Perceptions of risk: Rationality vs Emotion

Why is it so difficult for industry to communicate with other groups in society, such as environmentalists, workers, unions and journalists about issues of environment and health? Why do apparently rational terms like “risk assessment,” “cost2Dbenefit analysis” and “risk management” fall on deaf ears, while emotion-laden words such as “economical disaster,” “deadly chemical” and “toxic nightmare” are all too popular?

Space does not permit a complete analysis, but some useful insights were provided by Kai Erikson in “Toxic Reckoning: Business Faces a New Kind of Fear” in Harvard Business Review (January-February, 1990). Erikson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, has studied the reaction of people to manmade incidents such as Three Mile Island, the Love Canal, and Bhopal.

Erikson distinguishes between natural disasters and technological disasters. Being of manmade origin, the latter are theoretically preventable. They, therefore, provoke special outrage because someone must be to blame. People feel that “the victims deserve not only compassion and compensation but also something akin to what lawyers call punitive damages.”

The second special feature of these incidents is that they involve toxic materials. Words like “contaminate,” “pollute,” “befoul” and “taint” indicate a deeper sense of loathing than the straightforward “damage.” According to Erikson, “there is growing evidence that they (toxics) scare human beings in new ways, that they elicit an uncanny fear in us…people find radiation and other toxic substances significantly more threatening than most natural hazards and nontoxic technological hazards.”

We in industry find these fears extraordinary. Erikson agrees: “We will dismiss this fear as irrational of, like most experts, we assess the danger by calculating the odds of an accident and then estimating the number of casualties likely to result from it. but there are other reasonings and other reckonings at work in the world. Maybe we should understand radioactive and other toxic substances as naturally loathsome, inherently insidious — horrors, like poison gas, that draw on something deeper int he hu man mind.”

Erikson points to two specific features of toxics that account for these exaggerated fears. First, unlike a hurricane, toxic incidents do not end; their effects may linger on. secondly, radiation and other toxic substances “are without form. You cannot apprehend them through the unaided senses; you cannot taste, touch, smell, or see them. That makes them especially ghostlike and terrifying . . . They slink in without warning…and begin their deadly work from within — the very embodiment, it would seem, o f stealth and treachery.”

These fears are real, though we may not share them. Moreover, “this dread can also be channelled into quasi-political movements that virtually become a voice against technology itself.” This possibility creates a special challenge for our industry at present, in view of a stated objective of Canada’s Green Plan: the virtually elimination of persistent toxics from the environment.

We must demonstrate and communicate our own care and concern for the environment if we hope to influence public attitudes and future legislation. The first step in communicating with someone is to understand him and his fears, however irrational they may appear. Let Erikson have the last word: “The one thing we cannot afford to assume as we consider how to deal with this new species of trouble is that the fear it evokes is either a passing whim or a fever that can be cooled by the calculations of experts. This dread has its own reasons; it must be respected.” George Miller is the president of the Mining Association of Canada.