Lessons Obtained from Dialogue Between Nuclear Experts and Citizens

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Lessons Obtained from Dialogue Between Nuclear
Experts and Citizens

• Masaharu Kitamura
• Emeritus Professor
• Director of Organization Management Project
• New Industry Creation Hatchery Center(NICHe),Tohok
  u University,
• and
• Ekou Yagi
• Center for the Study of Communication Design,
  Osaka University

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1.Introduction

• Peoples trust in Japanese nuclear community has
  been seriously damaged due to accidents and
  troubles experienced in this decade.
• Monju (1995), JCO(1999), TEPCO(2002),
• Remedial actions have been taken by the utility
  and by the regulatory authority.
• But such efforts were not convincing enough to
  the citizens.
• Actions by academicians were rare for a long time.

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1.Introduction-2

• An action research program has been launched by a
  small group of nuclear experts at Tohoku Univ..
• The action research has been instantiated as a
  series of repetitive dialog sessions between
  nuclear experts and participants.
• The lessons from the action research provided us
  with the explanations about the insufficiencies
  of conventional activities aiming at public
  acceptance of nuclear technology, and with
  possible alternatives.

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Review-in-Brief

• ?Models in risk communication and social
  decision-making descriptive, not computational
• Slovic model dreadfulness and novelty of the
  target system are the influential factors to
  magnify perceived risk of public.
• Kahneman and Tversky model stresses the effect
  of framing of the situation.
• Habermas modeldecisionistic, technocratic, and
  democratic (or pragmatic) models as typical
  examples of social decision-making practice.

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2. Procedure

• As a first step to approach the desirable
  scheme, we started a simplified version where
  only three actors nuclear experts, a facilitator
  and the citizens gather together to have
  dialogue about the nuclear issues of public
  concern.

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The Scheme of Our Attempt
Facilitater
Communication
Dialogue Forum
Nuclear Communicatior (Expert)
Local Public
Nuclear Expert
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Object
Object
Self
Counterpart
Self
Counterpart
Recognition by Actor-1
Recognition by Actor-2
Actor-1
Actor-2
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Municipalities where the dialog forums have been
organized

• Case-1 Onagawa
• Nuclear power station with Three units of BWRs

• Case-2 Rokkasyo
• No nuclear power station
• Nuclear fuel reprocessing plant
• Low-level radwaste storage
• High-level radwaste processing facility

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Rokkasyo
Onagawa
Tohoku Univ.
Tokyo
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RESULTS

• The members in both forums are not perfectly
  representing the local residents.
• The acquired comments are not exhaustively
  covering the local opinions.

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Observation-1 categorization

• The negative opinions of local public has been
  categorized into issues related to technical
  risk, national nuclear policy, social problems
  including communication difficulty, negative
  effects by mass media.

This observation clearly explains why the
information provision by government and utility
was accepted only poorly.
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Observation-2 The Main Opinion by Classification
Practical
B-4
A-1
B-2
A-2
B-1
A-3
B-3
Resolution oriented
Understanding oriented
D-2
D-3
C-4
C-3
C-1
C-2
D-1
Emotional
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Observation-3 The change of public attitude
through the forums
Practical
Resolution oriented
Understanding oriented
Emotional
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Observation-4 Trust of citizens in experts

• After several sessions of dialogue, an informal
  interview was carried out to examine the
  effectiveness of the dialogue for trust building.
  
• It was confirmed that the citizens were
  originally highly skeptical about the
  trustworthiness of the experts.
• After several sessions, however, the trust was
  improved significantly.

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Interpretation

• The case history can be interpreted as a
  phenotype of mutual learning and co-evolving
  process between the two main actors of the
  dialogue, the local citizens and the nuclear
  experts.
• The two actor groups exchanged opinions and
  thoughts about the object, including nuclear
  facility itself plus human and organizational
  components.

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Interpretation-2

• The recognition of the local citizens can be
  modeled by
• object, experts, oneself (citizens).
• The recognition of the experts can be modeled by
  
• object, local citizens, oneself(experts).
• In this description, each element of the
  three-term description (triad) is not an
  objective entity but a representation.

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Interpretation-3

• The actors modify their recognition or
  representation of the object AND the counterpart
  of the dialogue, inevitably resulting to
  modification of the recognition of oneself as
  well.
• This modification, or transformation, of self-
  and mutual recognition can be an important step
  toward the resolution.

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Interpretation-4

• Only after reaching certain stage of trust in the
  experts, the local citizens started to verbalize
  their actual concern about the nuclear facility
  with deeper statements.

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Interpretation-5

• After realizing the change in the trust and
  capturing the status of their understanding of
  the nuclear technology, the expert started to
  give technical explanations relevant to the
  citizens concerns with more straightforward and
  realistic statements. At the same time, the
  experts naturally modified their trust in the
  citizens.

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Conclusion (tentative)

• The change of citizens opinion is a sign of
  effectiveness of present communication scheme.
• The change of experts recognition of citizens
  opinion is crucially important for developing
  better way of risk communication.
• The process of both actors change is not one-way
  but mutual and co-evolving.

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Concluding Remarks

• The new perspectives addressed in this talk will
  be elaborated to lead us to more realistic and
  fruitful theory and applications in many
  different academic disciplines.
• The key concept will be TOWARDS GROUNDED THEORY
  (rather than grand theory) THROUGH ACTION
  RESEARCH aiming at finding real-world solution.

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Object??
Object??
Self?
Counterpart ???
Counterpart ???
Self?
Recognition by Actor-1
Recognition by Actor-2
Actor-1
Actor-2
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Internalized W-1
Internalized W-2
Recognition by Actor-1
Recognition by Actor-2
Actor-1
Actor-2
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Interpretation- Proposal of Co-evolution Model
Experts
Citizens
Mental
Actions
Mental
Actions
Expert
Information
imagery
passive
Trust?Low?
-based
-oriented
Needs
Citizen
reality
active
Trust?High?
-based
-oriented
Discussions paying respect to thoughts of
counterparts(mutual)
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Methodological Renaissance

• The author believes that the similar
  interpretation is possible to characterize the
  human-machine (intelligent machine in particular)
  interactions as well. This new perspective
  provides us with rich opportunity to start
  innovative thinking about the design, operation
  and maintenance of complex artifacts.

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Methodological Renaissance-2

• The author believes that the similar
  interpretation is possible to characterize the
  human-machine (intelligent machine in particular)
  interactions as well. This new perspective
  provides us with rich opportunity to start
  innovative thinking about the design, operation
  and maintenance of complex artifacts.

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Methodological Renaissance-3 Statements about the
academic implications.

• To obtain the results, we employed the techniques
  of Qualitative Research originated in Germany and
  in US. The academic areas related are
  psychology, sociology, nursing, ethnography,
  etc..
• Methodologies and techniques in these
  disciplines, i. e. Data-Driven Model Building,
  Substantive Theory, Informal Interview,
  Triangulation, Transcript Analysis, etc. can be
  applied to problems in engineering domains.

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Methodological Renaissance-4

• Professor Tetsuo Sawaragi indicated the relevance
  of the co-evolving process to Peirces framework
  of semiosis.
• The evolving process can be related to semiotic
  triad object, sign, interpretant, since the
  situation (object and counterpart) can undergo
  significant metamorphosis via change in the
  recognition (interpretation) of the sign provided
  by the situation.

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The Desirable Schemes of Risk Communication
Environmental NPO
Politician
Mass-Media
Nuclear Experts
The Regulatory Authorities
Public
Technology assessment with public participation
Utility Company
Trust
Risk assessment as post normal science