Acknowledging Perceptions of Risk

Risk perception describes how stakeholders evaluate and weigh their concerns. Since the 1960’s, social scientists have conducted substantial research to understand how individuals perceive danger. Researchers and practitioners such as Vincent Covello, Paul Slovic and Baruch Fischhoff have documented stages in the process of risk communication. Early psychometric research influenced a foundation of theories on how people form understandings and why there are biases and mistakes in judgments.

Common characteristics emerged from this research. Through surveys, experiments and interviews, researchers found individuals’ perceptions of risk are influenced by consistent variables:

Awareness – A negative awareness of an event or issue, like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or Fukushima creates a negative stigma in stakeholders’ minds. This type of increased risk perception should be overcome by executing external communications.

Benefits – Lack of personal or community benefits negatively impacts how stakeholders view a project or scenario. It is important to openly share the potential benefits, both from a personal and a larger societal viewpoint. This allows stakeholders to weigh the opportunity and be open to the larger role of the project or scenario.

Catastrophe – Potential, no matter how remote, of catastrophic disaster can have major impact on stakeholder risk perceptions, despite low likelihood of such an event happening. It is important to craft messaging and information to allow for these concerns and related questions.

Choice – Imposing circumstances on stakeholders raises fear, as it implies they have no choice in the matter. But, when stakeholders feel they are provided an opportunity for choosing, despite deciding on the same outcome, typically fear decreases.

Control – Lack of control leads to increased fear and uncertainty. When stakeholders feel a personal amount of control and authority, for example, by involvement and engagement, they have an increased sense of safety.

Dread – Risk perception worsens if stakeholders see potential outcomes that result in excessive pain and suffering. These perceptions are not necessarily based on likelihood, but rather on their own thoughts. However, such images will have an impact on how stakeholders will accept information and should be considered.

Fairness – Stakeholders are negatively influenced when they see a lack of fairness connected to the communities that may be impacted or benefit from a project or scenario.

Individual – Stakeholders are typically more concerned about their welfare than the welfare of the larger community. This can appear in statistical introductions, such as a risk of 1 in 1,000, when despite having a .01 percent chance of being impacted, a stakeholder may instead see themselves at 100 percent.

Influence – Stakeholders often look beyond immediate risk to an impact in the future, such as to children. This can increase fear due to concern of long term impacts. Sharing the reality of long term impacts is important for improving stakeholder risk perception.

Nature – Stakeholders can have an uneven approach to risk based on whether it is manmade or of natural occurrence, as natural risk can be seen as more allowable. This is seen in increased concerns over radiation from a facility, despite a higher possible impact from natural background radiation. Caution should be taken here, as despite being comparable from a scientific perspective, it may not be seen so from an emotional standpoint.

Personification – While personification, the applying of individual stories to broader concepts, can hold benefit, such as in the profiling a nuclear engineer, in some situations it has negative impacts. Using a real person to describe a risk scenario, such as a victim of an event, can raise fear and negatively impact risk perception. Meanwhile, potential scenarios which benefit children, generate positive community outcomes and offer better prospects to future generations amplify individuals’ personal connection to issues.

Uncertainty – When risk is hidden, misunderstood or unmeasurable, it increases likelihood of stakeholder fear. To alleviate this, response communications should provide comprehensive information as early as possible. This decreases concern of hidden, misunderstood or unmeasurable risks.

All these factors influence how people make decisions. In general, people perceive risk in a broader way, relying on their feelings and subjectivity rather than informed assessments of consequences. Perception of risk influences how willing people are to accept new information and change their behaviour.