Strategies for Risk Communication: Evolution, Evidence and Experience

Strategies for Risk Communication
Evolution, Evidence and Experience

15-17 May 2006
Montauk Yacht Club Resort & Marina
Montauk, Long Island, New York

This symposium, sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis and the National Science Foundation, (Grant No. 0551330) explored practical methods and robust theories of risk communication arising from recent research in risk perception, neuroscience, and the evolutionary social sciences. The symposium addressed how humans process and perceive uncertainty and risks. The purpose of the symposium was to synthesize the findings from these diverse fields to inform the development of practical strategies for risk communication. There were several invited lecturers, interspersed with open discussion among the participants. There was also a small poster session in which participants described their research.

(Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)

Overview

This two and a half day symposium brought together theorists and practitioners in risk communication, risk perception, brain research, and the evolutionary social sciences. Rapid progress in these fields has opened a new window on risk perception with practical implications for enhancing the effectiveness of risk communication. Some of the questions addressed at the symposium included

What kinds of risk information can humans readily process and appreciate? What kinds are likely to be misunderstood?
Are some risk communication efforts bound to result in failure and increased controversy?
What does recent brain imaging research imply about the perception of uncertainty versus variability?
Is our persistent interest in 'worst case' possibilities a result of our human evolutionary history?
What is communication in an evolutionary context, and how has it changed in the modern technical world?
Do risk analyses misrepresent or even underestimate risks if they do not account for perception issues?
Are our prior probabilities and the ability to make decisions fundamentally tied to our emotions?
What features improve a risk communication effort's likelihood of success?

Institutional sponsors

NSF Decision, Risk and Management Sciences
National Science Foundation
Society for Risk Analysis
Applied Biomathematics
Pfizer

Who attended

The symposium was intended for academics, students, risk managers, public relations managers, advertisers, public interest advocates, journalists and science writers with professional or practical interest in risk communication. Presentations were structured so as to be understandable and beneficial to motivated newcomers in risk communication. The symposium was a forum for discussion and debate, rather than a simple teaching workshop. Focus was provided by presentations from invited speakers with ample time allowed for open-format discussion among all participants.

In all there were 48 participants from 8 countries, representing academia, several levels of govenment, and private industry. The table below lists participants and their affiliations.

Name	Affiliation
Joseph Andrade	Utah Science Center; University of Utah
Paul Bingham	Stony Brook University
Ann Bostrom	Georgia Institute of Technology
Mark Burgman	University of Melbourne
Martin Clauberg	Dr. Clauberg--Consulting
Hester Coan	Fairleigh Dickinson University
Nohra Corredor	Ecological Art On-line Portal
Laura Dill Morton	Pfizer
Scott Ferson	Applied Biomathematics
Adam Finkel	Princeton Univeristy
Lev Ginzburg	Applied Biomathematics
Ronald Hellman	ACSS, CUNY
Patricia Hough	Sandia National Laboratories
Charlie Janson	Stony Brook University
Joe Kable	New York Univeristy
Elke Kurz-Milcke	Max Planck Institute
Youngai Lee	Ewha Women's University, Korea
Nakeung Lee	Ewha Women's University, Korea
Igor Linkov	Cambridge Environmental
Jackie Little	Los Alamos National Laboratory
Tom Long	The Sapphire Group
Darcy Lonsdale	Stony Brook University
Claudia Naegeli	Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Mariko Nishizawa	University of Stuttgart
Claude Panneton	Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Ellen Peters	Decision Research
Joshua Reinert	Information Systems Laboratories
Victor Ricciardi	Kentucky State University
David Ropeik	Harvard University
R. Jean Ruth	General Motors R&D
Walter Rutledge	Sandia National Laboratories
Alan Sanfey	University of Arizona
Delores (Lori) Severtson	University of Wisconsin-Madison
Chris Shilling	Pfizer
Joanne Souza	Stony Brook University
Adrian Sparrow	Agriculture and Forestry, New Zealand
Gael Spivak	Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Andy Stirling	University of Sussex
Mary-Jo Takach	Rhode Island Department of Health
W. Troy Tucker	Applied Biomathematics
Jessica Turnley	Galisteo Consulting Group, Inc.
Verena Vorhold	Forschungszentrum Jülich
X.T. Wang	University of South Dakota
Karli Watson	Duke University
J. Lee Westmaas	Stony Brook University
Peter Wright	The Dow Chemical Company
Larry Young	Sandia National Laboratories

Schedule


Sunday, 14 May
6:30 to 8:00 pm: Reception, Turtle Room.
Drinks and hors d'oeuvres


Monday, 15 May
7:00 am: Breakfast, Waterside Ballroom
8:00: Welcome, Scott Ferson, Applied Biomathematics

8:10: "Introduction: Risk communication - evolution, evidence, experience"
W. Troy Tucker, Applied Biomathematics
8:30: “Risk realities and risk perception”
David Ropeik, Harvard School of Public Health
9:30: Discussion
10:00: Break
10:30: “Numeracy, affect, and risk”
Ellen Peters, Decision Research and University of Oregon
11:30: Discussion
12:00: “A lawyer’s perspective on risk communication”
Peter Wright, The Dow Chemical Company
12:30: Lunch, Turtle Room
1:30 pm: “Brain evolution and neural mechanisms for economic and social decisions”
Karli Watson, Duke University
2:30: Discussion
3:00: Break
3:30: “Resolving linguistic uncertainty in hazard evaluation”
Mark Burgman, University of Melbourne
4:00: “Mental calculators that perceive risk and how we may educate them”
Elke Kurz-Milcke and Gerd Gigerenzer, Max Planck Institute
5:00: Discussion
5:30: Free time
7:30: Dinner, Turtle Room
"Designing Intelligence: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Origins of Science and Religion"
Charles Janson, Stony Brook University


Tuesday, 16 May
7:00 am: Breakfast, Waterside Ballroom
8:00: “Mental models, risk perception, and communication”
Ann Bostrom, Georgia Institute of Technology
9:00: Discussion
9:30: "EU initiative on risk perception methodologies and empirical studies on chemicals released from consumer products and articles"
Martin Clauberg, University of Tennessee
10:00: Break
10:30: “The neural basis of decision-making”
Alan Sanfey, University of Arizona
11:30: Discussion
12:00: Lunch, Turtle Room
1:00: “Why risk communication fails the benefit-cost test: 'Tis no gift to be simple”
Adam Finkel, Princeton University and UMDNJ School of Public Health
2:00: Discussion
2:30: “Risk Perception and Reality in the Pharmaceutical Industry”
Christopher Shilling, Pfizer Global Research and Development
3:00: Break
3:30: “Evolutionary domains of risk and reference points-bounded risky choice”
X.T. Wang, University of South Dakota
4:30: Discussion
5:00: Free time
7:30: Dinner, Turtle Room
"A rich, new view of what human minds evolved to do"
Paul Bingham, Stony Brook University


Wednesday, 17 May
7:00 am: Breakfast, Waterside Ballroom
8:00: “Neural mechanisms of temporal discounting”
Joseph Kable, New York University
9:00: Discussion
9:30: “Stakeholders, politics, fairness, and risk communication”
Andrew Stirling, University of Sussex
10:00: Break
10:30: "Evolved altruism, strong reciprocity, and perception of risk"
W. Troy Tucker, Applied Biomathematics
11:30: Discussion
12:00: Wrap-up
12:30 pm: Adjourn

Poster session

Participants were invited and encouraged to present posters at the symposium. The posters were displayed throughout the event.

Speakers

Paul Bingham, Stony Brook University

Paul Bingham received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard in 1979 and has been on the faculty of the Biochemistry department at Stony Brook University for over 20 years. He is known for his long and strong commitment to innovative undergraduate education. His current research activities are diverse, including cancer chemotherapy and the scientific problems of human evolution and human history. Dr. Bingham has participated in numerous fundamental discoveries that have contributed to our current picture of animal genomes and their function including discovery of the P element transposon in fruit flies, development of the widely used technique of cloning by "transposon tagging", discoveries of structural features of chromosomes and nuclei and of how genetic regulatory elements work, discoveries of several fundamental features of messenger RNA metabolism and, finally, most recently, development of a novel approach to cancer chemotherapy.

Ann Bostrom, http://www.spp.gatech.edu/faculty/faculty/abostrom.php

Ann Bostrom is an associate dean for the Ivan Allen College and Associate Professor in its School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bostrom received her B.A. from the University of Washington in creative writing, an M.B.A. from Western Washington University, and a Ph.D. in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University. She also studied at the University of Stockholm on a Fulbright Scholarship and Lois Roth endowment award. She completed postdoctoral studies in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. Bostrom teaches qualitative and quantitative research methods, environmental policy, and risk perception, communication and management. Her research focuses on mental models of hazardous processes (how people understand and make decisions about risks) in the areas of air pollution, children’s environmental health, and seismic risk. She has published in journals such as Risk Analysis, the Journal of Social Issues, and the American Journal of Public Health, and co-authored Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (Cambridge University Press). Bostrom has served as program director for the Decision Risk and Management Science Program with the National Science Foundation. She is a Councilor of the Society for Risk Analysis, and received its Chauncey Starr award for a young risk analyst. She consults for the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, the National Research Council, the Transportation Research Board, and other organizations on risk communication. She is on the editorial boards of Risk Analysis and the Journal of Risk Research.

Mark Burgman, http://www.botany.unimelb.edu.au/envisci/mark/mark.htm

Mark Burgman is a professor of environmental science in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He was recently appointed Director of the newly formed Australian Centre for Risk Analysis. He received a B.Sc. in biology from the University of New South Wales and a Ph.D. in ecology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Burgman is an ecologist known internationally for his work on ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment. His work has included models to assist environmental managers for a variety of species and ecological systems in a range of settings including marine fisheries, forestry, vertebrate management in national parks, electrical power utilities and mining. He worked as a consultant ecologist and research scientist in Australia and the United States before joining the University of Melbourne in 1990. In Australia, he acts on scientific advisory panels for the Victorian EPA, the Zoological Board and the Australian Antarctic Division. He was recently appointed to the Australian Biological Diversity Ministerial Advisory Committee. He has authored four books, edited two others, and has contributed over 100 articles to refereed books and scientific journals. His most recent book Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management was published by Cambridge in 2005.

Martin Clauberg

Martin Clauberg is a lecturer in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department and consulting scientist at The Institute for Environmental Modeling at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He founded Dr. Clauberg--Consulting and is a recurring guest scientist in the Programme Group MUT at the Research Center Juelich in Germany (http://www.fz-juelich.de/mut). He holds a MBA-equivalency in business management and marketing from the Personal training Institute in Düsseldorf, Germany, a Ph.D. in biochemistry and B.S. degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Tennessee, where he was a Science Alliance Research Fellow. His research focused on neurotoxicology, toxicity information for trace elements, including essential minerals, and he gained an appreciation for intra- and inter-individual differences, as well as communicating variability and uncertainty to various audiences. As the Risk Assessment Team Leader for the ORNL Environmental Restoration Division's Risk Assessment Program, Clauberg prepared or managed numerous environmental health risk assessments. At Oak Ridge, he helped develop the Risk Assessment Information System (http://risk.lsd.ornl.gov), which serves as a resource for assessing and communicating risks to various stakeholders. He is an author of numerous publications on risk assessment and risk communication. His current research focuses on assessment and communication tool platform development in support of analyzing and organizing risk information management practices and systems in regulatory agencies. Clauberg's work on early risk detection has been used as a strategic resource by international regulatory bodies. He is currently involved in an EU initiative on risk perception methodologies and empirical studies on chemicals released from consumer products and articles. Clauberg is an active member of the Society for Risk Analysis and has served as an executive committee officer of the SRA-Europe and the Research Triangle Chapter.

Scott Ferson, http://www.ramas.com/sferson.htm

Scott Ferson is a senior scientist at Applied Biomathematics. He holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an A.B. in biology from Wabash College. He has over 80 scholarly publications, including five books and several software packages, in environmental risk analysis and uncertainty propagation. His research focuses on developing reliable mathematical and statistical tools for risk assessments and on methods for uncertainty analysis when empirical information is very sparse. Over the last decade, his research has included projects on variability and uncertainty in early system design (NASA), safe environmental concentrations under uncertainty (NIH), uncertainty projection in black-box models (Sandia National Labs), quality assurance methods for Monte Carlo risk analysis (NIH), exact probability methods for generalized occupancy models (NIH), ecological implications of toxicological data (EPRI), power tests for exact statistics for detecting disease clustering (NIH), ecotones and boundary delineation for detecting global change (EPRI), qualitative ecological modeling (NSF), and stage modeling for animal population dynamics (Army Corps of Engineers). Ferson is an adjunct professor at Marine Sciences Research Institute at Stony Brook University, and serves on the editorial board of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment. He is chair of the conferences and workshops committee of the Society for Risk Analysis and has served on several panels in the US and the EU.

Adam Finkel, http://webdb.princeton.edu/dbtoolbox/query.asp?qname=facultydetail&ID=afinkel

Adam M. Finkel is a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Finkel has a doctoral degree in environmental health sciences and a master's degree in public policy, both from Harvard University, and has written many articles in the medical, legal, economics, and statistical literature. For ten years he was a senior executive at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), serving as OSHA's national director of regulatory programs in Washington and later as chief OSHA administrator in the six-state Rocky Mountain region, based in Denver. He has pioneered methods to quantify and communicate the uncertainties in risk and cost estimation, and to explore the variation in environmental and medical risks individual citizens and patients face due to differences in susceptibility, exposure, and other factors. His research has shown that traditional methods of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis often underestimate risks and overestimate the economic costs of sensible interventions to reduce them. He designed OSHA's most sophisticated health regulations, as well as its first "enforceable partnerships" that brought government, industry, and labor together to craft protections beyond what traditional regulation could offer.

Charles Janson, http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/people/jansonindex.html

Charles Janson is the chairperson of the department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1985. His research spans two distinct topics in evolutionary ecology: (1) ecological pressures on social behavior in primates, and (2) ecological and evolutionary consequences of seed dispersal in plants. He has spent over 70 months observing the ecology and social behavior of several primate species. He is studying how an individual's social behavior interacts with external aspects of the environment to affect a variety of proximate correlates of fitness such as energy intake, predation risk, and mate choice. For instance, he analyzed how food productivity in patches interacts with group size and individual social status to affect an individual's food intake in brown capuchin monkeys. He then tested these patterns experimentally using spatial arrays of artificial food patches in a wild capuchin monkey population in Argentina. Extending the analysis across species, he found that the greater the degree of food competition within groups, the smaller the mean group size of fruit-eating primate species. Current grant-supported work intends to understand the rules used by primates to decide which of many resources available to visit, and in what order. Understanding the cognitive processes underlying spatial foraging decisions may be crucial to explaining the link between food availability and primate social behavior. Ongoing research focuses on the direct and indirect effects of predation and infanticide on primate social structure. From such studies, he hopes to build realistic models of the evolution of primate social behavior.

Joseph Kable, New York University

Joseph Kable is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. Dr. Kable earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1996 from Emory University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He is the recipient of several honors and awards, including a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and a Lucius Lamar McMullan Award. Kable has authored many scholarly publications in neuroscience and psychometry.

Elke Kurz-Milcke, http://www.ph-ludwigsburg.de/1738.html

Elke Kurz-Milcke is a cognitive psychologist working in the Institute of Mathematics and Computing at the Pedagogical University (Hochschulleitung und Studienort Ludwigsburg) of Ludwigsburg, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She has been a researcher at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and at the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Her specialty is in bridging the cognitive study of science and of education. She is contributing to a state-sponsored research effort on gender and mathematics. Her current research addresses, among other issues, how to best introduce statistics and probability to children. While a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow, she earned various prizes and honors, among them a Schloeßmann-Fellowship from the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. She has published on representational practices in mathematics, on research practices and modeling in biomedical engineering, on the history of research in psychology and in decision making, as well as on expertise.

Ellen Peters, http://www.decisionresearch.org/About/People/peters.html and http://www.uoregon.edu/~empeters

Ellen Peters is a research scientist at Decision Research and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Peters received her B.S.E. and B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in systems engineering and business. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Oregon. She was a visiting scientist at the National Cancer Institute. She is currently on an external advisory board for the Iowa Cancer and Aging Program and has been a guest editor for special issues of Health Psychology and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. She won a best paper award at the 2003 annual meeting for the Society of Risk Analysis. Her research focuses on how affective and deliberative processes help people to make decisions in an increasingly complex world. She studies decision making as an interaction of characteristics of the decision situation and characteristics of the individual and is currently funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and other federal and private agencies. She has published widely in journals such as Psychological Science, Risk Analysis, Health Affairs, and Health Psychology. Her research interests include decision making, dual processes, affect, emotion, risk perception, numeracy, aging, and health decision making, and she is particularly interested in the application of psychological theory to applied problems in health and financial domains.

David Ropeik, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/researchers/dropeik.html

David Ropeik is an instructor in risk communication at Harvard School of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health's Exposure, Epidemiology, and Risk Program. He was a former director of risk communication for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a National Tropical Botanical Garden Fellow. He has taught journalism at Boston University and Tufts University. Ropeik co-wrote RISK, A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Dangerous and What’s Safe in the World Around You published by Houghton Mifflin. He is a regular commentator on risk issues for National Public Radio. He has written op-ed pieces on risk and risk communication for The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsday, Parade Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Congressional Quarterly, Post Graduate Medicine Magazine, and the quarterly magazine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has collaborated with many risk experts on a variety of articles on risk perception and risk communication. He has been widely cited on issues of risk perception in major national and international journals and news services, and interviewed on several regional, national and international television and radio programs. Ropeik has lectured and consulted widely on risk communication and risk perception. Prior to joining Harvard, Ropeik was a television reporter for WCVB-TV, Channel 5, in Boston for 22 years. He specialized in reporting on environment and science issues. He twice won the DuPont-Columbia Award, often cited as the television equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. He also won a national Gabriel Award, National Headliners Award, and seven regional EMMY awards. He was for ten years a member of the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Between 1998 and 2000 he authored a science column in The Boston Globe, syndicated by The New York Times. That column appeared on MSNBC.com from 2000-2002.

Alan Sanfey, http://www.u.arizona.edu/~asanfey/

Alan G. Sanfey is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He holds a B.A. in psychology from the University College in Dublin, Ireland, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Colorado. He has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, and has received numerous academic awards. Sanfey has published widely in psychological and cognitive science, experimental brain research, and neuroeconomics. His research uses both behavioral and neuroscience methods to explore the cognitive and neural processes that underlie human judgment and decision-making. This work addresses emotion and cognition in decision-making, neural dynamics of fairness and cooperation the role of the anterior cingulate cortex in decision difficulty, EEG studies of risk and uncertainty, and the influence of memory representations on human judgment tasks.

Chris Shilling, Pfizer, Inc.

Chris Shilling has recently joined the Business Innovation Unit in Pfizer Global Research & Development, with responsibility for running research projects in the areas of risk communication, knowledge mobilization and process innovation. He spent the previous nine years working in the Project Management group, with global responsibility for developing and managing innovative Knowledge and Information Management processes and products. Having graduated in Law, Chris spent four years as a professional musician, working throughout the UK with his own blues band, and recording three albums. He then worked on document management and process analysis systems for a major European newsprint manufacturer, with particular responsibility for the paper recycling operation. This eclectic career path has proved to be a suitable preparation for the challenges of innovation in a large corporation.

Andrew Stirling, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/profile7513.html

Andrew Stirling is a senior fellow and senior lecturer at Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. Stirling holds a master's degree in archaeology and social anthropology from Edinburgh and a D.Phil. in science and technology policy from the University of Sussex. His research focuses on risk and the dynamics of technology choice, critical policy analysis, ecological economics, the precautionary principle, risk and uncertainty analysis, decision analysis, multi-criteria mapping, technology policy, citizen participation, sustainability, and technological diversity and resilience. Stirling has published dozens of papers and monographs in scholarly journals and three books on risk research, energy policy, ethics, and the precautionary principle as applied to disparate subjects ranging from genetically modified crops to regulation of the electricity supply industry. He has served on a variety of policy advisory bodies, including the European Commission's Energy Policy Consultative Committee, the UK Advisory Committee on Toxic Substances and Genetic Modification Science Review Panel, the European Commission's Expert Group on Science and Governance and the Science Advisory Council of the UK Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Stirling has also worked as a disarmament activist and board member for Greenpeace International.

W. Troy Tucker, http://www.ramas.com/TTucker.html

W. Troy Tucker is a human ecologist and anthropologist. Before joining Applied Biomathematics he spent three years as visiting assistant professor of biological anthropology at Stony Brook University. He received a B.A. from the University of Utah and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. His research includes a quantitative statistical study of the demography of New Mexican men (supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship) and quantitative demographic and ethnographic studies among a hunter-gatherer population in Venezuela, an agricultural village in Tanzania, and swidden agriculturalists in Madagascar. At Applied Biomathematics, his research has focused on risk perception and communication, case studies and methods to test probabilistic deconvolution and probability bounds, and developing and testing methods for the incorporation of human demography into ecological risk analyses. He has several years experience conducting probabilistic human health and ecological risk assessments for a Superfund site in Massachusetts and Connecticut. New projects in 2006 include devising methods to analyze epistemic and aleatory uncertainty in spacecraft design.

X.T.Wang, http://www.usd.edu/~xtwang/

X.T. (Xiao-Tian) Wang is a professor in the Psychology Department, at the University of South Dakota. He has been a visiting scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology at Peking University, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Management in the School of Business and Management at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Wang holds a B.S. in experimental medicine from Beijing Medical University, an M.S. in pathology and physiology from Jinan University, an M.A. in experimental psychology and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from New Mexico State University. Wang's research interests include human decision making in social contexts, risk perception, and risk management, probability judgment and moral reasoning, evolutionary rationality of decision making under risk, framing and cue use in risky choices, and modeling decision making in terms of risk distributions and reference points. Wang’s research has been published in various journals including Acta Psychologica Sinica, American Behavioral Scientist, Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Brain Behavior and Evolution, Child Development, Cognition, Cognition and Emotion, Communication Quarterly, Ethology and Sociobiology, Evolution and Human Behavior, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Bioeconomics, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Psychological Journal of Russian Academy of Sciences, and Psychophysiology.

Karli Watson, Duke University

Karli Watson completed her Ph.D. in neurobiology this year working with John Allman at the California Institute of Technology. Her dissertation focused on the characterization of the von Economo neurons, a neuroanatomical specialization present in humans and great apes. She is currently working in Michael Platt's lab at Duke University, where she uses pharmacological and electrophysiological techniques to explore how social decision-making is represented and implemented in the non-human primate brain.

Peter C. Wright, The Dow Chemical Company

Peter C. Wright is senior counsel for corporate environmental legal issues for The Dow Chemical Company. He earned his J. D., summa cum laude, from Indiana University and his A.B, summa cum laude, from Wabash College in 1981. He provides legal counsel to senior company management and coordination of outside counsel with respect to the range of issues faced by Dow on a global basis related to dioxin. Wright coordinates with public and governmental affairs regarding communications with media and advocacy efforts with federal, state and local governmental officials regarding dioxin matters. He also provides counseling on sustainability, environmental disclosure, shareholder resolutions, corporate policies and goals, public reporting obligations and product stewardship matters. Prior to returning to environmental practice, Mr. Wright provided business law counseling to Dow Automotive, Dow’s biotechnology business, electronics business, specialty fibers business and other businesses associated with Dow’s Growth Center. Prior to joining Dow, Peter was Counsel with Bryan Cave LLP’s environmental law group. Before joining Bryan Cave, Mr. Wright worked for a number of years with the Monsanto Company and provided legal counsel in the areas of hazardous waste regulation, Superfund cleanups and chemical regulation as well as environmental counsel with respect to mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Wright began his legal career with the environmental practice group of Baker & Daniels in Indianapolis, Indiana. Mr. Wright has written and spoken on a wide range of environmental law topics. He is currently the newsletter coordinator for the 10,000 member American Bar Association’s Section on Environment, Energy and Resources and a vice chair of In-House Counsel and the Fall Meeting Planning Committees. He recently co-authored the article “Twenty-five Years of Dioxin Cancer Risk Assessment” published in the Spring 2005 Volume of ABA’s Natural Resources & Environment.

Background

A better understanding of the way in which the human brain processes information relevant to risk might substantially improve the communication of risk to the public. Rapid progress in this direction is being made, in parallel, in three distinct scientific disciplines: psychometric risk perception studies, neuroscience, and the evolutionary social sciences. Unfortunately there has been little opportunity for interaction between risk researchers across these fields, hampering the spread of important new insights. The proposed symposium will bring together researchers active in these disciplines to directly confront issues of risk perception and communication common to all.

Currently, there are many strategies for communicating risks to stakeholders and the public. They range from lists of ad hoc injunctions borne from bitter experiences in hostile public meetings to elaborate systematic programs involving research phases and iterated implementations.

Expert risk perception often differs from that of the public. Prevailing paradigms in risk communication research often assert that expert assessments represent the normative basis of rational perception and that deviant perceptions are irrational in some sense. The goal of risk communication, in this context, is to bring public perception into line with expert risk assessments in order for the public to be able to make rationally informed choices. The idiosyncratic and emotion-laden public response to many risks makes this goal a challenge.

Research in risk perception has been guided by the psychometric paradigm. From its inception, this approach was fundamentally quantitative and empirically driven, with theories arising from analyses of observations and experiments. Agreement exists regarding the importance to risk perception of specific factors such as information context, uncertainty, trust, control, voluntariness, and emotional response. A general theory has to account for these factors with reference to the way that the brain processes information relevant to risk.

Some researchers propose a “dual-process” theory of cognition. It proposes two modes of cognition: experiential and rational. The experiential mode is dominated by emotional responses to information: “intuition, instinct, and gut feeling”. The theory supposes this to be the original mode of thinking until the very recent evolution of analytical reasoning, which is presumed to be a culturally transmitted phenomenon. Although there exists much support for this view, it may stand to gain from a growing body of research and theory building in evolutionary social sciences such as evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, as well as the burgeoning field of evolutionary neuroscience.

A general theory of how the brain processes information, derived from Darwin's theory of natural evolution, may provide significant insight into risk perception. Over the last 25 years, research in the evolutionary social sciences has developed an explanatory theory of human behavior. This body of theory is supported by experimental and observational studies in evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, and most recently neuroeconomics. The key insight powering these developments is that natural selection is the cause of biological complexity, that complex features of organisms are adaptations, and that adaptations are fairly well tuned to perform a few very specific functions. In psychology, Marr independently derived the evolutionary perspective from first principles of computation, leading to the theory that the brain consists of many domain-specific problem-solving mechanisms. This theory may lead to a rich set of expectations regarding how both experts and the general public perceive risk.

It is often presumed that humans are irrational about risk because it involves the perception and calculation of probabilities. Indeed, this may explain why probability theory is notoriously unintuitive and why, at roughly 200 years, it is the youngest of the main branches of mathematics. Neophytes in probability theory as well as professionals, and even luminaries such as Laplace, de Morgan, and Boole, make gross mistakes that have no parallel in other mathematical disciplines. A recent example of this is the spate of erroneous public statements about the “Monty Hall problem” by university mathematics professors.

Because probability theory is a central mathematical tool of risk analysis, risk communication would seem to be especially disadvantaged. Because the lay public is believed to often be irrational about risks, much of risk communication is devoted to remedial education. Yet, evolution has endowed humans with sensory structures and behavioral patterns that are at least reasonably well suited for practical decision-making in uncertain environments. Recent work has demonstrated that, when data is presented to the lay person in formats the brain is adapted to understand, many of these “biases” are mitigated and subjects accurately solve complex problems.

This symposium will explore these recent findings and emerging ideas regarding the mental calculators that human beings use to reckon about risks, the evolutionary origins of these calculators, and the proximate neurological bases of risk perception and cognition that surely underlie risk communications. It will seek to uncover strategies for making communication efforts more intelligible and relevant, and thus more successful. The symposium will examine how these theoretical ideas translate into communication strategies that could at least foretell, if not forestall or prevent, risk communication missteps and failures. It will seek to collate the injunctions that risk communicators have developed from their practical experience with theory that gives these injunctions context and extensibility.

Registration

A maximum of 80 participants was to be allowed in order to encourage discussion and potential collaboration. The registration fee was $275 before 14 April 2006, or $325 thereafter and on site. Registration was administered by Patrick Mercardante of Applied Biomathematics:
Patrick Mercardante
Applied Biomathematics
100 North Country Road
Setauket, New York 11733 USA

Email: admin@ramas.com
Telephone: 1-631-751-4350
Fax: 1-631-751-3435

MasterCard and Visa are accepted

The registration fee included a reception Sunday evening and all meals for the duration of the symposium (3 breakfasts, 3 lunches, 2 dinners). Full refunds of the registration fee were allowed up to 4 days before the symposium. After that, up until the first day of the symposium, a cancellation fee of $70 was imposed.

Venue

The symposium was be held 15-17 May 2006 at the Montauk Yacht Club Resort and Marina. Conference participants booked a room at least 1 month prior to the event to receive the special conference rate of $109 + tax per night, ($358.07 total for 3 nights).

Montauk Yacht Club Resort & Marina
32 Star Island Road/Box 5048
Montauk, New York 11954

Telephone: 1-888-692-8668 (8:30am to 6pm)
Fax: 1-631-668-6181
www.montaukyachtclub.com
(To register on-line, use Group/Event ID: 27526)

Travel tips

The airports in the New York metropolitan area include LaGuardia (LGA), Kennedy (JFK), and Newark (EWR). Macarthur regional airport at Islip, Long Island, (ISP) which is served by Southwest, US Air, Delta, ATA, Continental, and Northwest, may also be convenient. If you live in the New York City or tristate area, there are several ways to travel to Montauk, including personal car, express bus, limousine, train, ferry, and private boat.

From LaGuardia Airport (LGA) or Kennedy Airport (JFK) If you're flying into JFK or LGA, you can get from the airport to the hotel by train limo service, rental car or express bus.
From Islip Macarthur Airport (ISP) If you're flying into ISP, you can get from the airport to the hotel by rental car, limo service or train. Alternatively, you might call us (1-631-751-4350) to inquire about sharing the ride from ISP to the hotel.
Driving If you're driving a personal or rental car to Montauk, you will discover how Long Island got its name. Click here for driving directions from New York and New Jersey or Boston and Connecticut.

Renting a car at LGA, JFK, Islip, or Newark

Major car rental companies include Hertz Enterprise Avis Budget Dollar Thrifty

The rental company will help you with directions to Montauk. The trip by car will likely take between two and two and a half hours.

Train from JFK, LGA, ISP, or Manhattan

It is possible to take the Long Island Rail Road from Manhattan (Pennsylvania Station on 34th Street), JFK, LGA, or ISP to Montauk. Although it is inexpensive, it is not convenient on Sunday because there are so few trains. It may be more convenient to get you back to your airport after the symposium.

Train schedules and fares can be found on-line at http://lirr42.mta.info/index.asp or by calling the railroad's voice-activated telephone line at 1-516-822-5477.

Penn Station: If you take the train from Manhattan, you will have to transfer at the Jamaica or Babylon station, which means you will need to get off the train, wait a minute or two, and reboard a second train to continue the journey.

The one-way fare is about $15 off peak. Buying your ticket from the conductor on the train will cost an additional $5, and traveling during peak (departing New York City on weekdays between 4 and 8 pm) will cost another $5 more.

ISP: You will have to take a cab from the Islip Airport to the Long Island Railroad Station in Patchogue. The cab fare will be about $22 and will take about 15 minutes. Cabs can be hailed at the airport, or you can call 631-589-7878 to order one. There are very few trains on Sundays (9:17am, 11:17am, 1:13pm, 10:14pm and 2:14am Monday morning). The trip takes about two hours, so the 10:14 arrives in Montauk at midnight and the 2:14 comes in at 4 in the morning. The one-way fare is about $6, or $11 if you buy the ticket from the conductor on the train.

LGA: Like ISP, you will need to get a cab to the Flushing-Main Street LIRR station. It's not far from the airport but expect $25 and 20 minutes. Note that from Flushing you need to go to Penn Station in Manhattan to connect to a train to Montauk.

JFK: If you come in through JFK airport, the new AirTrain service will take you from the airport to Jamaica station where you can catch the Long Island Railroad. Airtrains leave every few minutes 24 hours per day. The trip takes about 15 minutes and costs about $7.

When you get off the train in Montauk, call the hotel (631-668-7716) and they will pick you up.

Driving from Boston and Connecticut

You can drive from the Boston area to Montauk using a series of ferries in about 5 hours. The trip is actually quite beautiful and interesting. From 95 south, use Exit 84 south to downtown New London, Connecticut. At the second light turn left onto Governor Winthrop Boulevard. Cross the railroad tracks and turn right to the Cross Sound Ferry. Take the ferry from to Orient Point, New York. The ferries depart every one or two hours during the day. The fare is $42, plus $12 per passenger, each way. Reservations are required and can be made at (1-860-443-5281) or https://www.longislandferry.com/.

In Orient Point, take 25A west for 9 miles and turn left at the flashing light and travel 1 mile to Greenport. At the next flashing light go right for 2 blocks to the traffic light. Make a left at the light and travel for 1 block to the North Ferry Company. Take the ferry to Shelter Island, and then continue on Route 114 south for 4.5 miles across Shelter Island to the South Ferry Company. Take this ferry from Shelter Island to North Haven (which is on the South Fork of Long Island). Both of these ferries depart every 15 or 20 minutes, from about 6 in the morning until almost midnight. They each cost about $10 each way. Reservations on these ferries is not required. Further information about these ferries is available on their respective websites http://www.northferry.com/ and http://www.southferry.com/.

Express bus service

If you fly into LGA, JFK, ISP, or if you're coming from Manhattan, you may take the Hampton Jitney (bus) service to Montauk. Jitneys depart from Manhattan hourly. The fare for the jitney is about $30 one way, and about $50 round trip. However, you must take a cab from the airports to get the jitney. Depending on the airport, this cab ride will take 10 to 25 minutes and will cost about $20. The Queens airport connection (LGA and JFK) bus stop is difficult for cabs to find. The Islip (ISP) airport connection is not much easier. You must call 631-283-4600 to get directions to give to your cabbie. The jitney stops in Montauk in front of the police station. Call the Montauk Yacht Club (631-668-3100 or 631-668-6181) when you arrive to pick you up. You must book the jitney in advance by telephone (631-283-4600) or on-line at http://www.hamptonjitney.com.

Limousine service

Many companies provide limousine service on Long Island and especially in New York City. Although it can be rather expensive, this option may be most convenient if you do not drive a car yourself. The driver will pick you up inside the airport at baggage claim, and drive you directly to the hotel. A limo from either LGA or JFK to the Montauk Yacht Club costs about $200. The trip will take about two or two and a half hours. Limo from Islip Airport to the Montauk Yacht Club costs about $160. The trip will take about two or two and a half hours. You must reserve limo service in advance. You can save $30 or so from this fare with a "shared" car service, but this will generally take longer because it would involve making side stops for other passengers. You must reserve limo service in advance. Some limo companies

Spartan Limousine (1-631-928-5454)

Winston Airport Limousine http://www.winstontrans.com (1-800-424-7767)

Classic Airport Shuttle http://www.classictrans.com (1-631-701-2085)

Colonial Transportation http://www.colonialtransportation.com (1-631-589-7878)

Elite Transport http://www.litransportation.com (1-631-878-3300)

Town Car Service - J. Caravaggio (1-516-635-7974)

Private boat

It is also possible to sail your boat directly to the Montauk Yacht Club. Call the marina (1-631-668-7702) to make a reservation for a slip. The docking fee is $2.75 per foot during the week and $3 per foot on the weekends.

Organizing committee

The symposium organizers, drawn from academia, consulting, and industry, served as discussants, lead question-and-answer periods, and moderated open discussion after each invited lecture. Several of the organizers also give short topical presentations.

Scott Ferson, Senior Scientist and Vice President, Applied Biomathematics
Adam Finkel, Visiting Professor, Princeton University, and Professor , UMDNJ School of Public Health
Charles Janson, Professor and Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University
Thomas F. Long, The Sapphire Group, Inc.
David Slavin, M.D., Executive Director, World Wide Development, Business Innovations Unit, Pfizer Global Research and Development Chris Shilling, Manager, Business Innovation Unit, Pfizer Global Research and Development
W. Troy Tucker, Research Scientist, Applied Biomathematics
Peter C. Wright, Esq., EH&S Special Projects Counsel, Dow

Links

Decision, Risk and Management Sciences (DRMS) http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5423&org=SES&from=home

National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/

Society for Risk Analysis www.sra.org

The Human Behavior and Evolution Society http://www.hbes.com/

The Imprecise Probabilities Project http://www.sipta.org/

Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting http://www.sra.org/events_2004_meeting.php

Other events sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis http://www.sra.org/events.php#otherevents

The New York Academy of Sciences http://www.nyas.org

(NYAS manuscript preparation guidelines: http://www.nyas.org/annals/guidelines.asp)

More information

For more information, please contact Troy Tucker at troy@ramas.com, telephone 1-631-751-4350, or fax -3435.