A dance of affect and reason

The things that we fear most are often the things that we are most unlikely to experience, like plane crashes. Do people understand risk?

If you are an expert or a scientist, you may be used to assessing risks in an analytical way, using research, data and statistics. When we started our research on risk perception, we expected to find that everyone used a similar, if simplified, version of that approach. But it turns out that most people evaluate risks through their feelings. They think about the situation and the way it’s described to them, and that generates a feeling in them of worry, anxiety, fear or hope. And those feelings and emotions are the representation of risk for them.

Why and how do our emotions influence the decisions we make?

Our emotional responses have been amazingly valuable for us since our earliest days as an evolving species, not only for judging risks but also for managing our lives. Consulting our feelings first gives us a mechanism to make rapid decisions: Should I drink this water? How should I react to that noise? We call that mechanism the “affect heuristic.”

How does the affect heuristic determine our response to modern-day risks?

Various factors beyond simple statistical likelihood have a strong influence on people’s emotions and their risk perceptions. Are you exposed to this hazard voluntarily or involuntarily? Can you control your exposure, or is it not in your control? Is the impact of the hazard immediate or delayed? How big is the reward I expect for taking this risk?

Can you give examples of risks that people perceive differently according to the context?

Take medical X-rays and nuclear power. They are both technologies that involve radiation, but people see the former as being controllable, well-understood and offering a high benefit, so they perceive the risk as low. By contrast, people looked at nuclear power with a sense of dread in the early days of the industry. Nuclear accidents could have catastrophic consequences and the benefits were not very clear, so they perceived it as a highrisk technology. An example of changing perceptions is smoking. The health impacts of smoking have been known for a long time, but people perceived it as a voluntary hazard. In the 1990s, when the evidence for passive smoking became clear, people began to think about smoking as an involuntary hazard, which paved the way for the restrictions we have today. The study of risk perception has enormous importance for the communication and interaction between experts and non-experts.

If our risk perceptions are driven by emotion, can we rely on scientists to help us make judgements?

There is the idea that scientists deal with objective risks – such as the number of fatalities expected from the use of a certain technology – while the public perception is subjective, and somehow irrational. But those so-called objective calculations are subjective too. They give equal weight to all manner of differences: whether the person was young or old, whether they were doing something voluntarily because they enjoyed it, or whether it was imposed on them by a company that was gaining all the benefit.

A lot depends on whether people trust the scientists. Nuclear power was accepted more readily in France than in the United States, for example. Not because people didn’t fear the risks, but because they had greater trust in the authorities to manage those risks.

What do we still have to learn about risk perception?

One big area is the interactions between the different ways our minds handle risks. Risk is something we can calculate and analyze logically in a slow way, but that process interacts with other mechanisms in our brain that operate in milliseconds without deep thought, and yet create feelings which are very powerful. We call that the dance of affect and reason. We don’t realize that our own minds deceive us about risk because they generate feelings that mislead us.