Understanding Risk Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society (1996) / Chapter Skim
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2 JUDGMENT IN THE RISK DECISION PROCESS
2 JUDGMENT IN THE RISK DECISION PROCESS
Pages 37-72
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From page 37... ...
Many of these difficulties result from judgments made at each step of the process that can undermine the quality of risk characterization and, if they are unacceptable to some of the interested and affected parties, become lightning rods for conflict. Such difficulties tend to arise when the knowledge and perspectives of these parties were not adequately incorporated into the process that led to the judgments.
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From page 38... ...
The deficiencies also threaten some lower-profile risk characterizations. PROBLEM FORMULATION Perhaps the most basic difficulty with risk characterization is that the people who will or should participate in the risk decision process frequently have divergent perspectives on the decision at hand.
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From page 39... ...
The history of risk analysis is filled with instances in which analysis, at least to some of the parties, seemed to beg the question. One such case is the risk analysis for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site, mentioned in Chapter 1.
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From page 40... ...
F alrness For some interested and affected parties in risk decisions, managing environmental risks has become a question of fairness, moral responsibility, and distributional equity (Beach, 1990; Bullard and Wright, 1992; Lawless, 1977; Nelkin, 1989; Sandman, Weinstein, and Klotz, 1987; Vaughan and Seifert, 1992~.
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From page 41... ...
Prevention Current debates about preventing pollution and risk also show clearly how problem formulation shapes risk characterization and the entire risk decision process. One proponent of pollution prevention has criticized standard practice in risk analysis for asking the question, "Which environmental problems can we ignore?
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From page 42... ...
A risk characterization for water pollution alone may be quite beside the point for a local official confronting such a choice. SELECTION OF OPTIONS AND OUTCOMES Problem formulation has practical implications for other steps in the risk decision process.
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From page 43... ...
Organizations responsible for risk characterizations should make efforts to identify the range of decision options that experts and the spectrum of interested and affected parties consider viable. Generating an adequate list of options may be difficult.
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From page 44... ...
An adequate risk characterization must address all the outcomes or consequences of a hazardous situation that are reasonably important to the relevant public officials and to the interested and affected parties to the decision. Agencies should tailor their analyses to the decision to be made, addressing the potential adverse outcomes most significant for that decision.
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From page 45... ...
These costs are borne by the potentially affected population regardless of whether they actually suffer from the adverse event. Risk characterizations typically do not address social effects, perhaps because they are considered outside the purview of formal risk analysis.
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From page 46... ...
If the analyses implicitly set this potential loss equal to zero, affected parties may find the risk characterization unsatisfactory. Many affected parties in risk decisions expect the government to endeavor to achieve some fair balance between the risks a community or an individual bears and the benefits received.
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From page 47... ...
How can one represent the interests of future generations in a current risk decision process? The difficulty of the first question is illustrated well by the Yucca Mountain controversy.
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From page 48... ...
Another is the 1979 nuclear power accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, which killed no one, but had extensive ripple effects. It devastated the utility that operated the plant; resulted in greatly increased costs for regulating, constructing and operating nuclear power plants; and led to "reduced operation of reactors worldwide, greater public opposition to nuclear power, and reliance on more expensive energy sources" (Slovic, 1987:201; see also Evans and Hope, 1984; Heising and George, 19861.
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From page 49... ...
Conclusion We do not suggest that all conceivable options for action or possible adverse outcomes can or should be the subject of detailed analysis in every risk decision process. In most instances, such detailed analyses would be unnecessary, not to mention the demands they would put on analysts and on scarce resources.
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From page 50... ...
The list below shows a few of the many different ways that risks of death have been measured: deaths per million people in the population deaths per million people within x miles of the source of exposure deaths per unit of concentration deaths per facility deaths per ton of toxic substance released deaths per ton of toxic substance absorbed by people deaths per ton of chemical produced deaths per million dollars of product produced loss of life expectancy associated with exposure to the hazard The choice of a measure can make a big difference in a risk analysis, especially when one risk is compared with another. It can also make a big difference in whether interested and affected parties see the analysis as legitimate and informative.
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From page 51... ...
Cat it: 1.0 O- _ 1950 1955 1960 Year 1 1 1 1965 1970 51 FIGURE 2-1. Accidental deaths per million tons of coal mined in the United States, 1950-1970.
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From page 52... ...
It can present a dilemma in which no single summary measure, no matter how carefully the underlying analysis is done, can satisfy the expectations of all the participants in a risk decision process. Other methods may be needed to allow the parties' various perspectives to be addressed.
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From page 53... ...
Measuring each type of outcome presents its particular set of judgments, and each judgment embeds values. Making Simplifying Assumptions Risk analysis requires making simplifying assumptions when information is incomplete or difficult to gather by regularly used methods.
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From page 54... ...
The risk estimates erred by assuming management strategies that farmers could not reasonably be expected to adopt. Risk characterizations often implicitly (and inaccurately)
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From page 55... ...
. Risk characterizations based on such an assumption, especially if they do not consider the past record of an organization in managing the particular risk or other relevant evidence on individual and organizational performance, are likely to be misleading and to be criticized as inadequate by people who are well acquainted with the organization or the kinds of behavioral changes a particular crisis demands.
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From page 56... ...
Organizational tendencies, such as to disregard warnings about possible dangers, have also been implicated in the accident at Three Mile Island (President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, 1979) and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (Pate-Cornell and Fischbeck, 1993; Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, 1986; Vaughan, 1990~.
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From page 57... ...
, which has been applied to the question of presenting risk information for policy purposes (see, e.g., Cole and Whithey, 1981; Gregory, Lichtenstein, and MacGregor, 1993; Heimer, 1988; Stern, 1991~. According to prospect theory, outcomes of a decision are evaluated as gains or losses from some reference point usually the status quo.
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From page 58... ...
If Program D is adopted, there is a Value - $500 Losses / 1 / / + $500 Gains FIGURE 2-3. A hypothetical value function in prospect theory.
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From page 59... ...
In the past, several major public controversies over technological and environmental issues have been marked by contrasting frames that differed by describing policy options either in terms of potential gains or potential losses (e.g., Brunner, 1991; Heimer, 1988; Lawless, 1977~. Prospect theory also implies that decision makers who differ in their views of the status quo will choose different policy options because they begin the decision task from different reference points.
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From page 60... ...
. Indeed, the study found that the desirability of water of Grade 8 was greater for people who believed this quality signified a restoration of lost water quality.3 These examples demonstrate that every way of presenting risk information is a "frame" that can shape the judgments of the participants in a risk decision.
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From page 61... ...
The Multidimensional Nature of Risk Risk characterizations often focus on a single outcome, most often human fatalities, but as discussed above, even a single outcome has multiple attributes. Furthermore, many risk decisions involve multiple outcomes, so that there are at least several attributes and kinds of information to synthesize.
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From page 64... ...
For most people, deaths and injuries are not equal some kinds or circumstances of harm are more to be avoided than others. One need not conclude that quantitative risk analysis should weight the risks to conform to majority values.
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From page 65... ...
A number of risk analysts have sought technical solutions to the problem of taking qualitative aspects of risk into account. Generally, they have proposed broadening risk analysis to incorporate one or more of the various characteristics identified in studies of perceived risk: for example, distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary activities in assessing risk-benefit balances (Starr, 1969~; giving proportionally more weight to large accidents than to numerous small accidents that cause the same amount of damage or number of deaths (Wilson, 1975; Griesemeyer and Okrent,1981~; and adjusting risk estimates to take into account the importance of various risk-perception characteristics (Rowe, 1977; Litai, Lanning, and Rasmussen, 1983~.
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From page 66... ...
The Meaning of Risk Estimates Separable from the technical questions about how best to estimate the risk of a particular agent with respect to a particular outcome is the question of what the risk estimate means, or should mean, to participants in risk decisions. Risk characterizations often fail because they attribute meaning to scientific estimates in ways that mislead participants in the risk decision process or that are incomprehensible to them.
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From page 67... ...
We believe, however, that a solution might be found in the processes that lead to a risk decision, processes that combine iterative deliberation and analysis and provide participants with enough understanding of uncertainty to appreciate where scientists agree and where they disagree. (The last section of this chapter outlines key issues in process design; Chapter 4 presents a more detailed discussion of understanding uncertainty.)
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From page 68... ...
. Knowledge about reading ability and the psychological factors underlying self-protective behaviors are not usually incorporated in risk characterizations although they can obviously affect both the risks to exposed individuals and the effectiveness of options to reduce those risks.
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From page 69... ...
As the Chester, Pennsylvania, case suggests, residents of an industrial community who believe that they have already had more than their share of exposure to chemical risks may demand on equity grounds that past exposures be considered as part of the risk characterization. Communication The success of a risk characterization depends on its effective delivery to the participants in a risk decision.
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From page 70... ...
Doing this would make risk analysis and characterization inordinately complex and resource intensive. We believe the best preventive is to devise analytic-deliberative processes that will pay appropriate attention to the judgments involved in problem formulation and the other tasks, inform these judgments with the best available knowledge and the perspectives of the spectrum of decision participants, and thus guide risk characterizations toward addressing the needs of the deci slon.
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From page 71... ...
This standard process often leads to objections from interested and affected parties that they have been disenfranchised, that their ideas have been ignored, that their concerns have not been taken seriously, that the risk analysis was incomplete or irrelevant, that the analyses are so complex and arcane that they cannot participate meaningfully, and so forth in short, serious disaffection with the process and the resulting risk characterization. Such outcomes have led many observers to recommend increased public involvement in risk decision making, better two-way communication between agencies and interested and affected parties, involvement of these parties early in the decision process, and other changes that would make risk decision making processes more broadly participatory (e.g., Kunreuther, Fitzgerald, and Aarts, 1993; Leroy and Nadler, 1993; Slovic, 1993a; National Research Council, 1994b)
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From page 72... ...
Organizations responsible for characterizing risks should plan to blend analysis with deliberative processes that clarify the concerns of interested and affected parties, help prevent avoidable errors, offer a balanced and nuanced understanding of the state of knowledge, and ensure adequately broad participation for a given risk decision.
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