Paul Slovic
Biographic Data
| ID | 159709 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Slovic |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Slovic |
| SIGNATURE | SLOVIC P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Decision Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7473-6403 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 110 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 876 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 107 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
It's all connected: Collectivism, climate change, and Covid-19
The Fear of Personal Death and the Willingness to Commit to Organ Donation
In three studies, with samples from different countries (the United States and Israel) and religions (Christians and Jews), we found that individual levels of fear of death significantly predicted lower willingness to register as organ donors (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, after being asked about their organ donation status (i.e., whether they are registered as donors), fear of death significantly increased among unregistered people. This did not o…
Valuing life
The heart of prospect theory is the value function, proposing that the carriers of value are positive or negative changes from a reference point. Daniel Kahneman observed that if prospect theory had a flag, the value function would be drawn on it. The function is nonlinear, reflecting diminishing sensitivity to magnitude. When describing how human lives are valued, the function exposes profound incoherence. An individual life is highly valued and…
The generic conspiracist beliefs scale – 5: A short-form measure of conspiracist ideation
Politicians polarize and experts depolarize public support for Covid-19 management policies across countries
Significance Political polarization impeded public support for policies to address the spread of COVID-19, much as polarization hinders responses to other societal challenges. The present cross-country study demonstrates how the cues from political elites and affective polarization are analogous across countries addressing COVID-19. Far from being an outlier, the United States faces polarization challenges similar to those of other countries. Imp…
Information spotlighting in Americans’ Decisions Surrounding Refugee resettlement Policy
Communicating Imperatives Requires Psychological Closeness But Creates Psychological Distance
This article evaluates the psychological correlates of imperative speech through pronouns. We demonstrate that people communicate with more collective immediacy (“we” words) when using imperatives than nonimperatives in an experiment (Study 1, N = 828) and field studies of American politicians (Study 2a: N = 123,678 speeches), and Joseph Stalin (Study 2b: N = 593 speeches). However, respondents experience a psychological distancing effect after a…
Affective calculus: The construction of affect through information integration over time
Humans receive a constant stream of input that potentially influence their affective experience. Despite intensive research on affect, it is still largely unknown how various sources of information are integrated into the single, unified affective features that accompany consciousness. Here, we aimed to investigate how a stream of evocative input we receive is dynamically represented in self-reported affect. In 4 experiments, participants viewed …
Priming critical thinking: Simple interventions limit the influence of fake news about climate change on Facebook
Information Spotlighting in Americans’ Decisions Surrounding Refugee Resettlement Policy
Violent conflict in the Middle East has forced millions to flee their homes and seek refuge in host nations around the globe. Across three studies, we asked American participants (N ∼ 1,500) to consider a refugee-resettlement policy that would bring displaced families from the Middle East into their communities, and tracked the items of information these Americans were interested in seeing during the consideration of their decision. Results sugge…
Sarah Lichtenstein (1933–2017)
This article memorializes Sarah Lichtenstein (1933-2017). Lichtenstein is aptly described as a "powerhouse in the field of decision-making research." In addition to her work on preference and probability estimation, Sarah, Baruch Fischhoff, and the author co-developed what has come to be known as the psychometric paradigm for the study of risk perception. This research showed that the public has a broad conception of risk that incorporates consid…
Affect, risk perception, and the use of cigarettes and e-cigarettes: A population study of U.S. adults
In developing models explaining tobacco use behavior, or in creating public communication campaigns aimed at curbing tobacco use, it is useful to focus not only on the reason based predictors, such as perceptions of risks and benefits, but also on affective predictors. Educational efforts aimed at further smoking reductions should highlight and reinforce negative images and associations with cigarettes
Improving Intervention Decisions to Prevent Genocide: Less Muddle, More Structure
Decisions to intervene in a foreign country to prevent genocide and mass atrocities are among the most challenging and controversial choices facing national leaders. Drawing on techniques from decision analysis, psychology, and negotiation analysis, we propose a structured approach to these difficult choices that can provide policy makers with additional insight, consistency, efficiency, and defensibility. We propose the use of a values-based fra…
Much ado about nothing: The zero effect in life‐saving decisions
Zero is a special value in our daily lives, and previous research on how zero values affect decision making leaves many questions to be explored. The present research examined the zero effect in life‐saving decisions and found that people expressed strong preferences for options offering a possibility that no one will die , even when the expected loss was relatively high. The prominence effect (the notion that the option with possibly zero deaths…
Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters
Significance We cannot assume that the statistics of mass human crises will capture our attention or move us to take action, no matter how large the numbers. The data that we present show that the world was basically asleep as the body count in the Syrian war rose steadily into the hundreds of thousands. The iconic image of a young Syrian child, lying face-down on a beach, woke the world for a brief time, bringing much-needed attention to the war…
Public perceptions of expert disagreement: Bias and incompetence or a complex and random world
Expert disputes can present laypeople with several challenges including trying to understand why such disputes occur. In an online survey of the US public, we used a psychometric approach to elicit perceptions of expert disputes for 56 forecasts sampled from seven domains. People with low education, or with low self-reported topic knowledge, were most likely to attribute disputes to expert incompetence. People with higher self-reported knowledge …
Worldviews and trust of sources for health information on electronic nicotine delivery systems: Effects on risk perceptions and use
Public health agencies, the news media, and the tobacco/vapor industry have issued contradictory statements about the health effects of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). We investigated the levels of trust that consumers place in different information sources and how trust is associated with cultural worldviews, risk perceptions, ENDS use, and sociodemographic characteristics using a nationally representative sample of 6051 U.S. adults…
Regretting Ever Starting to Smoke: Results from a 2014 National Survey
Background : The majority of smokers regret ever starting to smoke, yet the vast majority continue to smoke despite the fact that smoking kills nearly 50% of lifetime users. This study examined the relationships between regret and smoker characteristics, quit history, risk perceptions, experiential thinking, and beliefs and intentions at time of smoking initiation. Methods : Data from the 2014 Tobacco Products and Risk Perceptions Survey, a natio…
Reassessing the importance of ‘lost pleasure’ associated with smoking cessation: Implications for social welfare and policy
The proportion of smokers who might be characterised as having a preference to continue smoking are greatly outnumbered by addicted, discontent and concerned smokers who want to quit and regret ever having started to smoke. These discontent smokers could have a substantial net welfare gain if new regulations helped them escape their concerns about the health effects from continuing smoking
Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government
Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the ‘science comprehension thesis’ (SCT), which identifies defects in the public's knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the ‘identity-protective cognition thesis’ (ICT), which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties …
The Perception of Risk
Decision Processes, Rationality and Adjustment to Natural Hazards * Cognitive Processes and Societal Risk Taking * Preference for Insuring Against Probable Small Losses: Insurance Implications * Accident Probabilities and Seat Belt Usage: A Psychological Perspective * How Safe Is Safe Enough? A Psychometric Study of Attitudes Toward Technological Risks and Benefits * Rating the Risks * Weighing the Risks: Which Risks are Acceptable? * Facts and F…
Argument-inconsistency in charity appeals: Statistical information about the scope of the problem decrease helping toward a single identified victim but not helping toward many non-identified victims …
Reader reaction to news of mass suffering: Assessing the influence of story form and emotional response
Drawing from psychological research, the study examines how story form influences reader reaction to news accounts of mass violence in Africa. An online survey with embedded experimental conditions was administered to a US Internet panel (n = 638). Results show that how the story is told affects reader emotional response and, indirectly, charitable giving. Story personification had the strongest influence, followed by stories with photographic im…
Fearing or fearsome Ebola communication? Keeping the public in the dark about possible post-21-day symptoms and infectiousness could backfire
US quarantine announcements do not include information that there is a moderate likelihood that Ebola-exposed people might exhibit symptoms, signalling infectiousness, beyond 21 days. As a result it is possible that if and when there is media coverage in the US of a delayed-symptom case, it might create citizen distrust in public health authorities and information and cause citizens to overestimate the risk of Ebola infection. In this article we …
Regulation of experienced and anticipated regret in daily decision making
Decisions were sampled from 108 participants during 8 days using a web-based diary method. Each day participants rated experienced regret for a decision made, as well as forecasted regret for a decision to be made. Participants also indicated to what extent they used different strategies to prevent or regulate regret. Participants regretted 30% of decisions and forecasted regret in 70% of future decisions, indicating both that regret is relativel…
How safe is safe enough? A psychometric study of attitudes towards technological risks and benefits
The construction of preference
One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past two decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed-not merely revealed-in the process of elicitation.This conception is derived in part from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation often give rise to systematically different responses.These "preference reversals" violate the principle of procedure invaria…
Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government
Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the ‘science comprehension thesis’ (SCT), which identifies defects in the public's knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the ‘identity-protective cognition thesis’ (ICT), which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties …
Affect and decision making: A “hot” topic
The seven papers in this special issue represent the breadth and complexity of approaches to the study of affect in judgment and decision processes. Four papers examine the role of arousal or specific emotions in decision making. The three other papers investigate the impacts of uncertainty, time course, and thinking about mood. We briefly describe four functions of affect in decision making (affect as information, as a spotlight, as a motivator,…
Affective motivations to help others: A two‐stage model of donation decisions
Emotional reactions are an important element in the motivation to help others. Our research examined the role of affective vs. deliberative information processing in the genesis and use of emotional reactions in decisions to provide financial aid to people in distress. In two studies, we investigated whether information processing mode influenced participants' donations, affective reactions, and the relationship between the two. Information proce…
Reader reaction to news of mass suffering: Assessing the influence of story form and emotional response
Drawing from psychological research, the study examines how story form influences reader reaction to news accounts of mass violence in Africa. An online survey with embedded experimental conditions was administered to a US Internet panel (n = 638). Results show that how the story is told affects reader emotional response and, indirectly, charitable giving. Story personification had the strongest influence, followed by stories with photographic im…
The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion
Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align…
Perceived ecological risks of global change 1A psychometric comparison of causes and consequences
The Social Amplification of Risk: Theoretical Foundations and Empirical Applications
The social experience of risk is not confined to the technical definition of risk, i.e., the product of probability and magnitude. What human beings perceive as threats to their well‐being is influenced by their values, attitudes, social influences, and cultural identity. This article introduces the framework of social amplification of risk, which integrates the technical assessment and the social experience of risk. This viewpoint proposes that …
Priming critical thinking: Simple interventions limit the influence of fake news about climate change on Facebook
Societal risks as seen by a Norwegian public
In two studies, questionnaires originally developed to study risk perception in the United States were administered to Norwegian students. Level of perceived risk in Norway was clearly below American scores for most hazards, but slightly above what has been found in a parallel Hungarian study. Norwegians were more concerned than both Hungarians and Americans about narcotics, but less than Americans about chemicals used in food and agriculture, an…
Lay views on uncertainty in environmental health risk assessment
It has been argued that presenting uncertainty in environmental health risk estimates may increase citizens' risk knowledge and trust in the honesty and competence of the institutions providing such estimates; on the other hand, careless communication could have undesirable results. Reported here is a study of how American laypeople think about uncertainty in risk assessment, and its implications for risk management, extending earlier experimenta…
Science, Values, and Risk
In the context of health, safety, and environmental decisions, the concept of risk involves value judgments that reflect much more than just the probability and consequences of the occurrence of an event. This article conceptualizes risk as a game, in which the rules must be socially negotiated within the context of a specific problem. This contextualist view of risk provides insight into why technical approaches to risk management often fail wit…
Risk perceptions, stigma, and health policy
Aging and decision‐making competence: An analysis of comprehension and consistency skills in older versus younger adults considering health‐plan options
Older adults need to maintain strong decision‐making capabilities as they age. However, we know little about how age‐related physical and psychological changes affect older adults' judgment and decision processes. This paper reports the results of research comparing older versus younger adults' performance on evaluation and choice tasks about health‐plan options. In particular, comprehension and consistency in judgments (across separate versus jo…
Assessment of risk taking behavior
Risk taking propensity has been hypothesized to be a general personality disposition and many devices have been proposed for use in its assessment. Several types of studies relevant to the validity of these measures are reviewed. These studies expose a considerable lack of agreement among what are s
The affect heuristic and the attractiveness of simple gambles
Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of evaluability and the affect heuristic. Evaluators of the “no‐loss” gamble lack a precise feeling for how good $9 is, hence give it little weight in their…
The Psychology of risk
The essay contrasts the scientific approach to analyzing and making decisions about risk with the ways that ordinary people perceive and respond to risk. It highlights the importance of trust as a determiner of perceived risk. It describes relatively new research on "risk as feelings" and the "Affect Heuristic". Finally reflects on the importance of this work for risk communication and concludes with some observations about human rationality and …
The role of affect in the WTA/WTP disparity
Four studies demonstrated robust within‐ and between‐subject differences in willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) and willingness‐to‐accept (WTA) measures of the value of lottery tickets. Buyers and sellers attended to different numerical cues and interpreted the same numbers differently when setting these two kinds of monetary values. Affective influences appeared to guide the valuation process. Buyers with stronger positive feelings about owning a ticket we…
An analysis-of-variance model for the assessment of configural cue utilization in clinical judgment
Information processing, situation specificity, and the generality of risk-taking behavior
An effort was made to construct two structurally similar risk-taking tasks in order to evaluate inter-task consistency of individual differences. Only the mode of response differed between tasks. In one task, subjects chose their preferred bet within each of a number of pairs of bets. In the other, they set selling prices for these same bets. A measure of the subject's preference for 'long shot' gambles was obtained from each response. Reliable i…
Convergent validation of risk taking measures
Perceptions of ecological risk from natural hazards
This study examines lay perceptions of ecological risk (risk to the health and productivity of natural environments) associated with natural hazards. Ratings of 30 specific characteristics influencing risk judgments and one general risk assessment were obtained from 68 survey respondents for five natural hazards, as well as 28 technologically based hazards. Analyses revealed that the set of natural hazards, on average, were perceived to pose a mo…
The Effect of Recipient Identifiability and Neediness on Children's Sharing Behavior
The identifiable victim effect refers to people's greater willingness to share resources with identified targets (about whom they have some identifying information) than to share with unidentified or statistical targets. Previous research examining adults' behavior suggests that identifiable targets arouse in the perceiver an intense emotional reaction that, in turn, increases sharing especially when the target is perceived as needy. In the curre…
Risk, Media and Stigma: Understanding Public Challenges to Modern Science and Technology
Convergent validation of risk taking measures
Assessment of risk taking behavior
Risk taking propensity has been hypothesized to be a general personality disposition and many devices have been proposed for use in its assessment. Several types of studies relevant to the validity of these measures are reviewed. These studies expose a considerable lack of agreement among what are s
Relative importance of probabilities and payoffs in risk taking.
Concerned with understanding how people make decisions about gambles when the relevant probabilities and payoffs are explicitly stated. It is proposed that decisions may be determined by a person's beliefs about the relative importance of probabilities and payoffs and by limitations on his ability t
An analysis-of-variance model for the assessment of configural cue utilization in clinical judgment
Comparison of Bayesian and regression approaches to the study of information processing in judgment
Reversals of preference between bids and choices in gambling decisions.
30 pages
Information processing, situation specificity, and the generality of risk-taking behavior
An effort was made to construct two structurally similar risk-taking tasks in order to evaluate inter-task consistency of individual differences. Only the mode of response differed between tasks. In one task, subjects chose their preferred bet within each of a number of pairs of bets. In the other, they set selling prices for these same bets. A measure of the subject's preference for 'long shot' gambles was obtained from each response. Reliable i…
Response-induced reversals of preference in gambling: An extended replication in Las Vegas.
Behavioral Decision Theory
This report provides a critical overview to work, its applicability and directions for further research. As might be expected with a burgeoning, multi-disciplinary field, it is difficult to keep track of all that is done and to draw the implications of research done in one discipline for research done in another. This report surveys the entire field asking, (1) what is known. (2) what good is it. and (3) what else must we learn. Particular attent…
Knowing with certainty: The appropriateness of extreme confidence.
How often are people wrong when they are certain that they know the answer to a question ? The studies reported here suggest that the answer is too often. For a variety of general-knowledge questions (e.g., absinthe is [a] a liqueur or [b] a precious stone), subjects first chose the most likely answer and then indicated their degree of certainty that the answer they had selected was, in fact, correct. Across several different question and respons…
How safe is safe enough? A psychometric study of attitudes towards technological risks and benefits
Rating the Risks
Newspaper Coverage of Causes of Death
Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk
Rating the Risks
Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important social, medical, and political situations as well. Individual chapters discuss the representativeness and availability heuristics, problems in judging covariation and control, overconfidence, multistage inference, social perception, medical diagnosis, risk perception, and methods for correct…
Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk
People respond to the hazards they perceive. If their perceptions are faulty, efforts at personal, public, and environmental protection are likely to be misdirected. For some hazards, such as motor vehicle accidents, extensive statistical data are readily available. For other familiar activities, such as the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, assessment of risk requires complex epidemiological and experimental studies. However, even when statist…
Why Study Risk Perception
Studies of risk perception examine the opinions people express when they are asked, in various ways, to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and societal decision making by (i) improving methods for eliciting opinions about risk, (ii) providing a basis for understanding and anticipating public responses to hazards, and (iii) improving the communication of risk information among l…
Informing and Educating the Public About Risk
The objective of informing and educating the public about risk issues seems easy to attain in principle, but, in practice, may be difficult to accomplish. This paper attempts to illustrate why this is so. To be effective, risk communicators must recognize and overcome a number of obstacles that have their roots in the limitations of scientific risk assessment and the idiosyncrasies of the human mind. Doing an adequate job of communicating means f…
Graphic Representation of Judgmental Information
Graphic displays of information are an important link in the design of user/machine interfaces. However, research on general effectiveness of graphic displays as information organizing formats for judgment and decision making has produced mixed results; graphic formats appear to facilitate judgmental performance in some contexts, but not in others. The two studies reported here examine the relative efficacy of a set of basic graphic display forma…
Contingent weighting in judgment and choice.
Preference can be inferred from direct choice between options or from a matching procedure in which the decision maker adjusts one option to match another. Studies of perferences between two-dimensional options (e.g., public policies, job applicants, benefit plans) show that the more prominent dimension looms larger in choice than in matching. Thus, choice is more lexicographic than matching. This finding is viewed as an instance of a general pri…
The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework
One of the most perplexing problems in risk analysis is why some relatively minor risks or risk events, as assessed by technical experts, often elicit strong public concerns and result in substantial impacts upon society and economy. This article sets forth a conceptual framework that seeks to link systematically the technical assessment of risk with psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives of risk perception and risk‐related behavi…
Societal risks as seen by a Norwegian public
In two studies, questionnaires originally developed to study risk perception in the United States were administered to Norwegian students. Level of perceived risk in Norway was clearly below American scores for most hazards, but slightly above what has been found in a parallel Hungarian study. Norwegians were more concerned than both Hungarians and Americans about narcotics, but less than Americans about chemicals used in food and agriculture, an…
Trust as a Determinant of Opposition to a High‐Level Radioactive Waste Repository: Analysis of a Structural Model
Residents in the State of Nevada hold strong opinions about the federal government's proposal to site the nation's first high‐level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The model developed in this study is designed to examine the relationship between public perceptions of risk, trust in risk management, and potential economic impacts of the current repository program using a confirmatory multivariate method known as covariance structur…
Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks
Human beings have always been intuitive toxicologists, relying on their senses of sight, taste, and smell to detect harmful or unsafe food, water, and air. As we have come to recognize that our senses are not adequate to assess the dangers inherent in exposure to a chemical substance, we have created the sciences of toxicology and risk assessment to perform this function. Yet despite this great effort to overcome the limitations of intuitive toxi…
Psychology (93 works) · Social Psychology (60 works) · Risk Perception and Management (48 works) · Computer Science (42 works) · Perception (38 works) · Political science (36 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (35 works) · Medicine (32 works) · Risk perception (29 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (27 works)