Scientific American - 09.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1

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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/šž§§žÇĉîžTC ̧†iFranklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity
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
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