What Do We Know About Making Risk Comparisons?
Abstract
The risks of unfamiliar technologies are often evaluated by comparing them with the risks of more familiar ones. Such risk comparisons have been criticized for neglecting critical dimensions of risky decisions. In a guide written for the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Covello et al.(1) have summarized these critiques and developed a taxonomy that characterizes possible risk comparisons in terms of their acceptability (or objectionableness). We asked four diverse groups of subjects to judge the acceptability of 14 statements produced by Covello et al. as examples of their categories. We found no correlation between the judgments of acceptability produced by our subjects and those predicted by Covello et al..
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Many people do not understand the role of uncertainty in science.
“partly because many people do not understand the role of uncertainty in science (Roth et al., 1990)”
From A review of the effects of uncertainty in public science communication (2020) · cites this paper as Roth et al., 1990
Cites
Fault trees: sensitivity of estimated failure probabilities to problem representation
Fischhoff, B., Slovic, P., & Lichtenstein, S. (1978) · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance · doi:10.1037/0096-1523.4.2.330 · Cited by 708 · see citing works
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A review of the effects of uncertainty in public science communication
Gustafson, A., & Rice, R. E. (2020) · Public Understanding of Science · doi:10.1177/0963662520942122 · Cited by 291 · see citing works
- Authors
- Roth, E., Morgan, M. G., Fischhoff, B., Lave, L., & Bostrom, A.
- Affiliations
- Westinghouse Electric (United States) (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Morgan, M. Granger
- Venue
- Risk Analysis
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1990-09
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 375-387
- ISSN
- 0272-4332 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-6924
- OpenAlex
- W2070057681
- Cited by
- 110
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 5 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 14.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Risk Analysis (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Risk Perception and Management
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › Risk and Safety Analysis
- Keywords
- risk comparison, risk acceptability, risk perception, technological risk, risk taxonomy, comparative risk assessment, Chemical Manufacturers Association
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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