Paul Slovic's Risky Business

To UO psychology professor Paul Slovic, a common theme is the perception of risk and how it affects decision making.
   
Slovic has been much in the news in recent months, sharing his insight on these diverse subjects. As founder and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research organization analyzing risk assessment, Slovic studies the ways in which people perceive risk and how they use information to make judgments and decisions regarding potential hazards. He uses basic research as well as more focused studies on actual hazardous elements to explore probable negative outcomes.
   
As society's values, attitudes and perceptions of risk transform over time, Slovic evaluates the links between the ways risks are interpreted and the ways they are acted upon. Take terrorism for instance. "It's not that terrorism is new," Slovic said, "but it's new on our radar screen." Due to increased fears of terrorism, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to reduce the perceived risk of another attack, even though the damage done by terrorism is relatively small compared to the damage done by disease and other hazards.
   
While people expose themselves to risks all the time, Slovic has found that when exposure to risk is voluntary -- for instance, choosing to live in areas of California where wildfires are common -- people are much more accepting of the risk because they feel they're in charge and have put themselves in the path of risk.
   
However, when someone is exposed to risk against their will  -- for example, when traces of pharmaceuticals are found in community drinking water supplies -- people are less tolerant, even if the water isn't contaminated enough to be considered dangerous, Slovic said.
   
"Over the years we've learned a lot about why people react strongly to some things and not to others," Slovic said. "We try then to use that knowledge to inform both the public and policy makers."
   
One special area of interest for Slovic is psychic numbing, a phenomenon in which normally compassionate individuals become emotionally numb to groups of people in need, as seen in the failure of the international community to respond to cases of genocide such as Darfur. Even though a large number of lives are at risk, the vast scale of mass human tragedy fails to trigger the strong and stable feelings of concern and outrage required to prompt action. Slovic urges nations to create laws and institutions that compel action to prevent or halt such atrocities even when such feelings are absent. 
   
Slovic's understanding of human judgment and risk analysis has resulted in over 300 publications on a diverse list of research topics. "It's kind of a puzzle that you try to piece together, and there are a lot of different parts to it," Slovic said. "I'm still working on the puzzle."