Prior Work in Hazard Perception

Lay perceptions differ markedly from expert perceptions, e.g., exaggerating certain hazards and trivializing others far from the expectations of risk assessors. This is the case with Cassini, with the assertion by NASA that the risk of plutonium exposure from launch or flyby accidents is negligible and its opponents' claim that NASA is covering up the extent of the risk.

People often make up their minds about an issue before seeking facts about it, often taking the position of a reference group they trust, and then become very confident in their opinions. Once the pattern gels one way or the other, new facts and arguments are fit into the framework in a way that further solidifies it, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of holding two conflicting interpretations. This concept will be evaluated in the responses of opponent activists to NASA's risk assessment and proponents' reactions to opponent deconstruction of that assessment.

The public is often characterized, perhaps unfairly, as irrational and ignorant: It may be that laypeople judge hazards along multiple axes, not just the quantifiable probability of mortality/morbidity. One implication is that experts may have narrow, faulty perceptions of their own.

• People seem to judge hazards differently on the basis of the perceived control they have over the exposure: If they can choose the exposure, they often will accept substantial risks; but, if this is a risk they feel have no choice in, they may become very upset over the imposition of even the smallest risk. Cassini may be perceived as a risk imposed on the public.

• Another axial theme in technological hazards literature is lay sensitivity to fairness issues, to learning who gains and who loses from the deployment of a risky technology. With Cassini, the public may see the benefits flowing to "nerdy" scientists and the risks falling on average citizens.

• A prominent dimension consistently emerging in technological hazards literature is the dread factor: Is a given hazard seen as having the potential, no matter how small, of creating a really huge loss of life or particularly fearful diseases or can it have effects that might be passed down through the generations? Is it linked with past incidents of sheer horror? Anything nuclear evokes dread, and the opposition to the plutonium dioxide on board Cassini may be driven more by this single factor than any other.

• Another issue occasionally raised in hazards literature is public trust of institutions responsible for risk assessment, risk management, and emergency response. The proposed study will attempt to evaluate the extent to which suspicion of NASA itself has inspired mistrust of its process of risk assessment in the case of Cassini.

Much of this hazards perception literature is dominated by a focus on individual perception and behavior largely bypassing structures within the whole and their evolution. The structuring of the public and the social reproduction of an activist vanguard will be one contribution of the study.

Prior Work in Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Definitions:

• Risk assessment specifies hazards to humans, generally in terms of the expected probabilities of given types and magnitudes of damage.

• Risk management is the development and implementation of policy to minimize hazard.

The ideological orientation and political milieu of risk managers can slant risk assessment:

• Anti-regulatory sentiment among risk managers can demand they hear only the epistemologically most defensible science. This enables an attitude of denial or psychological minimization of a potentially risky situation, which, therefore, raises the probability of Type I failures (e.g., NASA approval of a launch that fails).

• Conservative risk sentiment among risk managers can demand hearings for even the least defensible extrapolations, in order to err on the side of safety, which then raises the probability of Type II failures (e.g., the costly scrubbing of a launch that would safely have resulted in a significant enhancement of scientific and technological knowledge).

• Only risk managers can decide whether Type I or Type II errors have the graver consequences morally and politically, and it is this sort of policy choice that determines whether the epistemological problems inherent in risk assessment delegitimate its findings or not.

Given the natural interest of the NASA Cassini team in its own mission, then, could risk assessment performed for it err on the side of minimizing the regulatory burden on NASA, thus lessening emphasis on the consequences of a Type I failure?

Prior Work in Media Criticism

Media are often criticized for sensationalizing hazard stories, which can inflate public concern about minimal risks. This is a criticism echoed within the NASA Cassini team.

Some media observers hold that media should report on breakdowns in institutional protections for society and provide a forum for debate on public issues that might not be well described by official statistics. Opponents argue that NASA's process of risk assessment resulted in statistics designed to protect the mission more than the public.

A large body of generic media criticism identifies filters that bias media selection of newsworthy items from the chaos of daily events. Most often cited are capital concentration in media and media dependence on advertising.

• Capital concentration is said to limit critical public debate on issues involving parent corporations. This filter has already been invoked in the anti-Cassini literature in claims that NBC and CBS may not have covered stories on Cassini's plutonium load because their parent corporations have ties with the nuclear industry.

• Dependence on advertising is held to limit critical discussion of anything that might upset the income flow of the advertisers. Conceivably, coverage of anti-Cassini activities could divert nuclear and aerospace companies' advertisements in the offending media, thus encouraging an attitude of editorial restraint.

A unique contribution of the proposed study is its integration of such media criticism with hazards. The focus will be on the relationship between the media and public, expert, and activist perceptions of the plutonium aboard Cassini-Huygens and the resulting pressure on policy-makers. Past work on media and hazards has not theorized this relationship and the pressure it generates as necessary components in analysis of the relationship between risk assessment science and risk management policy.

Toward a Richer Model of the Risk Assessment/Risk Management Relationship

The risk assessment and management literature has conceptually differentiated these two functions and paid much attention to political ideologies of regulation or laissez-faire as influences on their relationship. This project will specify critical channels along which ideology and politics impact that relationship by bringing in media analysis and the recruitment of individuals (through their mediated perceptions), into structured pressure campaigns.

These channels of political influence run through and among three complex categories of interacting players:

1. The Federal government has both risk assessment and risk management responsibilities towards its public distributed in its various branches, departments, and agencies.

2. The public itself, for the sake of which Federal risk assessment and risk management are conducted, holds at least latent responsibility for the ideological milieu within the Federal government. This responsibility is actualized through individual voting and willingness to participate in risk management decisions through varying levels of activism.

3. The private sector comprises a multiplicity of elite influences on Federal government risk management responsibilities and, through media and employment, on the public.

In a controversy of the sort examined here, each of these three categories of players can be further subdivided along lines of internal tension as structures in contradiction.

The Federal government

includes both the organs of governance (e.g., Congress), which sets and reviews policy, and agencies constituted to carry out policy (e.g., NASA). Agencies' desire to pursue their missions might create a bias towards downplaying any technological risk implicit in their missions during risk assessment. This might show as an emphasis on epistemological rigor, tacitly favoring the minimization of a Type II error. Minimizing Type II errors raises the probability of Type I failures (e.g., a catastrophic launch). NASA subcontracts risk assessment to outside institutions to offset this tendency. Does "farming out" of risk assessment, in fact, adequately safeguard against this?

The public

is often characterized as ignorant of the technical issues involved in any given debate and unengaged in it. A very few people will learn enough about a given hazard to become committed activists on one side or the other. Some portion of these activists may be persons who easily adopt causes: activism-oriented personalities. Others may become involved in a single issue because of important personal impacts. The influence exerted by the activated public reflects elected officials' perception of how wide-spread activist sentiment is and how that sentiment may affect voter turnout. This project will trace the impacts of activist recruitment on elected risk management policy-makers, as they face their own political risk assessment dilemmas.

The private sector

includes private concerns that enter the arena of technological risk as deployers of hazardous chemicals and technologies, and some of these contract for Federal agencies, including NASA. Certain of these own media subsidiaries, which enter the debate with their own interests in sensation, drama, and access to elite decision-makers, which can affect public perception of hazards issues.

Needed now are:

• an understanding of the process by which public perceptions trigger activist recruitment

• an exploration of how activists deal with the cognitive dissonance of risk assessment results at variance with their own beliefs

• an analysis of the frameworks by which politicians assess the resulting political hazards (risk assessment for political hazard?).
  • to what extent do politicians' assessments of the political risks of acting or not acting in response to constituent communications affect their ideologies of the reasonable balance between minimizing Type I and Type II errors in managing inherently uncertain technological hazards?

  • how is that sense of proper balance communicated to and understood by agency personnel as they compete to propose mission goals and designs and then establish risk assessment guidelines?

  • does agency direct subcontracting of risk assessment effectively protect risk assessment from agency and Congressional biases?

• a model of how media are used by parent corporations, agencies, and activists to the media affect public opinion, activist recruitment, risk management policy-making, and ultimately risk assessment.

For full documentation and to read the proposal on which this presentation is based, please visit:

crodrigue@oavax.csuchico.edu ^*

^* Note: the author has moved. The new contact information is: