In an opinion piece in the New York Times, writer David Ropeik argues that the nature of how humans perceive risk has led to some impractical, and potentially counterproductive, energy and environmental policies.
According to research cited by Ropeik, the following factors make people more likely to perceive higher levels of risk: “Human-made risks upset us more than risks which are natural; Risks imposed on us are scarier than those we take by choice; Risks grow scarier the greater the pain and suffering they cause.”
These perception factors percolate into our energy and environmental policy, Ropeik argues, sometimes leading to counterproductive outcomes. For example, the average person’s fear of the risks of nuclear power, which according to some sources are not very high, “has contributed to energy policy that favors fossil fuels,” he writes. “Burning coal to make electricity produces particulate pollution that kills thousands each year.”
“There are plenty of very real environmental dangers to worry about, and all of them … merit some concern and precaution,” he writes, “but that concern should be measured, commensurate with the actual danger, as best we understand it.”
Aside from nuclear, what other energy sources’ risks do people incorrectly perceive? What policies — or lack of policy — are tied to those perceptions? How might we achieve a energy policy-making system where risks are correctly perceived and accounted for “commensurate with the actual danger” they pose?
The risk perception distortions Ropeik discusses are generic, certainly affecting any/all energy systems. Hence all energy policies are affected by this aspect of social/political behavior.
That people’s feelings about risk do not align with mathematical calculations does not necessarily make their feelings and preferences incorrect.
Emotion is a necessary and inevitable element of human decision making. Experiments with people whose brains have damage in the amygdala — the center of emotions — reveal that those people make poorer risk management decisions than do people with normal brains.
Hence it is not the proper business of public policy — at least in any kind of democratic society — to manipulate people to make what technocrats have determined to be “correct” choices.
Rather, as Prof. Mark Kirk of the U. of Va. Medical School has said, we should plan to manage emergencies (or hazards generally) on the basis of how people actually behave, not how we wish they would behave.
It is appropriate to communicate accurate, reliable information about hazards or emergencies to the public (and also from and among the public) as extensively and rapidly as possible. Yet research shows that simply communicating information may not affect public behavior in the ways that are expected or desired. And research by Kahnemann and Tversky among others shows that nuances in the way equivalent facts are presented can greatly skew resulting behavior one way or another.
Beyond that, I highly recommend David Brooks’ “The Social Animal” for a wide-ranging, lucid survey of the many ways what behavioral science knows is manifested in ordinary human experience.
Dr. Perelman: An interesting and related update on this topic, specifically related to the Fukushima disaster, is featured in the New York Times dotEarth blog. This is from an essay by physicist and historian Spencer Weart:
“A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.
The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.”
Weart goes on:
“Overt fears dwindled with the end of the Cold War, but the idea of nuclear radiation as an almost magical pollutant persisted. Think of the three-eyed fish in the effluent of the nuclear power plant featured in television’s “The Simpsons,” or the horrid mutants that shamble through the popular post-apocalyptic computer game “Fallout.” A more realistic image is terrorists planning to explode a “dirty” bomb, that is, an ordinary bomb that scatters radioactive materials around a neighborhood. Of course if you want to terrorize people with cancer-causing substances, there are plenty that are easier to get hold of than nuclear wastes. But it’s the nuclear stuff that would bring real panic, large-scale evacuation, and frantic cleanup efforts wherever the tiniest trace of radioactivity could be detected. So nuclear fear feeds back on itself, holding its status as the supreme horror.
That’s not to say we should be terrified by ordinary chemicals. While pollution does shorten some lives, overall our industries bring indispensable benefits. But let’s try to level things up. An atom of a radioactive element, just like an atom of mercury or a molecule of a carcinogenic smoke, should be approached cautiously but objectively — not as if it was a breeder of unspeakable mythic horrors.”
So Weart thinks that “we” should be reasonable. But the reality is that ‘we’ conflates a great diversity of people, cultures, groups, interests, etc. And as I noted earlier, abundant behavioral science documents that people are generally not reasonable about risk.
Behavioral responses can change, but generally not by haranguing people to stop being unreasonable.
When GE introduced a new machine using intense magnetic fields instead of x-rays to peer inside the body, they at first called it NMR for ‘Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.’ That label proved a barrier to sales because of the word ‘nuclear’ — even though the latter referred to the nucleus of living cells, not of atoms. After GE changed the label to MRI — for Magnetic Resonance Imaging — sales took off.
In the mid-1980s, the video game industry in the US had been poisoned by the disastrous failure of Atari after it was acquired and grossly mismanaged by Time Warner. Yet the well-established Japanese game manufacturer, Nintendo, was determined to introduce a new digital game product to American homes. The company’s US marketing director insisted that when its sales reps approached US retailers, they must never ever use the term “video game” to describe the Nintendo product which was officially called the “Family Entertainment System”. Retailers and customers were willing to give the product a try because they were given to believe it was something completely new and different. The rest, as they say, is history.
Based on that sort of experience, I suggest that the prospects for a renaissance of what we have long been calling the nuclear power industry may be improved by simultaneously emphasizing a new generation of technology — particularly the thorium fuel cycle — and giving it a new label such as ‘thorium power’ or ‘t-power’. At the same time, the label ‘nuclear power’ could be retired.
This strategy would not work if it simply relied on a rhetorical gimmick. The point is to offer a genuinely new product that offers consumers more positive and fewer negative attributes. The thorium fuel cycle seems to do that by presenting the potential to substantially reduce the hazards of accidents/explosions, radioactive waste, and weapons proliferation.
I mention this to suggest that the perverse nature of human risk perception and behavior may be managed, sometimes, by accommodating it, rather than by decrying it or wishing it away.