1st Edition

Risk Analysis and Human Behavior

By Baruch Fischhoff Copyright 2012
    432 Pages
    by Routledge

    432 Pages
    by Routledge

    The articles collected here are foundational contributions to integrating behavioural research and risk analysis. They include seminal articles on three essential challenges. One is ensuring effective two-way communication between technical experts and the lay public, so that risk analyses address lay concerns and provide useful information to people who need it. The second is ensuring that analyses make realistic assumptions about human behaviours that affect risk levels (e.g., how people use pharmaceuticals, operate equipment, or respond to evacuation orders). The third is ensuring that analyses recognize the strengths and weaknesses of experts’ understanding, using experts’ knowledge, while understanding its limits. The articles include overviews of the science, essays on the role of risk in society, and applications to domains as diverse as environment, medicine, terrorism, human rights, chemicals, pandemics, vaccination, HIV/AIDS, xenotransplantation, sexual assault, energy, and climate change. The work involves collaborations among scientists from many disciplines, working with practitioners to produce and convey the knowledge needed help people make better risk decisions.

    Introduction  Section 1: Overview  1. Risk Perception and Communication  2. Cognitive Processes in Stated Preference Methods  Section 2: Behaviorally Realistic Risk Analysis  3. Cost-benefit Analysis and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  4. Individuals’ Decisions Affecting Radiation Exposure After a Nuclear Event  5. Predicting Emergency Evacuation and Sheltering Behavior: A Structured Analytical Approach  6. An Integrative Approach to Label Design and Evaluation  7. Analyzing Disaster Risks and Plans: An Avian Flu Example  Section 3: Social Context of Behavioral Research  8. Lay Foibles and Expert Fables in Judgments about Risk  9. Risk Perception and Communication Unplugged: Twenty Years of Process  10. Non-persuasive Communication about Matters of Greatest Urgency: Climate Change  Section 4: Risk Communication  11. What Forecasts (seem to) Mean  12. Patients’ Vaccination Comprehension and Decisions  13. Development and Evaluation of an HIV/AIDS Knowledge Measure for Adolescents Focusing on Misconceptions  14. Communicating about Xenotransplanation: Models and Scenarios  Section 5: Aiding Individual Risk Decisions  15. What do Patients Want? Help in Making Effective Choices  16. Giving Advice: Decision Theory Perspectives on Sexual Assault  17. Sticky Decisions: Peanut Butter in a time of Salmonella  Section 6: Aiding Public Risk Decisions  18. A Multi-channel Stakeholder Consultation Process for Energy Deregulation  19. The Science and Practice of Risk Ranking  20. Counting Casualties: A Framework for Respectful, Useful Records.  Postscript: Integrating Risk Analysis and Behavioral Research

    Biography

    Baruch Fischhoff is Howard Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, US, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Department of Engineering and Public Policy.