Joe Arvai: In our research we've done a lot of work on how people will want to spend much more money and effort dealing with crime for instance when the risks from crime to most people are actually quite low. Another big one in our research is terrorism, a lot of effort is spent on dealing with terrorism in the name of saving lives. Quite frankly you're at a higher risk in America crossing the street than you are from a terrorist attack yet we don't spend a lot of time making our sidewalks and crosswalks safe.
Norman Swan: You talk about value neglect, what do you mean by value neglect?
Joe Arvai: What we mean is that often times when we're presented with information about a risk we are presented with a short narrative about that risk be it terrorism, or crossing the street, or whatever and then some numbers to tell us how risky it's going to be to our human health, or to the environment, or to property, or whatever.
Norman Swan: Just explain that experiment in more detail because it's quite interesting.
Joe Arvai: Well we actually approach them in a park and give them just a quick bit of background and say there's $100,000 in the rainy day fund of this park and that money is used to deal with problems that arise in the park unexpectedly and then we'll go on and describe some problems that have come up in the park. One of those problems for example might be crime and we'll tell them what kind of crime it is, we're not talking violent crime here we're talking petty crime, thefts from cars, maybe a purse snatching and we explain to them that those kinds of crimes are on the rise and we give them some numbers that try to explain to them what the magnitude of that risk is. So for example we'll say that there's a risk to human health, there's a risk to environmental health, and a risk to property from crime and we'll give them numbers on a 1 to 10 scale so we'll say that the risk to human health is a 4, and to property a 5 and to the environment maybe also a 5. And then we'll present them with another risk narrative which would be a deer population in that same park and we'll present the risks using the same scale.
Norman Swan: That the deer might get you.
Joe Arvai: Yeah, exactly and in fact we did this research in Ohio and there are a lot of stories of deer during reproductive times actually attacking humans who venture into their territory, so we'll present the same kind of information about the deer and we'll say that the risks from the deer may be a 5 for human health, a 6 for environmental health, and a 6 for property. So just a little bit higher than the risks for crime and then we'll ask people how much money the government should spend to deal with crime versus deer population and what we see is that people routinely want to see more money spent on crime than deer overpopulation. And then we repeat the experiment time and time again, slowly increasing the risk levels from deer to see how high the deer risks have to be relative to the crime risks just so that people will want to invest equally between deer and crime. And what we find is that we have to push the deer risks off the scale, or to the end of the scale on a 1 to 10 scale for people to take notice and realise that.
Norman Swan: So effectively you've got to double the deer risks for them to respond in the same way as they would to crime?
Joe Arvai: Exactly and why this is happening is because people's responses to crime rely very heavily on system 1, our fear, our emotions are engaged. When we talk about deer overpopulation and we're not really sure, most of us, if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I mean deer are cute, we know Bambi, it can't be that bad and when we're presented with the numbers we don't even look at those, we sort of use our emotional attachment to the images of deer to form our judgements just as we do for the crime.
Norman Swan: And we also respond more fearfully to things that are unusual, that are rare, that have high impact and where human hands are involved, we don't respond so strongly emotionally to natural things which is a bit curious in many ways given our story about evolution when we started to talk.
Joe Arvai: Yeah, very much so. I think that the salience of the risk, the imagery that's associated with it plays a very, very large role so we're looking here at a lot of human induced risks like terrorism, in contrast to a lot of natural risks. We even see this extending into natural risks where for instance humans have a hand in those natural risks but they're still perceived as natural events. And of course here I'm talking here about climate change. Climate change is induced by humans yet the impacts of climate change are very natural in nature and therefore we tend to have the same sort of value neglect in play when we deal with climate change as compared to things like terrorism and other more highly emotionally charged risks.
full: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/2029794.htm#transcript
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
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