communication programs, similar issues arise, although with a few additional wrinkles. Potential consequences must still be identified.
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That is, the communicators may not seem to know what they are talking about or they may seem inadequately concerned about the recipients' welfare. Setting Objectives for Communication Programs It is accepted wisdom that program planning of any sort ought to begin with an explicit statement of objectives, in the light of which a program's elements can be selected and its effects evaluated.
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, or that those benefits are substantially lower than the benefits enjoyed by a technology's sponsor. Honest communications should help people reach such determinations.
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Rather than one party administering an informational treatment to another, the treater becomes more of an aide and servant. One particular expression of the change emerges in situations in which a communicator wishes to claim that people have given "informed consent"
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One component might be review panels to scrutinize the protocols for testing or running communication programs. Such panels might both ensure that programs use suitable evaluation criteria (e.g., reflecting both senders' and recipients' needs)
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? The institutional context for medical treatments attempts not only to ensure that they are delivered properly, but also to address possible failures.
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In some cases, these will be for better information; in other cases, they will be for better protection. Only after communication programs are recipient centered in this respect can they productively begin to be recipient centered in the sense of the following section, considering laypeople's strengths and weaknesses in understanding risk information.
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. Rather than consider the extent to which human behavior varies from situation to situation, people describe other people in terms of all-encompassing personality traits, such as being honest, happy, or risk seeking (Nisbett and Ross, 1980~.
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In risk debates, a stylized expression of this proficiency is finding just enough problems with contrary evidence to reject it as inconclusive. A third thought process that contributes to maintaining current beliefs can be found in people's reluctance to recognize when information is ambiguous.
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Unfortunately for their risk perceptions (although fortunately for their well-being) , most people have little firsthand knowledge of hazardous technologies.
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PEOPLE MAY DISAGREE MORE ABOUT WHAT RISE IS THAN ABOUT HOW LARGE IT IS Given this mixture of strengths and weaknesses in the psychological processes that generate people's risk perceptions, there is no simple answer to the question "how much do people know and understand? " The answer depends on the risks and on the opportunities that people have to learn about them.
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PEOPLE EAVE DIFFICULTY DETECTING INCONSISTENCIES IN RISE DISPUTES Despite their frequent intensity, risk debates are typically conducted at a distance (Hence et al., 1988; Mazur, 1973~. The disputing parties operate within self-conta~ned communities and talk principally to themselves.
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. Those should be the standards for designing and evaluating risk communication programs.
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A representative democracy could not function if people did not have some ability to evaluate the candor and competence of political candidates and governmental officials. There would not be significant declines in smoking and fat consumption if people were not able to extract personally relevant implications from risk communications.
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A third way is to provide annotated references to the research literature that could be consulted for more detailed treatment of specific risk issues. Making this research generally available in nontechnical terms can help to level the playing field, by granting equal access to it for all parties to risk controversies (and not just for those parties with staffs paid to follow the research literature)
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We have increasing understanding among risk managers of the need to take public concerns seriously when designing risk policies and among members of the public when deciding which risks to worry about and how to worry about them. We have increasing professionalism in reporting about risk issues and increasing ability to read or view risk stories with a discerning eye.
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308 APPENDIX C In addition, old problems continue to aggravate these wounds and to undermine the parties' faith in one another. For example, the question of whether to complete or operate many nuclear reactors is a lingering source of mutual frustration among all involved.
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1987. Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice.
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1978. Science and technology in the nuclear regulatory process: The case of Canadian uranium miners.
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1985c. Risk analysis demystified.
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1983. Health risks from the nuclear fuel cycle.
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Risk Analysis 6~3~:275-281. Keeney, R
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Public Opinion Quarterly 13:377-404. Levine, M
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1985. Position DocumentRisk Analysis.
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: The cultural approach to societal technology choice. Risk Analysis 7~1~:3-9.
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Risk Analysis 6~4~:403-415. Slovic, P., and B
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Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
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Risk Analysis 1~4~:277-287. Weaver, S
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