Scientific American - 09.2019

76 Scientific American, September 2019

We did, although it probably wasn’t what these

company officials wanted. Instead of trying to change

people’s minds, we set about learning how they really

thought about these technologies. To that end, we

asked them questions designed to reveal how they as-

sessed risks. The answers helped us understand why

people form beliefs about divisive issues such as nu-

clear energy—and today, climate change—when they

do not have all the facts.

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

TO START OFF, we wanted to figure out how well the gen-

eral public understands the risks they face in everyday

life. We asked groups of laypeople to estimate the annu-

al death toll from causes such as drowning, emphyse-

ma and homicide and then com pared their estimates

with scientific ones. Based on previous re search, we ex-

pected that people would make gen erally accurate pre-

dictions but that they would overestimate deaths from

causes that get splashy or fre quent headlines—mur-

ders, tornadoes—and un der estimate deaths from “qui-

et killers,” such as stroke and asthma, that do not make

big news as often.

Overall, our predictions fared well. People over-

estimated highly reported causes of death and un -

derestimated ones that received less attention. Imag-

es of terror attacks, for example, might explain why

people who watch more television news worry more

about terrorism than individuals who rarely watch.

But one puzzling result emerged when we probed

these beliefs. People who were strongly op posed to

nuclear power believed that it had a very low annual

death toll. Why, then, would they be against it? The

apparent paradox made us wonder if by asking them

to predict average annual death tolls, we had defined

risk too narrowly. So, in a new set of questions we

asked what risk really meant to people. When we did,

we found that those opposed to nuclear power

Illustration by Bud Cook

IN BRIEF

When people
assess novel risks,
they rely on mental
models derived
from previous expe-
rience, which may
not be applicable.
Asking people how
they form such
assessments can
reveal misleading
preconceptions.
Experts can also
test messages about
risk to ensure the
public understands
them clearly.

HOW A BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

SEARCHES FOR ANSWERS

The kind of control you have in

bench science is much tighter

than in behavioral science— the power

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at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University

of New York and president of the Center for Policing Equity,

as told to Brooke Borel