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

涉及人们对风险暴露的反应的研究揭示了两种截然不同的趋势。第一个是暴露后的警钟，这会提高风险意识，并有强烈的动力投资于旨在减少未来风险暴露的行动。第二种是暴露后的失望，人们感觉更安全，因为发生了不利但概率较低的风险事件，从而降低了他们对未来暴露的感知风险。自然灾害(如洪水和森林火灾)往往引发第二种反应，导致以前受影响地区的社区迅速重建，并将概率误读为预测(例如，近期发生的百年一遇的事件使居民在下个世纪感到安全)。这两种相反趋势的一个结果是，社区和政府采取的风险缓解行动往往侧重于近期的反应(例如，在最近被烧毁的地区要求耐火建筑材料)，而忽视了长期的研究和规划努力(例如，适应性管理对策)，这些努力可以通过更多地了解未来危险的可能性和性质来显著减少不确定性。2003年夏季发生在太平洋西北部的破坏性森林火灾提供了一个时间有限的机会，以调查暴露在灾难性风险之下如何影响决策者对不确定性的解释及其对未来风险管理选择的情感反应。通过对烧毁和未烧毁地区的关键参与者(社区居民、技术专家、决策者)进行结构化访谈和调查，我们将研究在制定风险管理决策的过程中如何评估、操纵和使用信息。我们认为，对不确定性的曲解和对风险评估的改变共同阻碍了长期学习和在最需要时实施适应性管理对策。研究结果应该促进对情感过程的理解，并有助于确定决策者用来解释不确定性的优先因素。拟议研究的更广泛影响包括设计决策辅助工具，以改进暴露后风险管理战略，从而减少未来风险事件对人类的伤害、环境损失和财产损失。

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.