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Understanding Risk Perception in Extreme Events: Implications for Communication and Policy

This paper by Tim McDaniels explores the nuances of risk perception relating to extreme events and how it shapes our coping mechanisms. It investigates how public perception influences responses to extreme events like terrorism, highlighting the importance of affective and cognitive processing in decision-making. By examining the components of risk perception, such as emotional impact and social amplification, the work provides insights into developing effective communication strategies and policy responses to manage public fear and misinformation in the face of extreme threats.

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Understanding Risk Perception in Extreme Events: Implications for Communication and Policy

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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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