Thirty subsystems constituting a functioning motor vehicle, including brake, steering, suspension, engine, electrical, and fuel systems, were evaluated by individuals on a set of risk characteristic scales. These included overall vehicle riskiness, likelihood of severe consequences in the event...

Potential health risks from exposure to power-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) have become an issue of significant public concern. This study evaluates a brochure designed to communicate EMF health risks from a scientific perspective. The study utilized a pretest-post test design in which...

Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the white male effect, this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This paper proposes a new explanation: identity-protective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on...

Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described as "the affect...

Extreme events, by definition, cause much harm to people, property, and the natural world. Sometimes they result from the vagaries of nature, as in the case of flood, earthquake, or storm, and thus are truly the outcomes of "games against nature." In other cases they follow technological failure...

In this chapter, we report on three psychometric scaling studies, summarized in Table 1. In each study, participants rated a given set of hazards on a range of risk characteristics and indicated the degree of risk reduction and regulation they desired. Based on this data, we explore the...