Vaccine Risk Communication: Lessons from Risk Perception, Decision Making and Environmental Risk Communication Research

Dr. Bostrom reviews the rich variety of empirical findings available to guide risk communication and demonstrates how it can contribute to vaccine risk and safety communication

Preferences for Exposure Control of Power-Frequency Fields among Lay Opinion Leaders

The authors report on surveys, differing according to focus on remedial costs, of Pittsburgh-area adults indicating beliefs about possible health effects of electromagnetic fields and the acceptability of options for reducing or eliminating the potential impact

The role of framing in public support for direct air capture: A moral hazard survey experiment in the United States

Limiting global warming will likely require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keeping it out of the atmosphere by sequestering it. Public support is crucial for a rapid upscaling of carbon removal and sequestration. One central concern is that public support for these negative emissions technologies (NETs) could be hampered by a moral hazard: that NETs could undermine mitigation efforts and should thus be avoided. Building on previous research, we investigate four novel ways of framing the use of a form of carbon removal from the atmosphere that is currently of broad interest, direct air capture (DAC). We frame DAC use in terms of either necessity (DAC for limiting climate change being either essential or dependent on future mitigation) or temporality (DAC of either past or future emissions from the atmosphere). In a survey experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 2891) we examined how these frames affect public support and risk perceptions in the U.S. for DAC, and the roles of prior awareness of DAC, climate change worry, and their interactions with the different frames. Frames differentially influenced support depending on prior awareness and climate change worry, higher levels of which were associated with more support for DAC (but also greater anticipated moral hazard) independent of the frames. Overall, framing only weakly affected public support, which was on average modest. These insights extend previous findings regarding the limited usefulness of moral hazard frames, but highlight the potential value of tailoring DAC messaging to different target audiences

Spatial Regulation of Air Toxics Hot Spots

This paper analyzes the potential implications, in terms of net social costs and distribution of risks and abatement costs, of a policy to address the problem of air toxics “hot spots.” The policy we analyze involves regulation of air toxics sources at increasingly finer spatial resolutions. We develop a model of a decisionmaker choosing emission standards within a net cost minimization framework. Empirical application of the model to two counties in Florida demonstrates that regulation at finer resolutions could involve trade-offs between net social costs and equitable distribution of risks and, in some settings, between individual and population risks

Hot Spots Regulation and Environmental Justice

This paper analyzes whether regulating “hot spots” of toxic air pollution by increasing the spatial resolution of regulation could address environmental justice (EJ) concerns. To examine this question, this paper develops a decision model of a regulator choosing emission controls within a net cost minimizing framework. An empirical application of the model using air toxic emission data for Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties in Florida estimates the emission standards and spatial distribution of risks at a coarse and a finer spatial resolutions. Implications for EJ are analyzed by combining the simulated spatial risk distributions at the two resolutions with the demographic data. Results indicate that different measures of EJ point to different conclusions regarding the question of whether finer resolution regulation alleviates EJ concerns. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for EJ policy

Credible threat: Perceptions of pandemic coronavirus, climate change and the morality and management of global risks

Prior research suggests that the pandemic coronavirus pushes all the “hot spots” for risk perceptions, yet both governments and populations have varied in their responses. As the economic impacts of the pandemic have become salient, governments have begun to slash their budgets for mitigating other global risks, including climate change, likely imposing increased future costs from those risks. Risk analysts have long argued that global environmental and health risks are inseparable at some level, and must ultimately be managed systemically, to effectively increase safety and welfare. In contrast, it has been suggested that we have worry budgets, in which one risk crowds out another. “In the wild,” our problem-solving strategies are often lexicographic; we seek and assess potential solutions one at a time, even one attribute at a time, rather than conducting integrated risk assessments. In a U.S. national survey experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to coronavirus or climate change surveys (N = 3203) we assess risk perceptions, and whether risk perception “hot spots” are driving policy preferences, within and across these global risks. Striking parallels emerge between the two. Both risks are perceived as highly threatening, inequitably distributed, and not particularly controllable. People see themselves as somewhat informed about both risks and have moral concerns about both. In contrast, climate change is seen as better understood by science than is pandemic coronavirus. Further, individuals think they can contribute more to slowing or stopping pandemic coronavirus than climate change, and have a greater moral responsibility to do so. Survey assignment influences policy preferences, with higher support for policies to control pandemic coronavirus in pandemic coronavirus surveys, and higher support for policies to control climate change risks in climate change surveys. Across all surveys, age groups, and policies to control either climate change or pandemic coronavirus risks, support is highest for funding research on vaccines against pandemic diseases, which is the only policy that achieves majority support in both surveys. Findings bolster both the finite worry budget hypothesis and the hypothesis that supporters of policies to confront one threat are disproportionately likely also to support policies to confront the other threat.publishedVersio

Comparative risk science for the coronavirus pandemic

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Dette er den aksepterte versjonen av en artikkel publisert i Journal of Risk Research. Du finner den publiserte artikkelen her: https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1756384 / This is the postprint version of the article published in Journal of Risk Research. You can find the published article here. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1756384Judgment, decision making, and risk researchers have learned a great deal over the years about how people prepare for and react to global risks. In recent years, risk scholars have increasingly focused their energies on climate change, and as pandemic coronavirus has swept the globe many of these scholars are comparing the coronavirus pandemic with climate change to inform risk management. Risk communication research and the best practices developed from it are predicated on findings from the 1970’s to the present showing that there are structural similarities in how people think about widely divergent risks. Consequently, these lessons from risk communication of climate change (and from the canon of best practices) apply to the coronavirus pandemic. In the empirical comparison of student perceptions reported here, we replicate these structural similarity findings, but also find that moral concerns in particular deserve attention as a potentially distinct dimension of risk perception, on which different risks may also differ, as pandemic risks appear to evoke less moral concern than climate change. The need for communications to be timely, honest, credible, empathetic, and informative for useful individual actions is fundamental and essential for communicating effectively about the coronavirus epidemic. Some countries have heeded risk sciences, and are coping more successfully with pandemic coronavirus. Others have failed to implement these old lessons, which our data suggest still apply. While these failures may reinforce cynicism about political and public enthusiasm for accepting science, comparisons between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change may also foster greater aspirations for collective action.acceptedVersio

The Effects of Earthquake Experience on Intentions to Respond to Earthquake Early Warnings

Warning systems are essential for providing people with information so they can take protective action in response to perils. Systems need to be human-centered, which requires an understanding of the context within which humans operate. Therefore, our research sought to understand the human context for Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) in Aotearoa New Zealand, a location where no comprehensive EEW system existed in 2019 when we did this study. We undertook a survey of people's previous experiences of earthquakes, their perceptions of the usefulness of a hypothetical EEW system, and their intended responses to a potential warning (for example, Drop, Cover, Hold (DCH), staying still, performing safety actions). Results showed little difference in perceived usefulness of an EEW system between those with and without earthquake experience, except for a weak relationship between perceived usefulness and if a respondent's family or friends had previously experienced injury, damage or loss from an earthquake. Previous earthquake experience was, however, associated with various intended responses to a warning. The more direct, or personally relevant a person's experiences were, the more likely they were to intend to take a useful action on receipt of an EEW. Again, the type of experience which showed the largest difference was having had a family member or friend experience injury, damage or loss. Experience of participation in training, exercises or drills did not seem to prompt the correct intended actions for earthquake warnings; however, given the hypothetical nature of the study, it is possible people did not associate their participation in drills, for example, with a potential action that could be taken on receipt of an EEW. Our analysis of regional differences highlighted that intentions to mentally prepare on receipt of a warning were significantly higher for Canterbury region participants, most likely related to strong shaking and subsequent impacts experienced during the 2010–11 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence. Our research reinforces that previous experience can influence earthquake-related perceptions and behaviors, but in different ways depending on the context. Public communication and interventions for EEW could take into consideration different levels and types of experiences of the audience for greater success in response