A Study of Consensus Making Process in Environmental Risk Managernent

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The present research examined what policies can recover the endangered trust of environmental risk managers after they cause an accident. Models of signaling effects and the hostage posting were applied. Hostage posting means to deposit something important which will be forfeited if the poster deceives others in social exchange. From the economics viewpoint, it is predicted that hostage posting will increase cooperative behavior, which is an index of the improvement of trust, because it causes the change of pay-off structure. However, from the psychological viewpoint, the improvement of trust is predicted because the voluntariness in hostage posting has signaling effects that improves the trusters' perception of integrity and competence of the trustees. Results of experiments suggest that risk managers can recover the public trust and perception of competence by a voluntary hostage posting that introduces a monitoring and penalty rule to themselves. On the other hand, the same hostage posted after the stakeholders' demand cannot improve their trust at all. These results mean that the voluntariness working as a signal of integrity and competence is more important for the recovery of trust than the change of the pay-off structure. However, a social survey concerning the public opinion on the repair work of the Miyamori River showed different results. The results of the survey showed the independent relationship between the public evaluation of the hostage posting (an introduction of monitoring and penalty rule to themselves) and their trust in the responsible, suggesting that the public participation cannot always improve the trust of risk managers. Finally, the factors that caused differences between the results of the experiments and the social survey were discussed.