Hi all,
The Behavioural Science Centre is running a mini-workshop on risk perception and risk
communication Friday Feb 23 11.30 - 1pm, Cottrell bldg 2b46.
We will have two speakers presenting related papers back-to-back
At 11.30 Philip Ebert (Stirling) will present on "End user and forecaster
interpretations of the European avalanche danger scale: a study of avalanche probability
judgements in Scotland"
at 12.15 Martina Barjakova (University of Milano-Bicocca) will present on "Delayed
synergies are harder to see: an experimental investigation of factors influencing
synergistic judgements of health risks"
Abstracts below:
End user and forecaster interpretations of the European avalanche danger scale: a study of
avalanche probability judgements in Scotland
We investigate Scottish end users’ risk perception ( N = 678) of the five point European
Avalanche Danger Scale by eliciting numerical probability judgements. Our main findings
are that end users’ risk perception of the danger scale increases linearly rather than
exponentially (as intended by the avalanche services), confirming recent findings by
Morgan, Haegeli, Finn, and Mair (2023) who used a different scale and a North American
user group. Second, we find significant differences in the perceived probability of
avalanches relative to a given avalanche danger level depending on whether respondents are
asked by a frequency or a percentage chance response format. More specifically, we find
that a frequency format elicits lower estimates and, in some cases, a higher variance.
Third, we find that individual characteristics of end users (such as outdoor sport
experience, age, gender, avalanche education, and having experienced an avalanche) has
little explanatory power to predict their interpretation of the avalanche danger scale.
Finally, using a small scale sample (N = 19) of professional avalanche forecasters in
Scotland, we find that there is little expected and actual overlap between end users and
professional forecasters in their numerical interpretation of the danger scale. We
summarise our findings by identifying important lessons for strategies to improve
avalanche risk understanding and its communication.
Delayed synergies are harder to see: an experimental investigation of factors influencing
synergistic judgements of health risks
When certain health hazards are combined, they produce synergies. In other words, they
lead to risks that are greater than the sum of risks presented by each factor separately.
For instance, smoking and radon exposure interact synergistically to increase lung cancer
risk. Without doubt, how people judge such risk combinations is important – and previous
research showed mostly underestimation of synergistic risks. Our previous research instead
suggests that people are better at judging certain synergistic risks as such than others.
In the current pre-registered study, we aim to understand why this is the case. In
particular, we experimentally test whether the likelihood of judging a combination of risk
factors as synergistic depends on the outcome being immediate or delayed, binary or
continuous, or whether knowledge about the outcome plays a role. We find that synergistic
judgements are much more likely for immediate outcomes compared to the delayed ones.
Thanks to the structure of our data, we are also able to shed light on the possible
mechanism for this. In particular, our data suggest that this result is due to the
difference in how much weight people give to the single risk factors for immediate vs
delayed outcomes, not to how they evaluate the combination of risk factors. Our study
furthermore tests for the effects of format of the task. We find that synergistic
judgements are more likely if natural frequencies and partitive probabilities are used, as
opposed to non-partitive (single-case) probabilities. These results have important
implications for communications concerning synergistic health risks.
Prof. David Comerford
Economics
Division<https://www.stir.ac.uk/about/faculties/stirling-management-school/our-research/research-areas/economics/>,
Stirling Management School, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA.
(+44 / 0) 75-42-188-166
Director, Behavioural Science Centre<https://behsci.stir.ac.uk/>
Program Director, MSc Behavioural
Science<https://www.stir.ac.uk/courses/pg-taught/behavioural-science/>
Recent publications:
Bridger, E. K., Tufte-Hewett, A., & Comerford, D. A. (2023). Perceived health
inequalities: are the UK and US public aware of occupation-related health inequality, and
do they wish to see it reduced?. BMC Public Health, 23(1), 2326.
Comerford, D. A., Tufte-Hewett, A., & Bridger, E. K. (2023). Public preferences to
trade-off gains in total health for health equality: Discrepancies between an abstract
scenario versus the real-world scenario presented by COVID-19. Rationality and Society,
10434631231193599.
________________________________
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