Food Insight has focused recent articles on risk assessment, management, and communication as they relate to food. This article highlights how humans make decisions and references two experts who have "written the book" on the science of risk and its impact on our daily lives. David Ropeik, director of risk communication at Harvard University, and George Gray, acting director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and lecturer on risk analysis, are co-authors of RISK: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You. (Houghton Mifflin).
Consumers today may be more overwhelmed than ever before with information about risks to their livelihood—from terrorism, bioterrorism, and SARS, to food contamination and excess food consumption. It could be said that Americans may be more afraid now than they have ever been.
According to David Ropeik, decision-making about risk is decision making about survival, a fundamental genetic imperative. Organisms that could successfully recognize and respond to danger moved up the evolutionary ladder. Those that could not moved into the food chain. Our emphasis on caution is ancient, and certainly pre-dates the relatively recent development of the human cortex and our ability to make risk management decisions solely on the basis of the facts. We learned how to fear long before we developed our current ability to think and reason. Rational though we may presume ourselves to be, caution is rooted in the emotion centers of our brains.
Ropeik says, "The science of risk perception has confirmed that we respond to risk in emotional, intuitive, affective ways. Risk perception studies have also found patterns in the way that humans respond to risks. We tend to fear similar things for similar reasons. A few of the factors by which we judge risks, factors which, far more than a rational analysis of the facts, help us subconsciously 'decide' what to be afraid of and how afraid to be."
We tend to be more afraid of new risks that are imposed on us without our control of the decision-making process, risks that arise from manmade processes, and from people or institutions that we don't trust. Many times there is little connection between the perceived degree of risk and the actual danger. Unfortunately, frightened people can make dangerous choices in their desire to feel safer. The challenge, according to Ropeik, is to understand and respect the legitimacy of our ancient affective responses to risk, but to do so in a way that is flexible enough to make room for the facts as well as our fears.
In their book, RISK, Ropeik and Gray provide a "risk meter" that gives consumers a sense of how big or small each risk might be, for the average American, although they note that the risk of an individual almost certainly varies from that average. In comparing these risks, one finds that food-borne illness is ranked as a high risk because of the strong likelihood of being exposed to a pathogen that can make one ill, whereas, food irradiation, ranked as a very low risk, can be part of the solution to pathogens and food-borne illness.
Other risks that the authors address in their book include air bags, the use of cellular telephones while driving, biological weapons, environmental hormones, solar radiation, mammography, and obesity. Surprisingly, the health risks from various hazardous agents and procedures, such as pesticides, water pollution, hazardous waste, mammograms, and nuclear radiation are lower than many people believe, whereas the health risks from alcohol, air pollution, solar radiation, accidents in the home, and medical errors are much higher than many people realize.
The goal of discussing risk management and decision-making is to help inform consumers about individual risks so they can make wiser choices for themselves about what, if anything, they want to do about those risks. The hope is that consumers will learn to put each risk into perspective against the range of risks about which the public is concerned.
