Risk perception and risk management : a review. Pt. 1, Risk perception (original) (raw)
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Risk perception and risk management : a review. Pt. 2, Lessons for risk management
1990
While experts confine the term risk to a combination of magnitude and probability of adverse effects, lay persons associate with risk a variety of criteria, such as voluntariness, possibility of personal control, familiarity, and others. To improve our knowledge about the risk perception process crucial for improving risk management and risk communication. Responsive and rational approaches to risk management should recognize the results of risk perception studies in two ways: First, management has to address the concerns of the affected public and find policy options that reflect these concerns; second, risk reduction or mitigation should be tailored towards the goal of meeting not only the risk minimization objective, but also the implicit criteria of risk characteristics that matter to the public.
Studies of risk perception examine the judgments people make when they are asked to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and policy-making by (i) providing a basis for understanding and anticipating public responses to hazards and (ii) improving the communication of risk information among lay people, technical experts, and decision-makers. This work assumes that those who promote and regulate health and safety need to understand how people think about and respond to risk. Without such understanding, well-intended policies may be ineffective.
How Does the General Public Evaluate Risk Information? The Impact of Associations with Other Risks
Risk Analysis, 2007
There is a considerable body of knowledge about the way people perceive risks using heuristics and qualitative characteristics, and about how risk information should be communicated to the public. However, little is known about the way people use the perception of known risks (associated risks) to judge an unknown risk. In a first, qualitative study, six different risks were discussed in in-depth interviews and focus group interviews. The interviews showed that risk associations played a prominent role in forming risk perceptions. Associated risks were often mentioned spontaneously. Second, a survey study was conducted to confirm the importance of risk associations quantitatively. This study investigated whether people related unknown risks to known risks. This was indeed confirmed. Furthermore, some insight was gained into how and why people form risk associations. Results showed that the semantic category of the unknown risks was more important in forming associations than the perceived level of risk or specific risk characteristics. These findings were in line with the semantic network theory. Based on these two studies, we recommend using the mental models approach in developing new risk communications. differently from the experts. (1,2) So far, several studies have looked at the way the public perceive risks, what information they use to judge a risk, what kind of information they want about a risk, (6) and how risk messages can influence risk perception (e.g., References 7-9). Nevertheless, it is not clear how this information is used to judge an unknown risk, for instance, how the public process the results of risk analyses and what other knowledge they mobilize. The two studies reported on in this article were designed to examine the process of evaluating risk information and focused on the effects of associated risks.
Uncertainty in Risk Assessment, Risk Management and Decision Making
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society), 1988
Risk communication takes place in a variety of forms, ranging from product warning labels on cigarette packages and saccharin bottles to interactions between officials and members of the public on such highly charged issues as Love Canal, AIDS, and the accident at Three Mile Island. Recent experience has shown that communicating scientific information about health and environmental risks can be exceedingly difficult and is often frustrating to those involved. Government officials, industry executives, and scientific experts often complain that laypeople do not understand technical risk information and that individual and media biases and limitations lead to distorted and inaccurate perceptions of many risk problems. Individual citizens and representatives of public groups are often equally frustrated, perceiving government and industry officials to be uninterested in their concerns, unwilling to take immediate and direct actions to solve seemingly simple and obvious health and environmental problems, and reluctant or unwilling to allow them to participate in decisions that intimately affect their lives. In this context, the media often play the role of transmitter and translator of information about health and environmental risks, but have been criticized for exaggerating risks and emphasizing drama over scientific facts. These difficulties and frustrations pOint to the problems and complexities of communicating health and environmental information in a pluralistic, democratic society. A review of the literature (Covello, Slovic, and von Winterfeldt, 1986) on recent efforts to communicate information about health or environmental risks-such as the controversies over the risks of saccharin, the pesticide EDB, dioxin, AIDS, toxic wastes, smoking, driving without seat belts, and nuclear power plant accidents-suggests that communication problems arise from (1) message charact~ristics and problems (e.g., limitations of scientific risk assessments)i (2) source characteristics and problems (e.g., limitations *The views and conclusions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and conclusions of the National Science Foundation.