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Publications
Publications (118)
In the western United States and elsewhere, the need to change society’s relationship with wildfire is well-recognized. Suppressing fewer fires in fire-prone systems is promoted to escape existing feedback loops that lead to ever worsening conditions and increasing risks to responders and communities. Our primary focus is how to catalyze changes in...
The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture faces a future of increasing complexity and risk, pressing financial issues, and the inescapable possibility of loss of human life. These issues are perhaps most acute for wildland fire management, the highest risk activity in which the Forest Service engages. Risk management (RM) has long been put...
Reviews the book, Constructive Controversy: Theory, Research, Practice by David W. Johnson (see record 2015-26752-000 ). At a time when psychology was barely a discipline and mostly an emerging subset of philosophy, a debate raged about what is now almost a forgotten topic: the proper way to form a belief. The purpose of this volume is to introduce...
Reviews the book, Anatomy of the Mind: Exploring Psychological Mechanisms and Processes with the Clarion Cognitive Architecture by Ron Sun (see record 2016-23441-000 ). This book is about a form of knowledge representation that is relatively new to psychology, but that relies upon centuries-old concepts that have come to form the basis of computer...
Reviews the book, Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models by David Danks (see record 2014-41066-000 ). It goes almost without saying that the human mind is complex. So complex, in fact, that the only way we can approach understanding the mind is through models. This book contains a primer on graphic models, and we do not ne...
Reviews the book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (see record 2013-37402-000 ). As authors Mullainathan and Shafir note, the reader is witnessing a “science in the making” (p. 15). They use a concept labeled scarcity as the core of a framework on which to construct a larger vision of how human...
Information technology is experiencing a particularly significant growth and impact on society, but it is nevertheless inspired by and built upon convergences with other technologies. This chapter focuses on the interdependencies between information technology and nanotechnology, especially in electronics, visualization and simulation of data, and...
The practical embedding of many convergent communications, information, and biological technologies in the everyday lives of people all over the globe is leading to fundamental changes in human cognition capabilities, perceptions of “wellness”, and norms of societal interactions. This chapter applies the term “Cognitive Society” broadly to these em...
“Baby boomers” comprise a significant portion of the U.S. population, and the leading-edge of this group will begin retirement within a decade. These individuals, in the age range of 45 to 55 years, are currently at or near the peak of their income-earning ability and are in a stage of life where retirement planning to meet future income needs is e...
Traditional theories of finance posit that the pricing of securities in financial markets should be done according to the quality of their underlying technical fundamentals. However, research on financial markets has tended to indicate that factors other than technical fundamentals are often used by market participants to gauge the value of securit...
Large fires pose risks to a number of important values, including the ecology,
property and the lives of incident responders. A relatively unstudied aspect of
fire management is the risks to which incident managers are exposed due to
organizational and sociopolitical factors that put them in a position of, for
example, potential liability or degrad...
Reviews the book, Psychology of Risk-Taking edited by Jean-Pascal Assailly (see record 2013-14199-000 ). This book offers an opportunity for readers to contemplate the broad spectrum of considerations that accompany risk in all of its complexities and as a basis for explaining as opposed to describing behavior. An edited volume of nine chapters, th...
Los grandes incendios suponen riesgos para una serie de importantes valores, incluyendo la
ecología, la propiedad y la vida de quienes responden a los incidentes. Un aspecto
relativamente poco estudiado del manejo del fuego son los riesgos a los que están expuestos
los gerentes de incidentes debido a factores organizacionales y sociopolíticos que l...
Western science has developed powerful techniques for modeling and aiding important social decisions. One such technique is risk assessment. The relationship of risk to cultural context is apparent in a number of its facets, including its dependence on values and the (potential) clash between probabilistic versus deterministic views about states of...
This bibliography was produced as part of an Office of Naval Research project titled “Cultural Influences on Intertemporal Reasoning.” The project approach is intended to provide a platform of knowledge based on existing research that will improve our ability to field useful and meaningful decision support in cultures where the capacity for such su...
All known cultures deal with time. How they understand time is a defining cultural characteristic, especially in contrast to the Western cultural understanding. This paper uses the term intertemporal reasoning to refer to the psychosocial and cultural processes engaged when people either integrate past experiences and events or project forward to t...
The Pashtun are an ethnic group that straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and are the largest group in Afghanistan. Historically, when Afghanistan has been united, it has been under Pashtun rule. Pashtun rulers of Afghanistan have come from the Durrani Pashtun, who are a western Pashtun group. The Durrani learned governance from serving under...
The emergence of large fires of long duration (also known as siege fires) with their inherently high costs has raised numerous questions about the opportunities for cost containment. Cost reviews from the 2003 fire season have revealed how additional knowledge created through research can lead to better management and lower costs of fire incidents.
With retirement comes significant challenges in making sound decisions concerning wealth management. Although people routinely make decisions throughout their lives, decisions made in retirement are critical because there is little time to recover from errors in judgment. This chapter draws from techniques and methods in psychology and the decision...
Fire has been a significant force in the evolution of ecosystems since the beginning of life on earth, and has occupied a powerful role in shaping the physical and natural world as we experience it today. Historically, human societies have both feared fire as a natural, destructive force, and used fire to social and technological ends. Indeed, the...
A methodology for incident decomposition and reconstruction is developed based on the concept of an "event-frame model." The event-frame model characterizes a fire incident in terms of (a) environmental events that pertain to the fire and the fire context (e.g., fire behavior, weather, fuels) and (b) management events that represent responses to th...
Elements of economic theory are examined to understand the Euro-American cultural assumptions encoded in their formulation. The research develops a framework by which to understand how Euro-American beliefs relevant to economic theory might be understood or misunderstood in other cultures, with the goal of facilitating inter-cultural dialog. The fr...
Reviews the film, Incendies by Denis Villeneuve (2010). This film takes place in the period of the Lebanese civil war between Muslims and Christian nationalists, circa 1975 to 1991. Viewers are fed pieces of the past and the present without a clear temporal sequence; chunks come together in part by logic, in part by imagery and imagination, and in...
Human habitation has made significant intrusions into forested lands, particularly in the western United States, but in other parts of the world as well. At the interface of the natural and built environments, known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), communities and property owners are exposed to the potential ravages of wildland fire. Efforts...
Reviews the book, Psyche’s veil: Psychotherapy, fractals and complexity by Terry Marks-Tarlow (see record 2008-03198-000 ). No single book has yet emerged as a central resource for readers interested in complexity theory. Perhaps this is an indication of the size of the enterprise, in which case the kind of distillation that produces a point-of-ent...
Prior to the existence of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Forest Service district rangers had considerable latitude to make resource management decisions and execute management plans with relatively little encumbrance by documentation and process requirements. Today there appears to be differences not only in the district ranger popul...
This paper presents results of a second international web-based survey designed to gather data about how individuals approach thinking about their futures and making decisions regarding their futures. Five hundred and five respondents from 38 countries participated in the survey. Similar to the first survey, the sample has gender, age and religious...
This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective respons...
One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...
A common mental response to risk is worry. Though generally associated with fear and anxiety, worry is primarily a cognitive activity that can, under some circumstances, be beneficial for developing coping strategies to deal with stressful events. The present study reports an assessment of worry done both before and after the reactor accident at Th...
Reviews To your health: How to understand what research tells us about risk (see record 2005-04565-000 ). The reviewer notes that for the scientist, policy maker, practitioner, or user of risk-related research, the task of staying current has become increasingly difficult. This is no less the case for health risk assessment and is perhaps more so b...
Risk is perceived and acted on in 2 fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described with "the affect heuristic." The authors trace the development of...
The emergence of large fires of long duration (also known as siege fires) with their inherently high costs has raised numerous questions about the opportunities for cost containment. Cost reviews from the 2003 fire season have revealed how additional knowledge created through research can lead to better management and lower costs of fire incidents.
Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamental ways in which human beings comprehend risk. The "analytic system" uses algorithms and normative rules, such as probability calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It is relatively slow, effortful, and requires conscious control. The "experiential s...
Although the vast majority of wildland fires are suppressed effectively in initial or extended attack, on relatively rare occasions fires become exceptionally large, resulting in unusual resource damages, significant financial impacts and/or loss of life. Understanding how to better manage large fires and to improve methods for controlling their co...
Humankind has begun to reap one of the most valued harvests of its scientific and technological pursuits: a significant increase in human longevity. We now live longer than ever before, due in large part to advances in medicine and health care that provide those who have the opportunity to afford them a lifespan that for many approaches or exceeds...
As the world approached the change of the millennium, intense public interest became focused on the possible consequences of potential failures in computer technologies. These potential failures arose because the mechanism for storing and calculating dates failed to differentiate adequately between the turn of the previous century (1900) and the tu...
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 healt...
This paper describes two fundamental modes of thinking. The experiential mode, is intuitive, automatic, natural, and based upon images to which positive and negative affective feelings have been attached through learning and experience. The other mode is analytic, deliberative, and reason based. I describe recent empirical research illuminating “th...
As society enters the 21st century, NASA and its international partners are planning to conduct numerous new and exciting missions within the solar system. Many of these missions are motivated by scientific questions in Astrobiology that focus on the origin and evolution of life in the universe. These explorations will involve the search for eviden...
Based on a survey of preretirees, I discuss the large disparity between the returns clients anticipate receiving on their investments and the returns that advisors anticipate. I also note that there is a large difference between the cost of health care and what clients generally believe they will spend on health care in retirement.
This article describes studies designed to inform policy makers and practitioners about factors influencing the validity of violence risk assessment and risk communication. Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists were shown case summaries of patients hospitalized with mental disorder and were asked to judge the likelihood that the patient would ha...
Planning for extraterrestrial sample returns--whether from Mars or other solar system bodies--must be done in a way that integrates planetary protection concerns with the usual mission technical and scientific considerations. Understanding and addressing legitimate societal concerns about the possible risks of sample return will be a critical part...
As space scientists and engineers plan new missions to Mars and other plants in our solar system, they will face critical questions about the potential for biological contamination of planetary surfaces. In a society that places ever-increasing importance on the role of public involvement in science and technology policy, questions about risks of b...
The concept of exposure is central to chemical risk assessment and plays an important role in communicating to the public about the potential health risks of chemicals. Research on chemical risk perception has found some indication that the model lay people use to judge chemical exposure differs from that of toxicologists, thereby leading to differ...
Financial advisors are continually faced with the challenge of evaluating the quality of financial investments. Previous research has indicated that even among researchers of financial markets, diverse views exist about the meaning of risk and its relationship to returns. A survey study of 265 financial advisors and planners was undertaken to devel...
Forecasters often need to estimate uncertain quantities, but with limited time and resources. Decomposition is a method for dealing with such problems by breaking down (decomposing) the estimation task down into a set of components that can be more readily estimated, and then combining the component estimates to produce a target estimate. Estimator...
This report describes a methodology to proactively and methodically assess future potential environmental legislative, regulatory, and judicial events. This is an important endeavor because new, revised, and reauthorized legislation, proposed and final regulations, and outcomes of judicial proceedings have the potential to impose new actions, direc...
Traditionally, the principal focus of research on judgment and decision making has been largely cognitive and rationalistic. More recently, however, decision-making researchers have acknowledged the role of noncognitive factors and have offered limited accounts of how affect and imagery influence processes associated with judgment and choice. The p...
Very often the risks of driving are expressed in terms of the total number of deaths that occur yearly as the result of motor vehicle operation. Yet, despite the thousands of people who die each year in automobiles in the U.S. alone, driving behavior seems relatively unresponsive to statistical portrayals of risk. Research in risk perception sugges...
Public reaction to chemical technologies has included a perception that chemical exposure is a contributor to human health problems. Though these perceptions sometimes correspond with technical assessments of chemical risks, at other times they do not. This paper presents a descriptive model of the relationship between perception of one's health st...
Potential health risks from exposure to power-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) have become an issue of significant public concern. This study evaluates a brochure designed to communicate EMF health risks from a scientific perspective. The study utilized a pretest-posttest design in which respondents judged various sources of EMF (and other) h...
Transportation of hazardous materials, and particularly radioactive wastes, on public highways has become an important risk management issue. The unfavorability of public attitudes regarding hazardous and nuclear wastes signals the potential for strong public opposition to programs for transporting these materials. This paper presents the results o...
We hypothesized that multiplicative decomposition would improve accuracy only in certain conditions. In particular, we expected it to help for problems involving extreme and uncertain values. We first reanalyzed results from two published studies. Decomposition improved accuracy for nine problems that involved extreme and uncertain values, but for...
Over the past two decades one of the most dramatic phenomenon on the social scene has been the rise of broad, public involvement in decision making about complex technologies, including those that protect society from natural hazards such as floods. Spawned by national legislation that required proponents to assess the environmental impacts of thei...
Given the tremendous importance of time as an organizing principle for behavior, it is surprising how little attention it has been given as a factor in decision making and choice. Indeed, by definition, to decide means to arrive at a conclusion or make up one’s mind. Thus, decision making is rooted in the concept of time, and time is one of the pri...
Virtually all organizations in the utility industry rely on some form of computerized decision support to assist in the management of operations and maintenance. As decision support needs evolve, new technologies are introduced and old technologies are updated, when possible and cost effective. Unfortunately, new designs are often superior to old o...
An important part of decision making in many contexts is the estimation of numerical values for uncertain quantities, such as the projected costs of a development project or the number of people who use illegal drugs. In previous research, estimation accuracy for such quantities was found to be improved by algorithmic decomposition. The present stu...
One of the most difficult aspects of knowledge engineering for knowledge-based systems development is the elicitation of uncertainty from experts. Though large numbers of articles and texts have been written on the topic of representing uncertainty in expert systems, much less advice and guidance is available on how to structure the uncertainty eli...
This report describes the Communications Alarm Processor (CAP), a prototype expert system developed for the Bonneville Power Administration by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system is designed to receive and diagnose alarms from Bonneville's Microwave Communications System (MCS). The prototype encompasses one of seven branches of the communicat...
Thirty subsystems constituting a functioning motor vehicle, including brake, steering, suspension, engine, electrical, and fuel systems, were evaluated by individuals on a set of risk characteristic scales. These included overall vehicle riskiness, manufacturer's anticipatory knowledge of system defects during vehicle design, likelihood of severe c...
A critical decision method is described for modeling tasks in
naturalistic environments characterized by high time pressure, high
information content, and changing conditions. The method is a variant of
a J.C. Flanagan's (1954) critical incident technique extended to include
probes that elicit aspects of expertise such as the basis for making
perce...
A Critical Decision Method (CDM) has been developed for knowledge elicitation. The CDM, an extension of the critical incident technique, includes protocol analysis and memory recall tasks to study cognitive performance. A set of probes is employed to trace the development of situation assessment during critical incidents, and to determine the decis...
People's expectations for success can affect their use of information sources in a variety of ways, including their willingness to search at all, their satisfaction (or frustration) with the success that they encounter, and their confidence in the completeness of their search for specific items. An earlier study using a pencil-and-paper format foun...
Descriptions of safety engineering defects of the kind that compel automobile manufacturers to initiate a recall campaign were evaluated by individuals on a set of risk characteristic scales that included overall vehicle riskiness, manufacturer's ability to anticipate the defect, importance for vehicle operation, severity of consequences and likeli...
The value of a database is bounded by the accessibility of the information it contains. The present studies provide a multifaceted approach to designing and evaluating entry-level menus using, as a case in point, the Statistical Abstract of the United States. They consider different ways of organizing material into categories, developing labels for...
Three methods for making a consumer product safety decision were evaluated on scales relating to their perceived acceptability, logical soundness, completeness, and sensitivity to moral and ethical concerns. Two of the methods were formalized techniques: cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis. The third method involved abiding by standard industry...
Searching for information in a database typically involves a series of decisions, as one chooses among alternative places to look. Behavioral decision theory investigates the cognitive processes involved in decision-making, with a particular focus on those that may impede effective performance. Applying this perspective to information search provid...
The perception of the potential risk arising from human exposure to 50/60 Hz electric and magnetic fields was studied with a quasi-random sample of 116 well-educated, opinion leaders using the risk perception framework previously developed by Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein. These individuals rated exposure to fields from transmission lines and...
The perception of the potential risk arising from human exposure to 50/60 Hz electric and magnetic fields was studied with a quasi-random sample of 116 well-educated, opinion leaders using the risk perception framework previously developed by Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein. These individuals rated exposure to fields from transmission lines and...
Swedish and U.S. subjects judged their own driving skills and safety in relation to other drivers. As in earlier studies, most subjects showed an optimism bias: a tendency to judge oneself as safer and more skillful than the average driver, with a smaller risk of getting involved and injured in an accident. Different measures of the optimism effect...
Four groups of college students were each given two base-rate problems. Three of the groups were given an aid with the first problem: (a) An instruction to list factors or aspects that were relevant to solving the problem, (b) a fill-in-the-blank algorithm that provided the correct solution, or (c) a seven-page tutorial that explained base-rate pro...
In 1973, the Ford Motor Company introduced to the American automobile-buying public the Ford Pinto. Weighing 2000 pounds and costing only $2,000, it was shepherded from the drawing board to production in only 34 weeks, somewhat of a record in the automobile business where two-year lead times are not unheard of even under moderately severe time pres...
Coincidence-type stories, a popular social pastime, were studied in terms of factors affecting their surprisingness. Subjects were presented with stories varying in tense (past vs. future) and scope of detail (union vs. intersection). The normal form of coincidence stories, past-intersection, was found to be judged less surprising than stories of i...
Four formally equivalent response modes were used to elicit laypeople's beliefs regarding the lethality of various potential causes of death. Results showed that respondents had an articulated core of beliefs about lethality that yielded similar orderings of maladies by lethality regardless of the response mode used. Moreover, this subjective order...