Risk perception…not the only important thing?

Why would you live here?! Nestled near the bottom of the Vazcun valley, these homes are in a very high risk area on the slopes of Tungurahua, Ecuador.  Built on top of pyroclastic flow deposits, which have regularly impacted the area in historic times. There hasn't been one to this location for almost 100 years - so despite heightened activity since 1999, people are still here. Sadly - unless the volcano becomes extinct (not likely any time soon) - history will inevitably repeat itself. I just hope not in the near future....

What if I told you that my friend lives there...and his family extended their house...only a few years ago - i.e during a time when the volcano was erupting? What would you think? Would you suppose that my friend and his family don't really know how dangerous the volcano is? What if you then found out that my friend is a very promising volcanologist...? Why on earth would they live there and invest money in their property as they surely know the volcano is very dangerous?? 

I regularly find myself telling people that I am a little dismayed that a ‘risk perception study’ is often the first social science approach taken off the shelf by volcanologists. When we are considering risk reduction, what we want to know is how people might respond to a hazard or forecasted hazard, and what steps they are likely to take to reduce the risk to themselves and their family. How people perceive risk or the ‘potential danger’ from a volcano is important, but it shouldn’t be the first thing we investigate and for me, it doesn’t explain adequately why people might take certain decisions or actions when confronted by risk.

Perhaps I trivialise the issue, but here is one interpretation of what a typical risk perception study is probably looking at:

Survey question: How dangerous do you think the volcano is? 

Answer: not very

Solution? Educate them about volcanic hazards. If they knew how dangerous it was, they wouldn’t live or work there, or they would at least make sensible decisions when we tell them something.

We could even add in a quantitative element – because that of course allows us to really understand something:

Survey question: on a scale of 1- 10 , how dangerous do you think the volcano is? 

Answer: 5

Solution: oooh – if we can educate them so that their answer is the same as our answer (about 7) then they will be safer. Risk Reduction ✓

In reality, the problem here isn’t actually about risk perceptions – it is about what we think they might tell us:

Thinking that people can have ‘bad’, ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’ risk perceptions isn’t helpful – it assumes that we all have the same way of calculating risk, or that there is some objective ‘true’ risk.

Assuming that we can ‘change’ or ‘improve’ people’s risk perceptions, to bring them more in line with scientists’ perceptions is a concept from straight out of the idiots guide to educating knowledge deficient publics:

The deficit model  of risk communication– suggests that the lay-public will make irrational decisions based on limited information about a problem.  This comes about because scientists often only consider objective science as the most important information. Whilst the amount of knowledge that the lay public has is a factor in their response, we have a responsibility to not disregard other factors as irrelevant. I very much doubt that we deliberately do this…but our obsessive focus on people’s risk perception doesn’t pay much attention to other things that might influence their decisions – as we know that the public’s judgments of risk aren’t necessarily based on the amount of information that they have, but more often than not on their ‘world view’, their social or political views and their circumstances*.  None of us, even scientists, simply process information with associated heuristics and biases, and then make a decision. We aren’t machines. Rather we like to attach meaning to issues. Further to this…much of how we make sense of the world is actually not individualistic, but a socially constructed reality. Particularly in volcanic areas, knowledge and meaning about risk is transferred between social groups, often passed down between generations. 

People create social representations about risk – reaching a consensual understanding of what did or could happen – we build common sense about an issue by anchoring and objectifying it. We anchor by drawing on shared experiences from the past, making an unfamiliar issue familiar amongst our group. Then we often objectify things, by representing them in a way that is easier to grasp, using more familiar terms. For example, people often objectify ash plumes, which are lit up and incandescent as “smoke and fire”. It may be different to the scientific reality, but anchoring and objectifying is the way in which social groups make sense of new or unfamiliar situations. For example, the way that a social group might have been affected in a previous evacuation and how they have made sense of it, may have a far greater effect on decisions they will make in a future risky situation. Thus, their risk perception of a volcano might suggest that they know it is incredibly dangerous, but if the community only talks about how last time there was an evacuation, they were looted or lost their animals, then how dangerous they perceive the volcano to be may have little baring on their decisions. If we simply asked them how dangerous the volcano is, we will get a false positive answer.

Where risk perceptions focus on knowledge and information, risk representations focus on meaning and understanding. What is more useful for us as volcanologists to know? How or why people might behave in a certain way, or what they know, which may or may not then affect how they behave?

I'm not suggesting that we don't try to understand risk perceptions - but let's try to not make it the first thing that we do. Instead what we could be looking for isn’t how dangerous people think a volcano is, but what do they think about it in relation to other hazards or life situations. When we frame the problem like this, we are able to attach meaning to people’s views about volcanic hazards - and then you can understand the factors determining why my friend and his family live where they live. 

  

To read more about social representations of risk, have a look at the paper below as a starter by Helene Joffe. Sorry if you can't access it...

Joffe, H., 2003. Risk: From perception to social representation. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(1), pp.55–73.

*This is based on the work of Paul Slovic (among others)