Paul Slovic, Ph.D. - US grants

This award provides support for research describing and explaining how people make judgments and choices and in what ways these decision making behaviors are at variance from rational prescriptive theories of decision making. Specifically the objective of this research is to extend the study of preference reversal behavior into real world situations and to develop formal models which describe and explain judgement and choice behavior. Since the early reporting of preference reversal behavior the phenomenon has been shown to operate in many diverse decision making situations. Various competing explanations have been advanced to account for decision making which violate the prescriptions of quantitative theories of decision analysis. This research effort which will extend prior laboratory research into real world situations has the objective of developing more comprehensive process descriptions and explanations of preference reversal behavior as well as to develop formal models of the psychological phenomena of judgement and choice. Such progress is crucial if normative decision models were to serve as a basis to increase the rationality and effectiveness of actual decision making behavior.

The overall purpose of this project is twofold: (1) to develop a model of people's intuitive understanding of chemical risks and toxicological principles; and (2) to compare this model with that of expert toxicologists and risk assessors. Specific objectives of the study are (1) to develop a better understanding of how laypersons and experts assess toxicological risks, (2) to investigate differences in risk perceptions within the expert and lay communities, and (3) to conduct empirical studies that examine the knowledge base and conceptual frameworks used by experts and laypeople to assess chemical risks. Despite the importance of understanding public perceptions of chemical risks, little research has been directed toward this end. This innovative study will provide information important to both risk analysts and decision makers. Specifically, it will clarify the nature of the cognitive frameworks used by laypersons and by experts to assess risks. It will also contribute to the development of more effective risk communication about the risks and benefits of chemical hazards.

This is an ambitious project to address an important issue of national consequence. The proposed research will compare risk attitudes and perceptions in the United States and Japan. Although both the United States and Japan are highly industrialized countries, their approaches to managing technological risks are quite different. The United States relies primarily on a "confrontational model" characterized by adversarial relationships between interested parties, widespread public participation, and extensive use of the legal system. The Japanese approach, in comparison, is based on a "cooperative model" centered upon private negotiations between government and industry with an emphasis on consensus building. The proposal hypothesizes that these contrasting approaches are reflected in major differences in public attitudes and perceptions of risk in general and risk management in particular. This project will examine these differences by carrying out parallel studies of risk attitudes and risk perceptions in both countries. The research will be conducted in cooperation with colleagues in Japan. The investigators will draw upon their extensive prior experience in analyzing the components of risk in various populations. Besides providing information that will be relevant to the future interactions between the two countries, this comparison will increase basic understanding of national risk- management styles and approaches.

This is an ambitious proposal to investigate new approaches to analyzing and interpreting data on risk perception. Fifteen years of empirical research on perceptions of risk have led to a number of useful insights and conclusions. However, most of this research has used a rather narrow set of analytic methods for data analysis. This project proposes to apply powerful but rarely used analytic methods to five existing sets of data on perceived risk. Such analyses should provide new insights into individual differences in risk perception, changes in perceptions over time, and taxonomic representations of hazards and perceptions. In addition, explicit theories of risk perception will be developed and tested with these new methods. The principal investigators are recognized leaders in the field of risk perception and risk communication. They have been highly productive in their past research efforts and are ideally situated to conduct the proposed research. The approach is technically sound with a high potential for contributing both to risk analysis and to behavioral decision theory.

Trust is important for all forms of human social interaction and lack of trust appears to be a critical factor in creating the divisive controversies that surround the management of risks from modern technologies. Over the past 25 years, our society has witnessed a steady erosion of trust in the technical, legal, governmental and institutional systems that are called upon to manage risks. This proposal describes research designed to understand the nature of trust, its role in risk management, and the individual, technical, and organizational behaviors that are needed to build and maintain it. Specific studies are planned to determine the multiple facets or characteristics of trust, analogous to the characteristics that have been found to underlie perceived risk. Additional studies are designed to illuminate the events and processes that create and destroy trust in risk management.

This award supports a cooperative research project between Dr. Paul Slovic of the Decision Science Research Institute in Eugene, Oregon and Professor Hirotada Hirose, Department of Psychology, Tokyo Women's Christian University. Specifically it supports an initial working group meeting between the U.S. and Japanese researchers on a project entitled "Comparisons of Risk Attitudes and Perceptions." This project is also supported by a grant from the NSF Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program. It is an ambitious project to address an important issue of national consequence. Although the United States and Japan are highly industrialized countries, their approaches to managing technological risks are quite different. The United States relies primarily on a "confrontational model" characterized by adversarial relationships between interested parties, widespread public participation, and extensive use of the legal system. The Japanese system, in comparison, is based on a "cooperative model" centered upon private negotiations between government and industry with an emphasis on consensus building. The investigators in the cooperative study hypothesize that these contrasting approaches are reflected in major differences in public attitudes and perceptions of risk in general and risk management in particular. The investigators will examine these differences by carrying out parallel studies of risk attitudes and risk perceptions in both countries. They will draw upon their extensive prior experience in analyzing the components of risk in various populations. In addition to providing information that will be relevant to future interactions between the two countries, this comparison will increase basic understanding of national risk-management styles and approaches.

Within a democratic society, risk management policies need to be guided by public attitudes, perceptions, and preferences. A national survey effort can play a crucial role in helping decision makers in government and industry understand and appreciate citizens' views. Toward the objective, the project will design a prototype for a national survey covering a wide range of risk-related topics including risk perceptions, comparative evaluations of societal, technological, environmental, and health risks, and attitudes and opinions about risk management policies and strategies. The research will address questions about demographic characteristics, economic status, worldviews, and political values. The design of the prototype instrument will be the responsibility of Decision Research with the assistance of personnel from the Survey Research Center of the University of Maryland and an Advisory Committee. The survey instrument will be designed to allow researchers to develop and test theories and models of decision making pertaining to a wide range of societal risk issues, public policy formulation, and analysis.

The probability that a person with mental illness will commit a violent act has important legal implications. Premilinary work shows that clinicians assessed probabilities of violence were highly sensitive to the manner in which they were elicited, resulting in great inconsistency. Unless probabilities are consistent, they cannot have an adequate degree of correspondence to actual events in the world and cannot convey appropriate information about the potential for future events, such as the likelihood that an individual will cause harm. Using experienced clinicians to judge the probability that a mental patient will commit a violent act, this research seeks to: (1) identify the underlying causes of inconsistencies in clinicians probability assessments of factors relevant to involuntary hospitalization in mental health law, (2) investigate the effectiveness of an alternative method of probability assessment to reduce scale inconsistency, and (3) examine the effects of task structure and training in probability on the consistency of clinicians probability assessments.

Affect and emotion have been actively studied in psychology for more than a century, yet few studies have examined the role of affect in technological risk assessment. This research develops and tests a theory that portrays affect and cognitive worldviews as functionally similar, working in parallel to help experts and laypersons cope with complexity and uncertainty in the face of risk. Quantitative measures of affect will be developed and used in empirical studies of expert and lay judgments about technological risks. The theoretical and empirical insights obtained from this work should lead to a better appreciation of how laypersons and experts derive meaning from risk information and experience.

Beyond Perception: The Experience of Risk in an African American Community The consequences of chronic, long-term environmental contamination can be devastating to individuals. Extensive research has been done to quantify the effects of exposure in such setting as well as the perceptions of this exposed. What has been less thoroughly examined are the more qualitative consequences of long-term exposure to contaminants on individuals' perceptions of themselves and their communities. In this research project, the PI s will gather qualitative data from the primarily African American residents in a heavily polluted site in Georgia. This research will provide a more complete understanding of what the experience of exposure to environmental contaminants entails - integrating the quantitative measurements of perceptions with more narrative and personal descriptions of life in such situations ó ªñ+ú^ó|úñ +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^|+ñ +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^¼»| +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^¼º¬ññ +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^Ñ|¡¬ +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^Ñ¿«ñ +?+¬ ó ¬ñ«¬^áúú¬^½¿? +?+¬

Rational decision making is commonly conceived of a involving dispassionate formulation of the options and careful computation of the best course of action. Research conducted by neuroscientists on individuals with certain types of brain damage suggests that, contrary to common view of rational decision making as dispassionate, emotions may be critical to good decision making. In this research the PI will investigate the interplay between affect and reason in decision making. Specifically, the research examines individual differences in the ability to be guided by affect when making decisions and how those differences in affect influence the quality of decisions made.

This dissertation project examines the governing narrative of the Cold War in order to understand how particular values and purposes came to dominate risk analysis. It casts risk analysis's regulatory history in a new light by showing that it was not established in the late 1970's, as most accounts claim, but much earlier. Case studies of civil defense planning, nuclear reactor safety, and the controversy over nuclear fallout show a) that risk analysis emerged early in the Cold War to meet policy objectives similar to those characteristics of later risk analysis, and b) that changes in methodology and regulatory sites marked its reestablishment in the late 1970's. This effort to reinstitute early Cold War patterns of authority and values in the wake of the social upheavals and regulatory reforms of the sixties marked a new and still unresolved phase in a conflict between system learning and social learning. The study argues that current tensions between authoritarian and democratic approaches to regulatory risk are indicative of an underlying choice about alternative forms of modernization.

Contemporary science and technology are perceived by many as hazardous as well as beneficial. This has led to public concerns about risk management of important policies and projects. Differences between experts and the public have been central to numerous resulting risk controversies. This research project studies the way attitudes toward risk issues and their management are formed and the implications for addressing risk controversies. The primary empirical evidence for discussing the conceptual issues comes from an examination of five risk topics: (1) risk and decision making; (2) values and environmental risks, (3) intuitive toxicology, (4) biotechnology and cloning, and (5) product stigma. Scientific articles are in preparation for each of these topics.

The data for the study comes from archives at Decision Research and elsewhere, from ongoing research, and from the 1997 national risk survey, which was designed to produce new data on these topics. In particular, this recent survey includes oversampling of minority populations that will allow examination of social, cultural, and political factors that prior evidence indicates are an important part of the context people use to form their perceptions of risk and their attitudes toward public decision processes. A primary focus of this work is to develop a conceptual framework to understand different approaches to risk and preferences for risk management options. This research is expected to inform risk communication, risk management, and public policy in ways that will serve as the basis for recommending new approaches for public decision making.

Affect and emotion have been actively studied in psychology for more than a century, yet the role of affective processes in judgment and decision making remains largely unexplored. Building upon recent work in cognitive and social psychology, and in neurology, the research proposed here develops and tests an affect-based theory of judgment and decision making. Within this theory, new concepts such as evaluability, proportion dominance, psychophysical numbing, and the affect heuristic are described and used to explain anomalies such as the increased attractiveness of inferior gambles and our inability to properly appreciate the significance of numerical representations of losses of human lives. We argue that, without affective guidance derived from experience or problem context, we may fail to grasp the meaning or value of commonplace things such as ice cream or more profound things such as money and human lives.

Building upon this theoretical framework and supporting research, five types of studies are proposed:
1. Research on the affect heuristic tests the hypothesis that affect serves as a cue for judgments of risk and probability.
2. Research on evaluability tests the hypothesis that the meaning of a stimulus is reflected in the precision of a person's affective feelings toward that stimulus. More precise affective impressions reflect more precise meanings, and they carry more weight in judgment and decision making.
3. Research on affect integration investigates the manner in which multiple affective feelings are integrated into an impression, judgment, or decision.
4. Studies of individual differences seek to develop measures to differentiate intuitive, experiential, and affective thinkers from persons whose thinking is less guided by affect.
5. Prescriptive research attempts to demonstrate how an understanding of affective processes can lead to improvements in the quality of people's judgments and decisions.

This project will investigate the roles of affective imagery and cultural
worldviews in risk perception, decision-making and behavior, using global
climate change as a case study. Past research has focused on the role of
cognitive factors like knowledge, mental models and general environmental
beliefs in risk perceptions of climate change. Recent research, however, has
also begun to focus on the role of affective factors. This project will
develop and test affective image analysis as an innovative method to study
public risk perceptions along both cognitive and affective dimensions.
Additionally, cultural theorists argue that cultural worldviews are also
important factors and need to be included as explanatory variables. This
project will operationalize and test the predictions of cultural theory.
Finally, many researchers assume that risk perceptions and behaviors
correlate, yet little focused research has been done. This research will
test this assumption, using climate change as a case study.

This project also addresses several applied questions: Does the American
public perceive global climate change as a serious risk? What specifically
do they fear about it? Do these risk perceptions translate into personal
actions and/or support for mitigation policies? This research will
contribute to the continuing discussion on global climate change, as
scientists and policymakers attempt to find scientifically appropriate and
publicly acceptable solutions to this global problem.

The proposed research attempts to articulate the interrelated roles of affect and deliberation in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, "affect" means the specific quality of "goodness" or "badness" (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without awareness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. We have characterized reliance on such feelings when making judgments or decisions as "the affect heuristic."

Research in cognitive and social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that informs us about two basic modes of thinking, experiential and analytic. The experiential system is intuitive, automatic, image-based, fast, and intimately associated with affective feelings. The analytic system is deliberative, reason-based, and slow. There are strong elements of rationality in both systems. It was the experiential system that enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution. Long before there was probability theory, risk assessment, and decision analysis, there were intuition, instinct, and gut feelings to tell us whether an animal was safe to approach or the water was safe to drink. As life became more complex and humans gained more control over their environment, analytic tools were invented to "boost" the rationality of our experiential thinking.

We plan in this project to conduct experiments to better understand the role of affect in decision making and the interaction between the experiential, affect-based mode of thinking and more analytic and deliberative processes. These experiments are designed to test specific predictions about the way that individual and environmental factors such as time pressure, cognitive load, age, mood, and instruction to think or give reasons influence the balance of affective and deliberative processing and the judgments and decisions that result from this processing. We shall also address the broader impacts of this research, by demonstrating how the findings provide insight into ways to improve a wide-range of important practical decisions about matters involving finance, medical treatments, cigarette smoking, health insurance, and risk perception.

Risks and risk management occur within a rich and complex socio-cultural context, in which groups of individuals are predisposed to select, ignore and interpret risk information in different ways. This exploratory project is part of a broad program to understand the socio-cultural dynamics of risk perception, decision-making and behavior. Specifically, this research will integrate three recent research trajectories (affective imagery, cultural theory, and the "white male effect") in a systematic effort to identify, describe and explain the existence of discrete "interpretive communities of risk:" clusters of individuals who share mutually compatible risk perceptions, affective imagery, cultural worldviews, and socio-demographic characteristics. Results from this study will contribute to emerging theory on the roles of affect, symbolic meaning, cultural worldviews and socio-cultural context in risk perception and decision making.

This project is guided by the following research questions: Can we identify distinct interpretive communities of risk among the American public? If so, what are their distinguishing characteristics? Are these interpretive communities dynamic and in constant flux, or are they relatively stable, transcending particular risks? In other words, do interpretive communities that are substantially different in character form around different kinds of risks (e.g., health vs. security risks), or are there groups who consistently perceive and interpret a wide variety of risks in similar ways? Finally, why do some interpretive communities perceive particular hazards as extreme risks, while others perceive these same hazards as low or non-existent risks?

Recent research has identified two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: an analytic, logical and abstract system of symbol manipulation; and an experiential, emotional and concrete system of images, narratives and associations. Research has also demonstrated that the experiential system can have powerful influences on risk perception, decision making and behavior. A related body of research has incorporated these psychological findings within a broader theoretical framework, which integrates psychological, social and cultural processes to understand the social amplification and attenuation of risk. These studies have identified the mass media as a critical actor in public risk perceptions, but have focused exclusively on the role of the news media (e.g., newspapers) in risk communication. To date, there has been no empirical investigation of the influence of motion pictures on public risk perceptions and behavior, despite substantial anecdotal evidence suggesting that popular movie representations of risk can occasionally have a powerful influence on public risk perceptions and behaviors (e.g., Jaws and The China Syndrome). Motion pictures, which integrate powerful imagery, strong emotional cues, and character-driven narrative, work directly on an individual's experiential processing system. Further, they can become major risk amplification events vicariously experienced by millions of people.

This project will explore the impact of vicarious experience and the social amplification of risk at the national scale. Specifically, we hypothesize that The Day After Tomorrow, a film that depicts abrupt, catastrophic climate change, will measurably alter public risk perceptions of the likelihood and severity of climate change impacts and shift public conceptions of climate change from a gradual, linear warming to abrupt, non-linear and catastrophic change. The project will test this hypothesis using three national surveys in a before, during and after treatment design. Results from this study will contribute to emerging theory on the roles of experiential processing and the social amplification of risk in risk perception and decision-making. It will also contribute to our understanding of the influence of mass media on society.

Do older and younger adults differ in how they process information? Do they make systematically different decisions as a result? How can we help older adults make better decisions? The aim of the proposed research is to examine adult age differences in affective (feeling-based) and deliberative (thought-based) information processes in order to understand how such dual information processing might impact judgments and decisions. Five experiments will be conducted to study whether older adults may react more to and learn more from affective experiences than younger adults and whether relevant and irrelevant sources of feelings may impact older-adult decision performance more. The tasks are intended to identify factors that might hurt older adult performance and to test methods to enhance their decision making.

This research will add to the growing body of knowledge concerning how affective and deliberative ways of thinking may follow particular developmental paths. In addition, proposals to improve decision-making abilities are based primarily on research with younger adults. Decision making is essential to life at all ages, however, and older adults are increasingly being asked to make their own decisions. No longer are health and financial decisions left entirely to specialists such as the family doctor. Instead, older adults are faced with more choices and more information than in previous generations at a point in their lives when their abilities to deliberate carefully about important decisions may be declining. Understanding the psychological processes that underlie the judgments and decisions of older adults will help us to identify areas in which they may be most vulnerable and guide efforts to help them maintain their health, financial security, and quality of life.

How do big events like natural disasters impact everyday behavior? This research project studies how individual and societal judgment and decision behavior is influenced by feelings and emotion in the aftermath of a major natural disaster. On December 27, 2004 a Tsunami struck southern Asia and East Africa resulting in over 150,000 lives lost. Southern Asia is a popular tourist resort, especially for Scandinavian travelers. One Scandinavian country, Sweden (pop. 9 million), had an unusually large number of tourists visiting the area at the time of the disaster. As a result, more than twelve hundred Swedes were killed or are missing. The Tsunami disaster is therefore the biggest national tragedy in Sweden in the last hundred years. A consequence of this tragedy, and the media attention it received and still receives, is that many Swedes feel deeply involved and saddened (e.g., a "national mood"). We propose that change in a nation's mood can have a profound impact on people's judgment and decision behavior. The aim of this project is to test research hypotheses about how affect experienced by a whole nation can influence risk perceptions, evaluative judgments, judgments about the future, and the decision strategies people use to mitigate their negative feelings. The national mood experienced in the aftermath of the Tsunami provides a unique possibility to test the research hypotheses in a whole population. Data will be collected in surveys, experiments, and through analyses of secondary objective data (consumption before and after the Tsunami disaster). The proposed studies will help to advance our basic understanding of how affect and feelings influence judgment and decision making, as well as to indicate how feelings tied to big events like natural disasters impact subsequent risk and decision behavior.

Recent research in numeracy suggests that individuals differ substantially
in their abilities to process numbers and that, in fact, many people are
"innumerate." In our increasingly technical world, innumeracy (a lack of
ability to understand and use basic probability and mathematical concepts)
may be a critical disadvantage to making good decisions in financial,
medical, and other domains.

The proposed research examines the roles of numeracy and affect in decision
making. We examine the extent to which numerical ability helps decisions in
some situations and hurts decisions in others. We also examine whether
numeracy impacts affective feelings, and we attempt to manipulate affect as
well as to enhance and disrupt calculation ability in order to test
hypotheses. This research will add to the growing body of knowledge
concerning how affective and deliberative ways of thinking may influence
important aspects of decision making such as the effects of describing
features of a decision in different ways (framing). In addition, proposals
for improving people's decision-making abilities are based primarily on
research results based on the population as a whole. It may be, however,
that individuals will differ in the type of assistance they need. Those low
in numerical ability may need different decision aids than those high in
numerical ability. In some decisions that involve very complex numbers, we
may all need assistance. We are increasingly being asked to make our own
decisions about vital life issues. No longer are health and financial
decisions left entirely to specialists such as the family doctor. Instead,
all decision makers are faced with more choices and more information than
in previous generations. Thus, research-based advice is essential to help
decision makers who differ in their preferences and abilities for
processing information and who face decisions that differ in numerical
complexity.

The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about the magnitude of risks to their culturally grounded moral appraisals of putatively dangerous activities. In a previous study the investigators surveyed a large national sample (N = 1,800) to assess this phenomenon. They found that beliefs about myriad risks--ones involving climate change, firearm possession, drug use, and various medical procedures, among others--are distributed across persons in patterns best explained by cultural cognition. But while this study furnished strong evidence that cultural commitments do indeed shape risk perceptions, the study did not identify precisely why or how culture exerts this influence.

That is the objective of the current study. Using innovative on-line testing methods, the investigators will carry out a series of experiments aimed at uncovering the social and psychological mechanisms through which cultural cognition operates. Among their principal hypotheses is that individuals experience emotional resistance to information that portends interference with activities central to their cultural identities. Another is that individuals impute greater credibility to risk communicators who appear to share their cultural orientations than to those who appear to harbor competing ones. It is expected that the results of the this experimental project will not only deepen scientific understanding of how risk perceptions are formed, but also generate practical insights into how persons of diverse cultural orientations can reach agreement on appropriate policies of risk mitigation.

Why do good people, so compassionate towards individuals in need, become apathetic when the number of needy grows large? While there is, of course, no single reason for apathy in the face of mass tragedy, in this research we focus on one fundamental mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-tragedy neglect. This mechanism involves the capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that combine with reasoned analysis to motivate our actions. Our experimental paradigm examines real donations to starving children in Africa. The number of victims ranges between 1 and 8. In earlier research, we found that donations were greatest when the contribution requested is to help a single child and declines as the number of victims increase. Our proposed experiments are designed to test a theoretical model in which attention and affect interact with psychological distance or "connectedness" to create empathy and willingness to donate. Experimental manipulations will vary the number of victims, the seriousness of their plight, and the "connectedness" between donors and victims and between victims to see how these factors determine attention to those in need and actions to help them.

This study seeks to model the dynamic complexity of a community's behavioral response to a terrorist strike and to estimate the economic impacts of this response. Emergency response systems, information and communication channels, and social support organizations are likely to interact with the particular characteristics of a terrorist event to both amplify and mute these impacts. What factors are most important to adequately forecast the broader impacts of a disaster and most particularly a terrorist strike? How can risk perception be incorporated into an economic model that predicts regional or national impacts? How does resilience (the ability of a community to maintain function when shocked) affect predicted responses to catastrophic events? How do these factors change and interact over time, and what are the important mechanisms that drive such change, especially system feedbacks and delays? How do responses to risk differ across gender, age, ethnicity, and income? What perspectives does a community bring to a crisis that helps or hinders its ability to prepare, respond and recover? What policies can be implemented that may mitigate the broader and long-term impacts of such an event?

The investigators will develop statistical and economic models. Interviews with community leaders and first responders will provide input for assessing emergency response systems. Public response will be based on data gathered from a longitudinal survey using three scenarios (earthquake, bomb blast, anthrax release) that unfold over time consistent with crisis news reporting. An economy-wide model based on the behavior of individual businesses and consumers, informed by the risk perception surveys and analyses, will provide estimates of the direct and indirect impacts of risk amplification.

First responders, health care providers, local administrators, and educators stand to directly benefit from a better understanding of the effects of their policies and practices. Findings from this project should prove especially useful to Homeland Security Officials. Researchers in areas such as risk assessment, communications, community planning, epidemiology, and risk perception will find the system dynamics model useful as a simulation tool for their own investigations.

The current financial challenges in the United States represent a unique opportunity to study public risk perception and risk-related behaviors in the midst of an on-going economic crisis that threatens the quality of life of a wide spectrum of Americans. Few emergencies within the U.S. have affected so many people. The current situation is a rich opportunity because it is occurring real-time, and is highly dynamic, involving many players and sectors of our economy. As a result, it allows a chance to compare financial threats with other disasters such as terrorism. The public?s perceptions and risk-related behaviors seem likely to change over time in response to media coverage and government and private sector actions.

The study will examine how people perceive and react to this crisis, what information they are attending to, whom they trust (or do not trust), and how this crisis is affecting future plans. One of the historical and central challenges of risk perception research has been the difficulty of examining how people?s attitudes and behavior in real-time emergencies change over time. The closest approximation is usually a series of cross-sectional surveys over time conducted by national polling organizations. This project will track a panel of respondents during this crisis at regular intervals and over a period of months. Theoretical links will be made between risk perception, social amplification of risk, the affect heuristic and numeracy.

The planned study investigates perceived threats from the financial crisis to jobs, savings, investments, retirement, future opportunities and quality of life. It also examines issues of trust, perceived control and predictability of the crisis?s consequences and emotions such as fear, anger, worry and sadness. Additionally, the questionnaire addresses reported behaviors people have taken, are taking, or plan to take in response to what they are learning from a variety of information sources. The study will examine the time people are devoting to acquire information about the crisis, and from what sources. Other phenomena will also be followed during this period such as the stock market, housing markets, media coverage, and pivotal events (e.g. rescue plan, presidential debates, major bank failures) to look for possible correlations of event occurrences with changes in public perceptions and behavior.

Business leaders, financial advisors, and administrators stand to directly benefit from a better understanding of the effects of their policies and practices. Researchers in areas such as risk assessment, risk communication, and risk perception will find the analysis of social amplification of risk, the affect heuristic and numeracy useful for their own investigations.

Numerical information is ubiquitous in decisions, both big and small (how many minutes to drive to the grocery, mortgages, credit-card debt, medical treatments, environmental risks). High quality data (e.g., complex data concerning natural hazards, health treatments, and financial options) are increasingly available to experts and the public. To a degree never before possible, individuals are in a position to understand risks, and, in the process, increase control over their lives. Policy makers and others generally assume that, if provided appropriate numbers, people will understand and use them, but having access to information is only the first step to making good decisions. Individuals may lack the skills, knowledge, or motivation to access credible sources, process information, and make informed choices. As a result, the same data may not be understood or used in the same way by all users. Previous research, in fact, has shown that individuals low and high in numeracy (abilities with mathematical and probabilistic concepts) rely on different sources of information in decision making, and that those lower in numeracy comprehend less and may make poorer decisions when numbers are involved. Numbers are used (and not used) in some surprising ways in decision making. Using behavioral methods (including reaction time, judgment, and choice) modified from previous literatures, this project involves conduct of experiments to test the relations between numeracy and intuitive representations of numbers and to test their separable influences in a variety of decision contexts.

This research may add substantially to our understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying decisions that involve numeric information. It will also add to the growing body of knowledge concerning how intuitive and deliberative ways of thinking interact and influence how numeric information is processed in decision making.

Abstract

Research suggests that chronic activation of the stress response system may have deleterious effects on many of the neurological structures that are believed to mediate decision-making processes. As a result, in addition to the adverse consequences chronic stress can pose for physical and mental health (e.g., cardiovascular disease, depression) it may pose a significant threat to decision-making capabilities. These effects may be especially detrimental at the extreme ends of the developmental spectrum. For instance, in older adults, chronic stress may further tax systems that may already be declining as a function of normal cognitive aging. At the other end of the spectrum, the effects of early life stress may result in maturational delays in the development of adaptive decision-making for young children.

This research examines the association between chronic stress and decision-making. It combines research on the neural structures that support decision-making with new techniques for studying risky decision-making. It also examines the developmental trajectory of adaptive decision-making (i.e., the ability to make choices that are more likely to result in a gain/reward, and avoid ones which pose greater danger for loss/punishment). The research will also identify individual difference variables that may influence adaptive decision-making across the lifespan. Three studies will be conducted. Study 1 investigates how age-differences in older adults may influence risky choice behavior for decisions involving potential gains and ones involving potential losses, and how chronic stress may further compromise decision-making abilities. Study 2 examines the effects of chronic stress on decisions posing extreme uncertainty. Study 3 examines adaptive decision-making abilities of children currently in foster care, who were exposed to significant early life stress. Together, these studies will provide insights regarding the effects of chronic stress on human decision processes, both with respect to cognitive aging and neuropsychological development. This increased understanding may assist in identifying specific vulnerability factors associated with age-related changes in decision-making abilities and provide important insights that may help researchers develop interventions to promote better decision-making in older adults and children.

There are more than 6 billion people inhabiting Planet Earth. About one billion of these enjoy a high standard of living unprecedented in human history, while another billion live in extreme poverty, subject to great risk from hunger, disease, natural disasters, and human malevolence. This research explores what motivates those in the wealthy world to contribute money and humanitarian aid to those in need. This research builds on psychological theory to test the effects of attention, imagery, trust, moods, emotions, and varying descriptions of the need. The project team also examines the importance and determiners of the warm glow of good feeling that occurs when one helps another in need.

Although there have been many studies of charitable giving and philanthropy during the past 20 years, many open questions remain. This project employs laboratory experiments, online surveys, and field studies to address questions such as the following:

* What is the psychological nature of warm glow: What is the experience? When is it experienced? How often? What is the duration of the experience and how does it influence subsequent decisions about donating? Can warm glow feelings be induced without the actual act of giving?
* What factors mediate giving through warm glow, both to motivate and demotivate giving? How does the number of people in need influence warm glow? Are we deterred from aiding those people we can help by becoming aware of others we are not helping?
* How might warm glow giving be modeled to incorporate the complex and dynamic interactions among many causal variables?

Previous research by these scholars in this area has already influenced the approaches that journalists and humanitarian aid organizations have taken to motivate people and their governments to do more to help others. The new research continues to inform those who are working to save lives and enhance the well being of the world's neediest people.

The term "identified victim effect" refers to people's greater willingness to help identified victims (victims about whom they have some information) relative to unidentified persons. Past research suggests that the effect is restricted to single victims; meaning that identifying a single victim (by adding a name or a picture) increases helping, while the identification of individual members of a group has less effect on helping. This project explores the roots of the preference for helping a single, identifiable person, examining the development of this preference in young children within individualistic and collectivist societies. Hence the research intends to offer some insight into a most important facet of human social behavior: the willingness to help others in need. It aims to make significant theoretical contributions to understanding the sources of the identifiable victim effect and to the literature on the development of pro-social behavior.

The research team is conducting nine experiments. Some examine young children?s willingness to help identifiable single and group targets experiencing the same need to help clarify whether the identifiable victim effect develops with age and if so, when, in childhood, this tendency begins to appear. The research addresses the question of whether society can impart the feelings that are needed for enhancing caring for groups of people in need. In addition, the research explores whether the preference for helping the single identifiable victim may be a result of culture and education. Specifically, Western societies' individualism (according to which the individual person is the purpose for which society exists) may enhance people's caring for the one victim and cause the lack of relatedness to the group. If that is the case, it is expected that people in societies that hold more collectivistic views (emphasizing the primacy of the group or community rather than each individual person) will show no such preference.

In addition to its theoretical contribution, the proposed research has important practical implications for increasing the frequency and strength of pro-social behavior as part of optimal human development.

In a rational world, as threats to life increase in scale, potential efforts to protect those lives should increase proportionally. Unfortunately, in many circumstances, the opposite occurs. Compassion and societal concerns decrease rather than increase in the face of larger threats. The studies proposed here aim to examine the psychological underpinnings of this perverse phenomenon and examine its importance for theoretical models of valuation and, more broadly, for the welfare of society. The research uses a web panel to conduct eight studies that, with comoponent substudies, total around sixteen experiments.

Prospect theory is arguably the most important descriptive theoretical framework in the field of decision making. According to this theory, valuation of human life follows an ever-increasing function that places greater overall importance on the threat as the number of lives at risk increases. Researchers have found empirical support for this function, but some believe that valuation of lives takes other forms besides that depicted in prospect theory. This research tests the hypothesis that, in some instances, "the more who die, the less we care," a form of valuation that is inconsistent with prospect theory. In some contexts, valuation may follow an inverse-U trajectory, rising with increasing numbers of lives at stake up to a threshold, but then collapsing as the number continues to increase.

In addition to this theoretical extension of prospect theory, the research has important practical implications. Devaluation of life in the face of large-scale crises may help us understand failures to respond aggressively to mass threats posed by poverty, disease, famine, natural disasters, violence, and species extinction. We hope, as well, that this understanding will point the way toward better decisions through improved processes of analysis and deliberation and the creation of laws and institutions designed to overcome value collapse.

In a great many situations where we are asked to aid persons whose lives are endangered, we are not able to help everyone. What do we then do? Research has shown that people often feel less good about helping those they can help and they help less when their attention is drawn to those who cannot be helped. The demotivation exhibited by these people may be a form of pseudoinefficacy that is nonrational. We should not be deterred from helping whomever we can because there are others we are not able to help. This research aims to provide a better understanding of the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of pseudoinefficacy and test strategies to combat it. Specifically, the research team examines pseudoinefficacy in the context of decisions about whether to aid people whose lives are endangered. Laboratory experiments and online surveys illuminate the interplay between the scope and framing of the humanitarian need, the type of thinking it stimulates, and the distinct emotional responses associated with such thinking and with pseudoinefficacy.

The importance of this project comes from the fact that, domestically and internationally, millions of people struggle to survive in the face of poverty, disease, food insufficiency, natural disasters, and human malevolence. Those individuals and governments fortunate to have the ability and desire to help those in need are inundated with requests for vital aid. Many do respond. Humanitarian aid provided by individuals, NGOs, and governments, though large in some sense, is but a fraction of what is needed and what could be provided. For those in a position to help, decisions are strongly motivated by perceived efficacy. Inefficacy, real or perceived, shrivels response, even among those who have the desire and the means to protect and improve lives. It is tragic, indeed, when efficacy goes unrecognized and vital aid that could be provided is withheld due to the illusion of ineffectiveness that the research teams has labelled "pseudoinefficacy." This research projecct explores and documents the root psychological causes of pseudoinefficacy and develops ways to mitigate its harmful consequences. Although the proposed studies are set in the context of humanitarian aid, the problem of pseudoinefficacy is central to a wide range of important personal and societal decisions motivated by perceived efficacy, such as actions to mitigate climate change or other threats to human health and the environment.

The workshop examines, in a direct and intense way, issues of valuation, judgment, preference, and choice that have engaged humanity for centuries and, today, are at the heart of the modern intellectual enterprise known as "Behavioral Decision Theory." Two primary intellectual debates lie at the heart of this proposal. The first, involving economists, philosophers, and other students of choice, concerns the influence on decisions of expressed or stated values as compared to values that are revealed through choices. Previous research has shown that the values indicated by these two modes of assessment often differ. One explanation for such inconsistency has centered around the weighting of the various attributes or objectives of decision options and the evidence for systematic discrepancies in weighting associated with expressed and revealed preferences. In particular, we shall examine the hypothesis that objectives such as national security and economic security get relatively greater weight compared to humanitarian objectives when values are revealed through decisions as opposed to being explicitly stated. A second intellectual debate addressed by the workshop concerns how tradeoffs involving multiple dimensions of value "including such disparate concerns as lives, costs, national security, uncertainty, politics, and reputation" should be evaluated as part of difficult national policy choices.

It is hard to imagine an issue that has broader significance than understanding the place of humanitarian objectives in national security decisions. Millions of lives and global security depend on these decisions. Do the political, social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian values that we assume should guide rational decision making actually exist in some coherent and consistent form? If so, what are these considered values and how do we ensure that our decisions, at the end of the day, are in accord with these values? This project addresses these vital questions within the framework of a workshop designed to clarify and address an apparent disconnect between stated humanitarian aspirations and values and subsequent lack of commensurate actions. Questions are asked of public and expert participants in a workshop setting to better understand the underlying reasons why expressed humanitarian values may collapse in the decision-making process. A second objective is to understand the thinking of decision makers with hands-on experience in decisions about whether to intervene in other countries for humanitarian reasons.

Despite the increase in the number of life-saving organ transplants in the last decades, organs recovered from deceased donors are not adequate to meet the increasing demand in most countries. In many cases, the possibility of organ transplantation is prevented because of the objection of the donor's family, especially when the deceased herself did not express her willingness for organ donation (OD) while alive. This project implements a broad and in-depth research program to understand behavioral and psychological mechanisms behind OD decisions. It aims to find ways to increase the percentage of organ donors and the support for policies that may increase ODs. For example, encouraging OD receivers to tell their story in the media (with identifying detail) may increase the support for OD. Likewise, providing statistical information about the average life expectancy may promote realistic thinking about death and may increase willingness to commit to OD. We believe that increasing the number of potential organ donors as well as the public awareness of this issue may help to save the lives of many that are waiting for organ transplants.

The planned research addresses three main objectives. (1) To learn about the role of the presentation of OD cases in affecting people's willingness to commit to OD (including the decision to donate the organs of a deceased relative). (2) To examine individual differences in death anxiety (Fear of Personal Death - FPD) and in people's beliefs, to learn about their role in predicting people's decisions regarding OD issues. (3) To manipulate the factors situationally, using priming techniques (i.e., priming thoughts about religious issues, about just vs. unjust world; thoughts of tempting fate; manipulation or increasing the salience of different aspects of the FPD) to examine the influence of such manipulations on people's decisions regarding OD issues. Together, these research directions will help us to better understand the mechanisms behind OD decisions and describe how these decisions differ from other donation decisions.

The unprecedented pandemic wrought by the coronavirus has infected many people around the world, triggering anxiety and panic and disrupting all facets of life. In addition to the growing numbers of cases and deaths, the social, economic, and political impacts are vast. Lacking a vaccine or effective therapeutic cure, the front line of defense against the spread of this disease depends on human behavior, following guidelines about social distancing, sanitation, and other recommended measures. There is great uncertainty about the future trajectory of the disease and its impacts. Against the backdrop of this catastrophic threat this research forecasts public perceptions of risks, including hopes and fears, using a new theoretical model based on what is known as ?the affect heuristic.? The researchers build and test this model in two ways that increase understanding of how positive and negative emotions, influenced by daily news reports, interact to guide behavior. Understanding the changing reactions to news information not only advances understanding of risk perception, but enables the creation of effective risk communication messages. The research provides insight into the behaviors that will determine the course of the disease and can help to mitigate its harmful social and economic impacts.

Studies have consistently found an inverse relationship between judgments of benefits and risks associated with a wide array of hazards. This relationship occurs because perceptions of risk and benefit are derived in opposite ways from an affective sense of the importance of the risk. This process became known as the affect heuristic. The causal dynamics that underlie the relationship between affect and perceived risks and benefits remain poorly understood. This project does three things: (1a) constructs a system dynamics simulation model that explicitly incorporates the informational feedback loops that allow affect to play this moderating role and (1b) simulates the trajectories of affect and perceived risk and benefits as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, (2) constructs a hybrid agent-based model that incorporates findings from the systems model but allows for heterogeneity (e.g., different levels of medical vulnerability) among agents, and (3) conducts a longitudinal national panel to survey the public?s response to the pandemic over a 6 month period. These data together with data from an independent panel are be used to estimate and validate both models. This project has broad impacts because understanding how we manage our perceptions of risk and benefits is critical to the decisions we make and our behaviors. The project helps to explain this entanglement and predict public reaction to the current pandemic and, potentially, to other crises.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.