Risky Business The science of decision making

grapples with sex, race, and power

By RUTH BENNET

ry a sports metaphor, Paul Slovic urges psychology graduate students learning about risk assessment at

the University of Oregon in Eugene. There are umpires who say, “I call them

as 1 see them,” and others who say, “I call them as they are,” he tells the students.

In his classes, Slovic, who is president of the firm Decision Research in Eugene, as well as a psychology professor, has ex- panded the umping metaphor first sug- gested by late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky. In their everyday deci- sions, people are most likely to reason in a third way, says Slovic: “They ain’t noth- ing ‘ti1 I call them.”

Welcome to the bold new subjectivism in risk-assessment theory, an interdisci- plinary branch of decision-making re- search that draws on psychology, politi- cal science, and economics.

The emerging direction of this field is less about the mathematical deduction of risk than it is about the perception of risk. Slovic put it another way in the Au- gust 1999 RISK ANALYSIS: “Danger is real, but the concept of risk is socially con- structed .”

The science of risk assessment-for- merly characterized by actuarial tables that insurance companies use to calcu- late premiums-is getting a whiff of post- modernism. Studies are revealing differ- ences in the way different groups of people look at danger, raising questions about the fixed and possibly biological nature of those perceptions.

For many, the idea of subjectivity in risk-perception research can be unset- tling. Isn’t there a particular number that could be assigned to, say, the odds of dy- ing from radon exposure or from having an infelicitous encounter with a semitrail- er truck?

The problem with that view, Slovic ar- gues, is that there are multiple ways to measure the costs involved. Consider the risk of death from radon. It could be ex- pressed, for example, as deaths per mil- lion people exposed, as years of life ex- pectancy lost due to exposure, as deaths as a function of the concentration of radon present, or in lots of other ways.

Moreover, the way risk is measured r e veals the value system of the measurer, Slovic claims. Framing a risk in terms of

190

reduction in life expectancy, for example, values the lives of the young over those of older adults, who have less of that re- source to lose. Simply measuring deaths per million equates the suffering of those who expired quickly with those who lin- gered painfully.

Because the way risk is defined dic- tates the best course of risk reduction, any definition is fraught with value judg- ments. Says Slovic: “Defining risk is thus an exercise in power.” Since studies re- peatedly show that definitions of risk de- pend on people’s racial group or their gender, this conclusion intensifies the stakes in assessing risk.

he first evidence of group differ- ences caught researchers by sur- prise, says Slovic. In the early 199Os,

he and his colleagues were analyzing data from a survey of perceptions of environ- mental health risks in the United States. “We just happened to run the data by race and gender, and [the effect] kind of leapt out at us,” he says.

They called their discovery the “white male effect.” White men rated a variety of risks, from nuclear waste to street drugs, as significantly less threatening than did white females or men and women of other races. The white men who rated the risks the lowest also scored differently from the rest of the participants on several other factors. They put more trust in experts and resisted the idea that the public should give input on decisions about risk made by government institutions.

Melissa L. Finucane, a colleague of Slovic’s at Decision Research, recently tried to reproduce the white male effect, this time sampling more broadly from nonwhite populations. In the July HEALTH, RISK & SociEn, she and her colleagues found the effect first reported in 1994 still to be valid.

Her team interviewed 1,204 U.S. adults who identified themselves as white, His- panic, black, Asian, American Indian, or multiracial. The researchers asked partic- ipants for their views on the threat to themselves and their families of 13 activi- ties and technologies. They also consid- ered the risk level for 27 hazards to the US. public as a whole. Moreover, the

SCIENCE NEWS, VOL. 158

team presented statements expressing various sociopolitical attitudes and asked participants whether they agreed or dis- agreed.

Women and nonwhites provided high- er risk estimates for every question about risk to self and family as well as to nearly all questions about risk to the U S . public.

In addition to their lower risk esti- mates, white males reported different perceptions regarding other factors, Finu- cane says. They were significantly more likely to disagree with the statement that they had little control over risks to their health, for example.

From the survey responses, Finucane suggests that white males may have a lower risk perception in part because they view their own social power and control over risks as high. These attitudi- nal differences between the groups mean the whitemale effect is probably based on sociopolitical factors and not biologi- cal differences, the research team asserts.

argo Wilson, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamil- ton, Ontario, bristles at the sug-

gestion that the data from the University of Oregon researchers eliminate biology as an agent of the differing perceptions. “1 think they’ve misrepresented what a bio- logical model might be,” she says.

With psychologist Martin Daly, Wilson has argued that young, single males may have an adaptive advantage to being blind to dangers, at least for certain types of risks in certain types of circumstances. If derringdo proves irresistible to poten- tial mates, the payoff in reproductive suc- cess may outweigh the decrease in over- all life expectancy for this group.

A young-male effect that results from men’s and women’s different sexual strate- gies, rather than from culture, makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, Daly and Wilson claim.

Many of the risk-perception questions posed in Slovic’s and Finucane’s work, such as those having to do with nuclear technology, are simply beside the point for any evolutionary model, Wilson says. Men and women have faced mating dilemmas that have essentially remained unchanged as long as there have been people to mate, so successful strategies have had time to manifest themselves as sex-specific, biologically embedded psy- chologies. Nuclear technology, on the other hand, is simply too recent for any talk of a biologically adapted response to be meaningful.

Furthermore, just what participants are responding to when they answer Fin- ucane’s questions isn’t exactly clear, Wil- son continues. For example, men and women might-for reasons that are bio- logically based-react differently to ques- tions involving risk to the family. White and nonwhite males may answer the

SEPTEMBER 16,2000

questions differently because of sociolog- ically based disparities, such as those in education or wealth.

The real comparison, Wilson says, shouldn’t be across race and sex, but within groups closely matched in cultural factors. For example, data from Daly and Wilson’s book Homicide (1 988, Walter De Gruyter) indicate that in each ethnic group and culture they studied, males kill each other at a significantly greater rate compared with females killing females. And yet, she says, women in Chicago kill other women more than men kill other men in England.

Does that say there isn’t a sex differ- ence? Wilson asks. She contends that it merely shows that cultural variables can obscure a noncultural difference.

he question of group differences T in risk perception

isn’t just academic. It’s also of immediate con- cern to policy ana- lysts. If risk isn’t an objectively measura- ble quantity, and if assessments vary sys- tematically by sex and race, whose standard should prevail when governments and industries must deter- mine an acceptable risk level?

John D. Graham, di- rector of the Harvard Center for Risk Analy- sis in Boston, says that researchers at his center have found that female scientists per- ceive higher risk from a number of potential hazards than male sci-

which advocates an equal distribution among people of benefits and burdens from decisions affecting the environment and the use of natural resources. She claims that in any government decision about risk, the most precautionary stan- dard should be embraced.

“If we are concerned about protecting future generations, we ought to be follow- ing the risk perceptions and judgments of women and people of color,” she says.

For Sahlin, attempting to solve policy difficulties by favoring one group-any groupisn’ t the answer. The issue goes deeper than differences in gauging risk levels. Even if all groups assessed risks equally, opinions could diverge. “You and I might agree the probability of a fatal ac- cident is .9,” he says, “but you say it’s worth taking it, and I say it’s not. Then, we have a problem.”

sible to achieve. In an actual test of this assumption,

however, Kazuya Nakayachi of the Uni- versity of Shizuoka in Yada, Japan, re- ported in 1998 that people’s trust in a fic- titious risk-management agency wasn’t diminished when the agency stated that risk elimination is impossible, compared with when it claimed that all risk indeed could be eliminated.

Furthermore, Nakayachi reports in a paper scheduled for publication in the October RISK ANALYSIS, although people highly valued a total removal of risk, as Tversky and Kahneman found, they put an even greater premium on a risk re- duction that took the first step in com- bating a hazard. His results suggest that, contrary to researchers’ assumptions, people don’t irrationally respond to their fears about risk and may be

amenable to honest, trust-restoring news from the agencies charged with the scientific manage- ment of risk.

he question about biology’s T role in the

white male effect and in risk assessment in general remains open, and it will stay open for a long time, Sahlin says. In 100 years, he points out, a demographic group other than white males may have the greatest control of society’s risk factors

Perceived risk associated with potential hazards, rated by men and women of and therefore will different races. Scale ranges from 1, almost no risk, to 4, high risk. The white male perceive less risk effect shows up in white men’s lower rating of risks to themselves and their families. than other groups

entists do. That result confounds any at- tempt to reframe the debate as one pit- ting educated opinion against lay beliefs.

In Graham’s view, the problems raised by the white male effect can be avoided as long as the public has sufficient input into risk assessment.

In practice, says Nils-Eric Sahlin, a soft-spoken professor of philosophy at Lund University in Sweden, risk experts don’t often indulge the judgments of the public. Experts, says Sahlin, are quick to characterize nonspecialists’ risk judgments as naive. That’s wrong, he says.

This opinion-that views differ not be- cause of nayvet6 but because each group accurately reports its own, very different life experiences of risk-is gaining popu- larity as part of the political movement known as environmental justice, says Robin Collin, a law professor at the Uni- versity of Oregon in Eugene.

Collin is a supporter of the movement,

SEPTEMBER 16,2000

It’s a problem, Sahlin says, that can on- ly be solved by providing full information about what experts know and don’t know about particular dangers. The white male effect reflects a gap in trust between peo- ple with power and those without, be- tween the sexes, and among the races, he says. The effect can be erased only by full disclosure and information sharing, a suggestion he acknowledges is not main- stream. “Paul [Slovic] says this is a crazy idea,” Sahlin adds with a laugh.

Indeed, the dogma that the public will settle for nothing less than a risk-free so- ciety is well rooted in the risk-perception field. As early as 1981, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and Stanford’s Tversky demonstrated that people value a risk reduction from 1 percent to zero more highly than the equivalent reduc- tion from 2 percent to 1 percent. The gen- eral public, risk researchers have as- sumed, would not take kindly to the news that risk elimination may be impos-

SCIENCE NEWS, VOL. 158

do. If the sociologists are right, he says, the white male effect is not static.

In the past, theories about risk have been prescriptive. They have assumed that people ought to behave in certain ways based on certain objective calcula- tions made by experts. The study of risk perception, however, is descriptive. Un- der its framework, says Rajeev Gowda, a political scientist at the University of Ok- lahoma in Norman, some of what has previously been termed error in assess- ing risk or as differing perceptions ac- companying race and sex may simply re- flect people’s values in a way that hasn’t been recognized before.

From the perspective of risk science’s mathematical roots, attempting to cater to a multitude of viewpoints may be an inefficient way to set risk-based policies. But, Gowda says, “if people’s values say it’s OK to live with some inefficiency, then in a democratic setting we say ‘OK,’

0 and get on with it.”

191