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Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events

Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events. By Tim McDaniels. Extreme Event risk/non-marginal changes. Another Definition: overwhelms standard coping mechanisms. Tax our management, impose stresses

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Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events

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  1. Comments on Risk Perception and Extreme Events By Tim McDaniels

  2. 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

  3. What can risk perception research tell us generally • Thoughts off the top of people’s 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

  4. 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

  5. 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”

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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.

  9. 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

  10. Wider Ideas • How to use perceptions, affective content, emotional impact broadly, as widespread screening? • Note that when we can’t 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

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