Risk and Decision Making Perspectives and Research (1982) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Perspectives on Risk and Decision Making
Perspectives on Risk and Decision Making
Pages 1-46
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
The focus reflects the committee's expertise and, more important, a growing public awareness of and concern about adverse consequences to human health, safety, and the environment. INCREASED LONGEVITY AND RISING PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT RISK The increases in average life expectancies for Americans have not lessened their concern with risks and may even have increased it.
|
From page 2... ...
mortality rates since the turn of the century has been steady and, on a cumulative basis, dramatic. Life expectancy at birth has increased in the United States from 47 years in 1900 to 74 years in 1979.
|
From page 3... ...
Department of Commerce, 1980~; The expanded media coverage of scientific find ings about risks, corporate risk .anagement activities, and political activity related to risk; m e increase in funding for health, safety, and environmental research and the emergence of a relatively new field of "risk analysis." SOME POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS Multiple hypotheses have been proposed for the apparent contradiction between increased longevity and increased concern with risk.1 While several hypotheses are given below, there are undoubted! , others.
|
From page 4... ...
The United States fares poorly compared with other developed countries in terms of a variety of health indicators, including infant mortality, life expectancy, cardiovascular disease rates, cancer death rates, and homicide rates. For instance, the United States is 26th on a list of countries in the probability of death before age 6S.
|
From page 5... ...
estimates that "alcohol misuse is a factor in more than 10 percent of all deaths in the tinited States" and cigarette smoking is a factor in 17 percent of all deaths. Nonetheless, alcohol abuse produces social problems that, in at least two respects, are more serious than those problems caused by cigarette smoking.
|
From page 6... ...
Since many emerging risks could have been selected for discussion by the committee, we have highlighted those that polling data suggest are of most concern to Americans (see Louis Harris and Associates, 1980~. cat- - r-~ ZThat awareness.
|
From page 7... ...
Environmental Contamination Although considerable progress has been made in the past 20 years in improving certain aspects of air and water quality, serious environmental problems confront us, and some environmental threats are increasing. Polling data indicate that Americans continue to be concerned with environmental degradation.
|
From page 8... ...
The increased manufacture and use of toxic chemicals and the rise in the incidence and the death rate from some cancers have been a source of controversy. Whether there is a causal relationship between these two trends remains an issue involving large scientific uncertainties and considerable dispute among experts.3 Recent survey data indicate that "chemicals" are a major source of increased perceived risk among the public.
|
From page 9... ...
~e ~ Nuclear Power Polling data indicate that the risks of nuclear power are of considerably less concern to Americans than those 4A committee member comments that the increased military aggressiveness of the United States may reduce the probability of nuclear confrontation, because it signals our determination to remain firm.
|
From page 10... ...
At the other extreme, opponents see nuclear energy as ushering in the potential for worldwide calamity threatening human survival; they link nuclear power with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, through the proliferation of new nuclear powers and through national and subnational terror; more important, they link the acceptance of nuclear power with acceptance of nuclear weapons and their use in another war. Those advocating nuclear power argue that the knowledge of nuclear fission, even how to make bombs, is widespread.
|
From page 11... ...
There are reports on the risks of the Three Mile Island accident hazardous chemical wastes in the Love Canal, DC-10s, benzene, saccharin, asbestos, tampons, PCBs, the pill, . recombinant DNA, nuclear waste, and so forth.
|
From page 12... ...
This is not an argument against quantitative risk estimates but rather an argument for a broader risk analysis in combination with numerical risk estimates. Consider two examples.
|
From page 13... ...
Whatever the reasons for the decline in public confidence in business and government, the trend has been syncronous and may have interacted with rising aspirations for risk reduction and with perceptions of increasing and emerging risks. If this speculation is true, people may have begun to suspect that although the resources and technology exist to reduce old and emerging risks, risk-management institutions are incapable of performing the requisite tasks.
|
From page 14... ...
although society frequently must respond to risks without conclusive scientific evidence about causation, the development of effective, long-term coping strategies is possible only if the generation of risks is better understood. To provide organization to the analysis of risk generation, the committee used a simple classification scheme (see Figure 1~.8 Although it is an imperfect model of risk 80ne member of the committee, while agreeing that risks can be classified in this way, argues that other classifications may be more useful.
|
From page 15... ...
In contrast, the risks generated by self-hazardous behavior -- although they may produce more deaths, injuries, and illnesses than those created by productive enterprises or by criminals -- are not so widely regarded as an appropriate subject of social intervention. Advocating social intervention to reduce risks from self-hazardous behavior quickly triggers debates about freedom and the role of government in society.
|
From page 16... ...
Illustrative examples: risks imposed on a worker resulting from combined actions of worker and employer or risks imposed on consumers by the combined actions of producer and consumer. Risks Generated by Production Externalities: When productive enterprises generate risks that are incurred by people not directly involved in the production or consumption of a good.
|
From page 17... ...
The Linkage Between Risk Generation and Coping Strategies The more society learns about the generation of risks, the more competent it can be in designing coping strategies. For example, better empirical evidence about the relationship between economic conditions and risk would be quite valuable to policy makers.
|
From page 18... ...
To what extent do sellers and employers have incentives to withhold, distort, or selectively present information about risks to consumers and workers? The case for social intervention to reduce co-generated risks rests significantly on the misinformation hypothesis; that is, the extent of misinformation-~whether it arises from ignorance, ineffectiveness, intentional suppression, or falsification -- influences the rationales for and against intervention and the choice of riskcoping strategies.
|
From page 19... ...
Coping Strategies and the Rationales for Intervention The strategies appropriate for coping with selfhazardous behavior vary with the rationales for social intervention. If the rationale is that such behavior imposes financial costs on others through insurance policies or tax-supported public programs, then a variety of approaches to controlling those costs can be considered.
|
From page 20... ...
me United States makes different choices than do other countries and, therefore, the broad field of cross-cultural comparisons of coping processes is an interesting and important research domain. In the case of risks generated by production externalities, most coping strategies are designed to cause businesses to internalize the social costs of their production activities.
|
From page 21... ...
21 FIGURE 2 Strategies for Coping with Some Categories of Risks Self-Hazardous Behavior Insurance Premium Adjustments Educational Campaigns Incentives /Dis incentives Legal Restrictions Automatic Protection Strategies Liability Rules Co-Generated Risks Occupational Risks Wage Premiums for Risky Jobs Worker Compensation Programs Liability Rules Union Bargaining Informational Approaches Taxing Occupational Risks Employee Protective Measures Standard Setting for Health and Safety Consumer Product Risks Product Safety Research and Development Regulation of Advertising Product Labels and Warnings Consumption Goals and Guidelines Liability Rules Regulating Standards and Bans Risks From Production Externalities Government Standard Setting Sale of Pollution Licenses Effluent Fees Liability Rules Governmental Compensation Programs Negotiation Processes Compulsory Liability Insurance
|
From page 22... ...
The task is to define those combinations of risk-coping strategies that can offer the flexibility and effectiveness necessary to , respond to risks. Most strategies for coping with risks are not mutually exclusive.
|
From page 23... ...
Pilot projects are important not only for coping with persistent risks, such as smoking and air pollution, but also for emerging environmental threats, such as inadequate disposal of hazardous wastes. Traditional coping strategies are ill-equipped to deal with risks posed by toxic substances in the air, food, water, homes, and workplaces and thereby emphasize the need to experiment with and learn from multiple strategies for attacking this problem.
|
From page 24... ...
Finally, the mere existence of deficiencies in individual and market decision making about risks does not establish the claim that social institutions should intervene to reduce risks. Government decision making is also imperfect and costly, and governmental failures must be considered when deciding whether social intervention should be employed and what forms intervention should take.
|
From page 25... ...
They set out to design and enforce a regulatory system that would be less susceptible to domination by those being regulated. By publicizing instances of the corporate creation and mismanagement of risks, public interest groups mobilized latent public support for risk reduction, thus contributing to the growth of social regulation.
|
From page 26... ...
Some agencies, such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Occupational Safety and Bealth Administration, face sharp cutbacks in resources and authority as well as possible extinction. But there remains strong congressional support for regulation of certain risks, as evidenced by the passage of several major pieces of legislation in the late 1970s aimed at controlling toxic substances and hazardous wastes -- for example, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and the so-called superfund law to clean up waste dumps, which was passed at the end of 1980.
|
From page 27... ...
Moreover, the underlying justifications for social regulation-market failures, environmental externalities, consumer and worker misinformation, and society's altruistic desire for safety -- are not likely to decline in the 1980s. They may increase.
|
From page 28... ...
Third, analysis can be done and is done by persons other than policy analysts or risk analysts. For example, public servants would be better off, on some kinds of issues, to conduct their own informal analysis of a risk problem -- without any professional analysis -- since they can draw on a fund of practical experience and can better cope with and respond to the realities of a particular organization.
|
From page 29... ...
Finally, professional risk analysis is expensive and time-consuming. It is simply impossible to subject every important aspect of a policy decision to professional analysis.
|
From page 30... ...
Many decision makers must do more than decide what risk coping strategy to advocate. They must often decide how to enlist the support of interest groups for a particular policy, how to enforce risk-coping strategies, how to defend policy positions in court and at legislative hearings, what new information to gather, what kinds of authority to delegate and to whom, and so forth.
|
From page 31... ...
Thus, it is not the case that more information and more knowledge always help resolve conflicts about risks. TWO ASPECTS OF RISK ANALYSIS: ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION Individuals who must frequently decide between complex alternatives -- doctors, business-executives, investment analysts, judges, and juries -- rarely decompose their thinking into separate compartments and formalize each component task separately.
|
From page 32... ...
Also, an assessment free of overt policy values may be useful to a wide range of decision makers, inside and outside the government. There is a decomposition of tasks that seems quite natural and that is extensively employed by such federal agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
|
From page 33... ...
The policy maker has to consider, formally or informally, the alternative actions he or she might pursue, the institutional and political constraints, value and ideological judgments, and so on. This is risk evaluation.l4 It can be viewed as a subset of what some people call policy evaluation or policy analysis.
|
From page 34... ...
Some on the committee believe that it is important to say that, as an ideal, reports about uncertainties should not be distorted by consideration of value trade-offs; it is in this sense that those espousing this view talk of the desirability of value-neutral assessments of uncertainties. They feel that the assessment phase should ideally be buffered against consideration of values.
|
From page 35... ...
The study of risk analysis in NRC reports also commented on the difficulties of synthesizing assessment data into a form sufficiently coherent for policy makers: A broad risk assessment almost always involves diverse kinds of analysis often developed by disci plines employing different assumptions, standards of
|
From page 36... ...
Lure . Value Trade-Offs and Ethical Considerations in Risk Evaluation Risk reduction is not society's only goal.
|
From page 37... ...
Furthermore, an evaluator might want to know how identifiable the victims are, the type of injuries to be expected, the number of people affected, and how accountable the decision maker will be as well as what the possibilities are for delay, experimentation, flexibility, and adaptability. There is more -- this is just a partial checklist that could be greatly expanded.
|
From page 38... ...
This perspective is important because it highlights the limited albeit important role of science and professional analysis in resolving disputes over decisions about acceptable risk. 5A variation of this is: To what extent should society be willing to impose small costs and risks to a large number of members of society in order to greatly benefit a few members of society?
|
From page 39... ...
It is hard, for the media and for the general public, to sort scientific judgments from what is primarily value-based or political opinion. In some cases scientists cloak controversial value judgments in scientific jargon, both consciously and unconsciously.
|
From page 40... ...
These responsibilities are jeopardized when tasks are accepted that are inappropriate for the committee and its parent institution. For example, a committee of physical scientists sponsored by an engineering institute may not be the appropriate committee to recommend policies for balancing concerns about health and safety risks with value trade-offs and political constraints.
|
From page 41... ...
would be better served if the scope of the assignment is limited to nonprescriptive, nonevaluative scientific assessments. To talk about assessment and evaluation -- their separation and integration -- in risk analysis, we purposely draw sharp lines around each.
|
From page 42... ...
In the debate about how far to quantify, as in most long-standing debates, there are errors of two kinds in the balancing equation: A false sense of precision with numbers may give the impression that more is known than is really known; and a false sense of imprecision without numbers may give the impression that less is known than is really known. Risk assessments deal with uncertainties: some are based on copious amounts of relatively uncontroversial statistics (such as assessments of motor vehicle risks)
|
From page 43... ...
In other cases, however, the facts pull in different directions with different degrees of credibility, and if all this raw information were accurately and completely reported, it would overwhelm any policy maker. Policy makers may want experts to interpret and synthesize those facts, so that they can incorporate values and political concerns to arrive at a balanced decision.
|
From page 44... ...
Given that they disagree about fundamentals, can they agree on a compromise assessment report to give to the policy maker? How should groups report their ~ r - - -r disagreements?
|
From page 45... ...
Funding agencies for risk assessments can incorporate a dynamic review process into funding decisions. It might be advisable to reserve substantial monies for peer review or possibly to fund two independent risk assessments, depending on the importance of the problem at hand.
|
From page 46... ...
Egregious errors are filtered out; highquality reviews are more 1 ikely; and the overall standards o f risk analyses are raised .
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.