Understanding Post-Exposure Risk Management Decisions: How Affect and Uncertainty Modulate Risk Appraisals and Subsequent Risk Management Choices

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Research involving people's responses to risk exposure reveals two sharply contrasting trends. The first is a post-exposure wake-up call, which results in a heightened awareness of risk and a strong motivation to invest in actions designed to reduce future exposure. The second is a post-exposure letdown, with people feeling safer because an adverse but low-probability risk event has taken place, thereby lowering their perceived risk of future exposure. Natural hazards (e.g., floods and forest fires) often elicit this second response, leading to the rapid reconstruction of communities in previously affected areas and the misreading of probabilities as predictions (e.g., so that the near-term occurrence of a 1-in-100 year event leaves residents feeling safe for the next century). One result of these two opposing trends is that risk-mitigation actions undertaken by communities and government often focus on near-term, reactive responses (e.g., requiring fire-resistant building materials in recently burned areas) to the neglect of long-range research and planning efforts (e.g., adaptive management responses) that could significantly reduce uncertainty through learning more about the likelihood and nature of future hazards. Destructive forest fires in the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 2003 provide a time-limited opportunity to investigate how exposure to catastrophic risk influences decision makers' interpretation of uncertainty and their affective responses to future risk-management choices. Using structured interviews and surveys with key participants (community residents, technical experts, decision makers) in both burned and unburned areas, we will examine how information is evaluated, manipulated, and used during the process of making risk-management decisions. We believe that both misinterpretations of uncertainty and altered appraisals of risk conspire to impede long-term learning and the implementation of adaptive management responses when they are most needed. Research findings should advance understanding of affective processes and help to identify priority factors that decision makers use to interpret uncertainty. The broader impacts of the proposed research include the design of decision aids to improve post-exposure risk-management strategies, thereby reducing injuries to humans, environmental losses, and property damage resulting from future risk events.