Coping with Stigma: Challenges & Opportunities

This paper discusses several strategies for preventing technological stigma from causing unwarranted bias in public decision making

Do Adolescent Smokers Know the Risks?

Professor Slovic challenges Professor Viscusi by suggesting that risk is a term with varying meanings and the potential for misinterpretation by study participants. He distinguishes between the probability and severity of a risk, and suggests that teens who know the probability of smoking causing cancer are not aware of the severity of the experience of cancer. He goes on to note that people often perceive themselves as being less at risk than others, and observes that Professor Viscusi\u27s study posed questions about others, instead of asking teens to assess their own risks. Thirdly, he argues that teens perceive each individual cigarette as posing a small risk even if they seem to be aware of the larger risk of smoking. Finally, since many teen smokers intend to quit, he contends, they do not see smoking as hazardous to themselves. He argues that Professor Viscusi underrates the misperception of the risks of personal addiction. Professor Slovic augments his argument with original research demonstrating that smoking teens are more likely than nonsmoking teens to perceive the short term risks of smoking as trivial

Expert and Public Evaluations of Technological Risks: Searching for Common Ground

Drs. Flynn and Slovic compare and evaluate the ways in which the public and experts perceive technological risks

Predicting Future Sources of Mass Toxic Tort Litigation

The authors describe the efforts of an expert working group to identify potential sources, over the next five to ten years, of future mass litigation and report on the group\u27s consensus conclusions

Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior

We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument––a type of rational appeal––can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s well-known “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene 2012) against favoring nearby victims over distant ones. The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need (Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic 2007). This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We did not find support for our pre-registered hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a significantly stronger effect than either appeal in isolation. However, our finding that both kinds of appeal can increase charitable donations is cause for optimism, especially concerning the potential efficacy of well-designed rational appeals. We consider the significance of these findings for moral psychology, ethics, and the work of organizations aiming to alleviate severe poverty

Public perceptions of expert disagreement: Bias and incompetence or a complex and random world?

30 page PDFExpert disputes can present laypeople with several challenges including trying to understand why such disputes occur. In an online survey of the U.S. public, we used a psychometric approach to elicit perceptions of expert disputes for 56 forecasts sampled from seven domains (climate change, crime, economics, environment, health, politics, terrorism). People with low education, or with low self-reported knowledge of the topic, were most likely to attribute expert disputes to expert incompetence. People with higher self-reported knowledge tended to attribute disputes to expert bias due to financial or ideological reasons. The more highly educated and cognitively able were most likely to attribute disputes to natural factors, such as the irreducible complexity and randomness of the phenomenon. We highlight several important implications of these results for scientists and risk managers and argue for further research on how people perceive and grapple with expert disputes.We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation: This material is based upon work supported by NSF under Grant Nos. #1231231 (Robin Gregory, PI; Nathan Dieckmann co-PI) and #0925008 (Nathan Dieckmann, PI) to Decision Research. All views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone