All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.

David Brower

Introduction

John Adams, in Risk, points out that risk is not easily measured, agreed upon by diverse audiences, or managed. In asking, "Can we assess risk better?," he is not so much posing a problem that has a one best solution as challenging us to become more involved in understanding and evaluating relationships among science, technology, and society.


Compass

    Key Questions

      How does the public evaluate risk?
      How can we manage risk better?

    Examples

      What criteria does the public use to evaluate risks associated with new technologies?

      How valid are public evaluations of new technologies?

      What weight should be given to public evaluations of risk in establishing technology policy?



Risk Perceptions

Adams notes that sometimes the public and scientific experts differ in their evaluations of technology risk. This disagreement occurs, in part, because the public uses a wide variety of criteria, including some nonscientific criteria, in its evaluations of risk. Adams distinguishes between formal and informal approaches to risk evaluation, wherein formal approaches emphasize technical assessments of health and safety hazards and informal approaches address social, political, economic, and ethical issues. He observes that the typical response of technical risk evaluators to nontechnical evaluations is a patronizing effort to further educate the public about the real risks associated with a technology.

Adams rejects as a false dichotomy the notion that technical experts know actual risk and the public harbors uninformed, misinformed, and even irrational perceptions of risk. He asserts that individual and group risk-taking involve instead a balancing act between social, political, economic, and ethical costs and benefits. He argues that adherence to the false dichotomy has led to many misguided attempts to educate the public into thinking correctly about a new technology. Given that such educational efforts are necessary but not sufficient motivators of attitudinal and behavioral change (even when scientists do have a good knowledge of actual hazards), scientific experts experience inevitable failures and subsequent frustration in their attempts at risk communication.

Adams points out the actual versus perceived dichotomy is false in two respects:
  1. Technical risk assessments are neither entirely objective nor necessarily very precise.

    • Sometimes no data exists upon which to make a risk assessment. For new technologies, this problem is common. For complex technological systems, the problem increases geometrically. That is, there might be no data for a particular component of the system and there might be no data for the combination of various components with one another.
    • Inadequate data, improper recording of data, and data that are difficult to disaggregate also can create problems in technical risk assessments.
    • When technical risk assessments are demanded, and the data are inadequate for such assessments, guesswork must be made, which elicits problems with values and opinions entering into presumably objective indicators of risk.
    • Technical risk assessment is further hampered by accident migration (the tendency for ignored areas of accident occurrence to experience increased accidents) and regression towards the mean (the natural ebb and flow of accidents associated with a certain range of events).
    • Cultural filtering determines which types of risk will be assessed and the outcome of the risk assessment. Noise (measurement error in collecting data), "near misses" (ambiguous data), and bias (misrepresentation of data) also affect quantitative risk assessment.
    • Deriving cost/benefit analysis for a technology not yet in use can be especially difficult. First, to assess expected utility, the user of the technology must be fully informed of the risks associated with it. The educational requirements for a complex technology, however, can be extensive. Second, users must be able to incorporate subjective evaluations into their expectations of utility. As noted, these evaluations depend upon the social construction of risk, which not only include many subjectively defined shared values, but require some lag time to fully develop.

  2. Technical risk assessments exclude considerations of political, social, and ethical goals.

    Even to the extent that technical risk assessments accurately reflect hazards, because they ostensibly exclude consideration of political, social, and ethical goals, they provide only a limited appraisal of the value of a technology. A technology might contain few hazards but engender much outrage. The abortion of a human fetus, for example, is a fairly safe technology (for the mother) but raises strong emotional feelings in American society. On a different note, some argue that risk assessments intentionally include political and economic considerations. See: Risky Business: How Scientific Are Science-Based Risk Assessments?

Risk Perceptions and Risk Management

Managing risk, then, is a key motivator of much professional practice. But the objective of managing risk must be as free from misplaced concreteness as possible to avoid polemics. Myths about nature, or cultural outlooks, affect all risk evaluations. These myths--also called paradigms, ideologies, belief systems--are the set of assumptions about reality formed through shared experience, supported by interactions with others, and routinely go unquestioned. They are culturally constructed and maintained.

What happens when observations about reality do not correspond with our assumptions about it? Certainly, we should avoid being too hasty to revise paradigms; they must have enjoyed a great deal of support at some point in time to have gained their standing. Yet, to cling too long to paradigms with many anomalies is to engage in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: to believe in the paradigm in spite of overwhelming evidence that refutes it.

But paradigms carry much emotional baggage. Revising them or exchanging them for radically different ones requires not only much scientific debate, but much soul-searching as well. Thus, evaluations of risk, if they place pressure on paradigms, which they sometimes do, will instigate debates about paradigms that reflect cultural outlooks. Hence, debates about high risk technology often entail emotionally charged debate that reflects cultural outlook.

Can we manage risk better? Adams suggests keeping in mind the following observations on the evaluation of risk by technical experts:
  1. Remember, everyone else is seeking to manage risk, too.
  2. They are all guessing; if they knew for certain, they would not be dealing with risk.
  3. Their guesses are strongly influenced by their beliefs.
  4. Their behavior is strongly influenced by their guesses and tends to reinforce their beliefs.
  5. It is the behavior of others, and the behavior of nature, that constitute the actual risk environment.
  6. It will never be possible to capture "objective risk."
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