The Industrial Green Game Implications for Environmental Design and Management (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Public Perception, Understanding, and Values
Public Perception, Understanding, and Values
Pages 200-211
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From page 200... ...
The author illustrates how these can be used in developing public communications materials and closes by suggesting some hypotheses about public perceptions as they relate to the field of industrial ecology.
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From page 201... ...
" It was an internal risk-ranking exercise, but the agency also commissioned a Roper survey that gave respondents a long list of scary sounding things and asked how serious they thought each one was. The New York Times summarized the results as follows: "The American public and the EPA rank environmental threats quite differently with the public's fear focused most sharply on hazardous wastes sites which the government views much less serious" (Stevens, 1991)
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. CMA commissioned three of the country's leading experts in risk communication to review the literature and extract from it advice for chemical plant managers on how to communicate risk information, focusing particularly on risk comparison.
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Our four-step approach to risk communication is based on people's mental models of risk processes. The steps are open-ended elicitation of people's beliefs about a hazard, allowing expression of both accurate and inaccurate concepts; structured questionnaires designed to determine the prevalence of these beliefs; development of communications based on both a decision-analytic assessment of what people need to know to make informed decisions and a psychological assessment of their current beliefs; and iterative testing of successive versions of those communications using open-ended, closed-form, and problem-solving instruments administered before, during, and after the receipt of messages.
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. The second stage of the aproach uses a closed-form survey to determine the prevalence in the sample population of the concepts uncovered in the mental model interviews.
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Respondents tended to confuse stratospheric ozone depletion with the greenhouse effect and weather with climate. Automobile use, industrial-process heat and emissions, pollution in general, and aerosol spray cans were perceived as the main causes of global warming.
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From page 206... ...
For example, a series of studies on public understanding of the physics of 60-Hz electromagnetic fields (Morgan et al., 1990) shows that it is a fairly challenging job to produce questions about electromagnetic field theory that are in lay language but are precise enough to illicit an umambiguously correct answer from every physicist or electrical engineer.
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From page 207... ...
For this and other reasons, ranks may not translate directly into budgetary priorities. DEVELOPING RISK COMMUNICATION MATERIALS We have used the mental-model procedures outlined above to develop risk communication materials for the general public, including two communications on radon, four on 60-Hz fields, and one on climate change.
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From page 208... ...
SOME HYPOTHESES ABOUT PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS AND VALUES AS THEY RELATE TO INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY Relatively little work on public perceptions and values in the context of industrial ecology has been done, but several general hypotheses can be advanced about what may be found when that work is done. These hypothesis are based on my own work, which utilized unpublished data supplied by the anthropologist Willett Kempton.
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From page 209... ...
Principal collaborators in the work on mental models and risk communication were Jack Adams, Ann Bostrom, Baruch Fischhoff, Keith Florig, Gordon Hester, Lester Lave, Indira Nair, Daniel Read, and Tom Smuts. Thanks are also due to Cindy Atman, Conception Cortds, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Greg Fischer, Max Henrion, Urbano Lopez, Michael Maharik, Kevin Marsh, Fran McMichael, Jon Merz, Denise MurrinMacey, Karen Pavlosky, Daniel Resendiz-Carrillo, Emilie Roth, Mitchell Small, Patti Steranchak, Joel Tarr and Jun Zhang of Carnegie Mellon University, and Paul Slovic and Don MacGregor of Decision Research.
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1994b. Evaluating risk communications: Completing and correcting mental models of hazardous processes, part 1.
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Like, as far as the ozone layer and ice caps melting, water level raising, rain forest going down, oxygen going down because of that? All of that kind of stuff?
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