Judgements of Responsibilities for Disaster Consequences

在识别、预测和减轻灾害方面的科学进步可能会对公众如何评估灾害损失的道德和伦理责任产生重大变化。它还应该影响那些参与减灾的人，包括设计专业人员、企业和政府官员判断自己责任的方式。本项目开始审查影响对技术灾害和自然灾害损失的责任判断的因素。研究的最初阶段将致力于两项任务：撰写概念论文，阐述有助于理解责任判断的主要知识传统；确定灾害责任归属的主要维度（以及反映这些维度组成部分的变量）。在一个跨学科咨询小组的指导下，在项目的前六个月，研究人员将编写一系列概念论文，回顾被用来理解人们如何判断责任的主要知识传统，并审查特拉华大学灾害研究中心档案中的案例研究材料，以确定可能有用的灾害例子，这些例子可以构成初步情景发展工作的基础。根据论文和危害文献，将确定可能影响不同责任归因的关键维度。项目的后半部分将生成一组相关维度和大量场景。然后，实验将改变这些维度，以检验它们如何影响外行判断。前期工作将以方便样本进行。然而，为了从这一阶段的研究中产生可概括的数据，研究人员还计划与来自社区的付费受试者和一个“利益相关者”群体的代表（最有可能是工程师）一起进行一些场景开发工作。该项目的第一年将产生一套场景，用于研究的实验和调查阶段。这些场景将基于对受试者反应的分析。概念论文将在各种渠道上发表，早期实验分析也应产生可发表的论文，讨论基于场景的研究所涉及的方法问题以及灾害后果归因过程的概念发展。

Scientific advances in identifying, predicting and mitigating hazards are likely to produce significant changes in how the public assesses moral and ethical responsibility for disaster losses. It should also affect the way in which those involved in disaster mitigation, including design professionals, businesses, and government officials, judge their own responsibility. This project begins an examination of the factors that influence judgments of responsibility for losses from both technological and natural disasters. This initial period of the research will be devoted to two tasks: the development of concept papers addressing the major intellectual traditions that have contributed to understanding of judgments of responsibility; and the identification of the principal dimensions (and the variables that reflect components of those dimensions) of the attribution of responsibility for disasters. With the guidance of an interdisciplinary advisory group, in the first six months of the project, the investigators will develop a series of concept papers reviewing major intellectual traditions that have been used to understand how people judge responsibility, and review case study materials in the archives of the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center to identify potentially useful examples of disasters that can form the basis for initial scenario development work. Drawing on the papers and the hazards literature, key dimensions that influence potentially different attributions of responsibility will be identified. The second half of the project will generate a set of relevant dimensions and a large number of scenarios. The dimensions will then be varied experimentally to examine how they influence lay judgments. Premiminary work will be conducted with convenience samples . However, to produce generalizable data from this phase of the research, the investigators also plan to conduct some of the secnario development work with paid subjects from the community and with representatives of one "stakeholder" group, most likely engineers. The first year of the project will procude a set of scenarios to be used in experimental and survey phases of the research. The scenarios will be based on an analysis of the subjects' responses. The concept papers will be published in various outlets, and the early experimental analysis should also result in publishable papers addressing the methodological issues involved in scenario-based research as well as conceptual development of attribution processes for disaster consequences.