Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events

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Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events

• By
• Tim McDaniels

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Extreme Event risk/non-marginal changes

• Another Definition overwhelms standard coping
  mechanisms.
• Tax our management, impose stresses
• How we think about, perceive an action helps
  shape our standard coping mechanisms, and what is
  seen as extreme
• perception partly determines what is an extreme
  event and what is not

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What can risk perception research tell us
generally

• Thoughts off the top of peoples heads, average
  person view
• How will a technology or event be widely seen
  the broad comparative view
• Enormously useful for diagnosing conflicts,
  prescriptive aiding, communication

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What to learn from Risk perception about extreme
events

• Risk perception describes affective responses in
  systematic terms
• Affective responses are one explicit intended
  consequence of terrorism
• Affective responses are a fundamental influence
  on broader consequences (financial, travel,
  investment, seeking of culprits)
• Thus efforts on mitigation/communication

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Consider the over/under response to extreme events

• People tend to treat the likelihood of an extreme
  event as either 0 or 1.
• You can predict which will occur based on
  affective response, availability of events
• This thinking about extreme events may be shaped
  through broad risk communication

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Influences of RP on Terrorism?

• Could not come up with a scenario more
  frightening malevolent adversary, on TV,
  dramatic images, massive horror and destruction,
  then distributed through the mail system
• Assumption is we are all under active attack,
  life as we know it is collapsing
• Terrorists have great intuitive understanding of
  RP

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What has RP given us so far

• Helps to predict when social amplification will
  occur, and so benefits of risk reduction bigger
  than might be thought
• enormously useful in designing communication
• Helpful in understanding the fundamental concerns
  that should help form objectives for policy
  decisions
• More need in context of extreme events

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Where to go with new work?

• Risk perception of a range of extreme events?
• Risk perceptions of scenarios
• The links between the affective and cognitive
  modes of thinking or information processing. When
  do we benefit from intermingling and providing
  cues linking one to the other.

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Decision Aiding/Risk Communication

• Individuals and groups involve decision-aiding
  how to blend the emotional and cognitive
  approaches for recommendations on policy/societal
  issues
• The influence of problem structuring tools on
  setting the framework for blending
• expanding the bounds, and improving awareness of,
  bounded rationality

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Wider Ideas

• How to use perceptions, affective content,
  emotional impact broadly, as widespread
  screening?
• Note that when we cant predict risks, then
  monitoring and rapid response becomes far more
  important
• Through understanding the affective content of
  language, we may be able to screen for terrorist
  actions better