Baruch Fischhoff - Böcker

We find risks everywhere--from genetically modified crops, medical malpractice, and stem-cell therapy to intimacy, online predators, identity theft, inflation, and robbery. They arise from our own acts and they are imposed on us. In this Very Short Introduction, Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany draw on the sciences and humanities to explore and explain the many kinds of risk. Using simple conceptual frameworks from decision theory and behavioural research, they examine the science and practice of creating measures of risk, showing how scientists address risks by combining historical records, scientific theories, probability, and expert judgment.Risk: A Very Short Introduction describes what has been learned by cognitive scientists about how people deal with risks, applying these lessons to diverse examples, and demonstrating how understanding risk can aid choices in everyday life and public policies for health, safety, environment, finance, and many other topics. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

People often face complex, novel, fateful, and wildly unbounded problems throughout their lives. In their work, disciplinary scientists hone their wisdom on the complexities of necessarily bounded problems. Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems offers a vision for schools of management science to bring these worlds together, by doing more of what they do best, co-creating solutions in ways that serve the world and the disciplines. Disciplinary wisdom is illustrated with studies eliciting beliefs and preferences. Collaboration is illustrated with a wide variety of applications, including climate, energy, health, security, technology, and natural disasters. The proposed strategy, for bonding bounded disciplines, offers a realistic path forward, at a time when the value of academia is sometimes questioned by the public, students, and even some of its members.

A popular myth emerged in the late 1990s: in 1900, wars killed one civilian for every eight soldiers, while contemporary wars were killing eight civilians for every one soldier. The neat reversal of numbers was memorable, and academic publications and UN documents regularly cited it. The more it was cited, the more trusted it became. In fact, however, subsequent research found no empirical evidence for the idea that the ratio of civilians to soldiers killed in war has changed dramatically. But while the ratios may not have changed, the political significance of civilian casualties has risen tremendously.Over the past century, civilians in war have gone from having no particular rights to having legal protections and rights that begin to rival those accorded to states. The concern for civilians in conflict has become so strong that governments occasionally undertake humanitarian interventions, at great risk and substantial cost, to protect strangers in distant lands. I n the early 1990s, the UN Security Council authorized military interventions to help feed and protect civilians in the Kurdish area of Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. And in May 2011 , Barack Obama 's National Security Advisor explained the United States' decision to support NATO's military intervention in these terms "When the president made this decision, there was an immediate threat to 700,000 Libyan civilians in the town of Benghazi. We've had a success here in terms of being able to protect those civilians."Counting Civilian Casualties aims to promote open scientific dialogue by high lighting the strengths and weaknesses of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation techniques in an understandable format. Its thirteen chapters, each authoritative but accessible to nonspecialists, explore a variety of approaches, from direct recording to statistical estimation and sampling, to collecting data on civilian deaths caused by conflict. The contributors also discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages, and analyze how figures are used (and misused) by governments, rebels, human rights advocates, war crimes tribunals, and others. In addition to providing analysts with a broad range of tools to produce accurate data, this will be an in valuable resource for policymakers, military officials, jou rnalists, human rights activists, courts, and ordinary people who want to be more informed--and skeptical--consumers of casualty counts.

A popular myth emerged in the late 1990s: in 1900, wars killed one civilian for every eight soldiers, while contemporary wars were killing eight civilians for every one soldier. The neat reversal of numbers was memorable, and academic publications and UN documents regularly cited it. The more it was cited, the more trusted it became. In fact, however, subsequent research found no empirical evidence for the idea that the ratio of civilians to soldiers killed in war has changed dramatically. But while the ratios may not have changed, the political significance of civilian casualties has risen tremendously.Over the past century, civilians in war have gone from having no particular rights to having legal protections and rights that begin to rival those accorded to states. The concern for civilians in conflict has become so strong that governments occasionally undertake humanitarian interventions, at great risk and substantial cost, to protect strangers in distant lands. I n the early 1990s, the UN Security Council authorized military interventions to help feed and protect civilians in the Kurdish area of Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. And in May 2011 , Barack Obama 's National Security Advisor explained the United States' decision to support NATO's military intervention in these terms "When the president made this decision, there was an immediate threat to 700,000 Libyan civilians in the town of Benghazi. We've had a success here in terms of being able to protect those civilians."Counting Civilian Casualties aims to promote open scientific dialogue by high lighting the strengths and weaknesses of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation techniques in an understandable format. Its thirteen chapters, each authoritative but accessible to nonspecialists, explore a variety of approaches, from direct recording to statistical estimation and sampling, to collecting data on civilian deaths caused by conflict. The contributors also discuss their respective advantages and disadvantages, and analyze how figures are used (and misused) by governments, rebels, human rights advocates, war crimes tribunals, and others. In addition to providing analysts with a broad range of tools to produce accurate data, this will be an in valuable resource for policymakers, military officials, jou rnalists, human rights activists, courts, and ordinary people who want to be more informed--and skeptical--consumers of casualty counts.

Interest in the role that decision making plays in adolescents' involvement in high-risk behaviors led the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to request the Board on Children, Youth, and Families to convene a workshop on adolescent decision making. The Board on Children, Youth, and Families is a joint activity of the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine. A workshop was held on January 6-7, 1998, to examine what is known about adolescents' decision-making skills and the implications of that knowledge for programs to further their healthy development.

Adolescents obviously do not always act in ways that serve their own best interests, even as defined by them. Sometimes their perception of their own risks, even of survival to adulthood, is larger than the reality; in other cases, they underestimate the risks of particular actions or behaviors. It is possible, indeed likely, that some adolescents engage in risky behaviors because of a perception of invulnerability-the current conventional wisdom of adults' views of adolescent behavior. Others, however, take risks because they feel vulnerable to a point approaching hopelessness. In either case, these perceptions can prompt adolescents to make poor decisions that can put them at risk and leave them vulnerable to physical or psychological harm that may have a negative impact on their long-term health and viability. A small planning group was formed to develop a workshop on reconceptualizing adolescent risk and vulnerability. With funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Workshop on Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability: Setting Priorities took place on March 13, 2001, in Washington, DC.The workshop's goal was to put into perspective the total burden of vulnerability that adolescents face, taking advantage of the growing societal concern for adolescents, the need to set priorities for meeting adolescents' needs, and the opportunity to apply decision-making perspectives to this critical area. This report summarizes the workshop.

the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Environmental Health Science, Research, and Medicine held a regional workshop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on March 13, 2003. This workshop was a continued outgrowth from the Roundtable's first workshop when its members realized that the challenges facing those in the field of environmental health could not be addressed without a new definition of environmental health--one that incorporates the natural, built, and social environment. The Roundtable realized that the industrial legacy is not unique to Pittsburgh. Other cities around the world have seen their industries disappear, and it is only a matter of time before some of the Pittsburghs of today, such as Wuhan, China, (a sister city) will need to address similar problems. One goal for this IOM Environmental Health Roundtable Workshop is to extract lessons from Pittsburgh's experience in addressing the post-industrial challenge, distilling lessons that might be useful elsewhere.

The U.S. intelligence community (IC) is a complex human enterprise whose success depends on how well the people in it perform their work. Although often aided by sophisticated technologies, these people ultimately rely on their own intellect to identify, synthesize, and communicate the information on which the nation's security depends. The IC's success depends on having trained, motivated, and thoughtful people working within organizations able to understand, value, and coordinate their capabilities. Intelligence Analysis provides up-to-date scientific guidance for the intelligence community (IC) so that it might improve individual and group judgments, communication between analysts, and analytic processes. The papers in this volume provide the detailed evidentiary base for the National Research Council's report, Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances from the Behavioral and Social Sciences. The opening chapter focuses on the structure, missions, operations, and characteristics of the IC while the following 12 papers provide in-depth reviews of key topics in three areas: analytic methods, analysts, and organizations.Informed by the IC's unique missions and constraints, each paper documents the latest advancements of the relevant science and is a stand-alone resource for the IC's leadership and workforce. The collection allows readers to focus on one area of interest (analytic methods, analysts, or organizations) or even one particular aspect of a category. As a collection, the volume provides a broad perspective of the issues involved in making difficult decisions, which is at the heart of intelligence analysis.

Attaining meaningful cybersecurity presents a broad societal challenge. Its complexity and the range of systems and sectors in which it is needed mean that successful approaches are necessarily multifaceted. Moreover, cybersecurity is a dynamic process involving human attackers who continue to adapt. Despite considerable investments of resources and intellect, cybersecurity continues to poses serious challenges to national security, business performance, and public well-being. Modern developments in computation, storage and connectivity to the Internet have brought into even sharper focus the need for a better understanding of the overall security of the systems we depend on. Foundational Cybersecurity Research focuses on foundational research strategies for organizing people, technologies, and governance. These strategies seek to ensure the sustained support needed to create an agile, effective research community, with collaborative links across disciplines and between research and practice.This report is aimed primarily at the cybersecurity research community, but takes a broad view that efforts to improve foundational cybersecurity research will need to include many disciplines working together to achieve common goals.

People today must make decisions about many health, safety, and environmental risks. Nuclear power, HIV/AIDS, radon, vaccines, climate change, and emerging infectious diseases are just some issues that may face them in the news media, ballot box, or doctor's office. In order to make sound choices they need to get good information. Because their time is limited, that information has to be carefully selected and clearly presented. This book provides a systematic approach for risk communicators and technical experts, hoping to serve the public by providing information about risks. The procedure uses approaches from risk and decision analysis to identify the most relevant information; it uses approaches from psychology and communication theory to ensure that it is understood. This book is written in nontechnical terms, designed to make the approach feasible for anyone willing to try it. It is illustrated with successful communications, on a variety of topics.

The common denominator of a growing number of hard decisions facing modern societies is the need to determine 'how safe is safe enough?'. The authors begin by defining acceptable-risk problems and analysing why they are so difficult to resolve, considering such issues as uncertainty about their definition, lack of relevant facts, conflicting and conflicted social values, and disagreements between technical experts and the lay public. Drawing on their own experience in risk management as well as the relevant research literatures, they identify and characterise the variety of methods that have been proposed for resolving acceptable-risk problems. They subject these methods to a rigorous critique in terms of philosophical presuppositions, technical feasibility, political acceptability, and validity of underlying assumptions about human behaviour. The authors construct a framework for deciding how to make decisions about risks, and offer recommendations for research, public policy, and practice. Although their principal focus is on technological hazards, their analysis applies to many risks, such as those from new medical treatments or innovative programmes in criminal justice. The necessity of balancing risks and benefits impinges on most people's lives, and a broad audience will find this book thought-provoking and useful.

People today must make decisions about many health, safety, and environmental risks. Nuclear power, HIV/AIDS, radon, vaccines, climate change, and emerging infectious diseases are just some issues that may face them in the news media, ballot box, or doctor's office. In order to make sound choices they need to get good information. Because their time is limited, that information has to be carefully selected and clearly presented. This book provides a systematic approach for risk communicators and technical experts, hoping to serve the public by providing information about risks. The procedure uses approaches from risk and decision analysis to identify the most relevant information; it uses approaches from psychology and communication theory to ensure that it is understood. This book is written in nontechnical terms, designed to make the approach feasible for anyone willing to try it. It is illustrated with successful communications, on a variety of topics.

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behaviour, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behaviour. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

The articles collected here are foundational contributions to integrating behavioural research and risk analysis. They include seminal articles on three essential challenges. One is ensuring effective two-way communication between technical experts and the lay public, so that risk analyses address lay concerns and provide useful information to people who need it. The second is ensuring that analyses make realistic assumptions about human behaviours that affect risk levels (e.g., how people use pharmaceuticals, operate equipment, or respond to evacuation orders). The third is ensuring that analyses recognize the strengths and weaknesses of experts’ understanding, using experts’ knowledge, while understanding its limits. The articles include overviews of the science, essays on the role of risk in society, and applications to domains as diverse as environment, medicine, terrorism, human rights, chemicals, pandemics, vaccination, HIV/AIDS, xenotransplantation, sexual assault, energy, and climate change. The work involves collaborations among scientists from many disciplines, working with practitioners to produce and convey the knowledge needed help people make better risk decisions.

The articles collected here are foundational contributions to integrating behavioural research and risk analysis. They include seminal articles on three essential challenges. One is ensuring effective two-way communication between technical experts and the lay public, so that risk analyses address lay concerns and provide useful information to people who need it. The second is ensuring that analyses make realistic assumptions about human behaviours that affect risk levels (e.g., how people use pharmaceuticals, operate equipment, or respond to evacuation orders). The third is ensuring that analyses recognize the strengths and weaknesses of experts’ understanding, using experts’ knowledge, while understanding its limits. The articles include overviews of the science, essays on the role of risk in society, and applications to domains as diverse as environment, medicine, terrorism, human rights, chemicals, pandemics, vaccination, HIV/AIDS, xenotransplantation, sexual assault, energy, and climate change. The work involves collaborations among scientists from many disciplines, working with practitioners to produce and convey the knowledge needed help people make better risk decisions.

Behavioral decision research offers a distinctive approach to understanding and improving decision making. It combines theory and method from multiple disciples (psychology, economics, statistics, decision theory, management science). It employs both empirical methods, to study how decisions are actually made, and analytical ones, to study how decisions should be made and how consequential imperfections are. This book brings together key publications, selected to represent the major topics and approaches used in the field. Put in one place, with integrating commentary, it shows the common elements in a research program that represents the scope of the field, while offering depth in each. Together, they provide a vision for what has become a burgeoning field.

Behavioral decision research offers a distinctive approach to understanding and improving decision making. It combines theory and method from multiple disciples (psychology, economics, statistics, decision theory, management science). It employs both empirical methods, to study how decisions are actually made, and analytical ones, to study how decisions should be made and how consequential imperfections are. This book brings together key publications, selected to represent the major topics and approaches used in the field. Put in one place, with integrating commentary, it shows the common elements in a research program that represents the scope of the field, while offering depth in each. Together, they provide a vision for what has become a burgeoning field.