A Boomerang Effect of an All-Clear Message on Radiation Risk

Boomerang effects are changes caused by persuasive communication against the intentions of the communicator. In risk communication, boomerang effects have so far been primarily addressed and shown for warnings in fields such as alcohol, nicotine, and drug use prevention. Boomerang effects of all-clear messages on environmental risks have so far not been demonstrated. Based on this observation, this article essentially makes three points. First, the most prominent theoretical explanations for boomerang effects do not preclude all-clear messages to have this type of effect. Second, it presents an experiment that demonstrates the existence of a boomerang effect of an all-clear message on the risk from cell phone tower radiation. Respondents who were very worried about this risk before the experiment said on average that reading a short all-clear message increased their worries. Third, if this type of boomerang effect is also found for other than radiation risks, people worried about environmental risks (including those worried without a reasonable cause) would be hard to convince they need not worry. This impedes reasonable public risk communication in the long run and creates a social group of people who harbor fears and anxieties not grounded in reality, but are immune against correction.     

Risk Communication and the Precautionary Principle

The perception of risks for environment and health deriving from globalization processes and an uncontrolled use of modern technologies is growing everywhere. The greater the capacity of controlling living conditions, the larger is the possibility of misusing this power. In environmental and occupational health research we tend to reduce the complexity of the observed phenomena in order to facilitate conclusions. In social and political sciences complexity is an essential element of the context, which needs to be continuously considered. The Precautionary Principle is a tool for facing complexity and uncertainty in health risk management. This paper is aimed at demonstrating that this is not only a problem of technical risk assessment. Great attention should also be paid to improve risk communication. Communication between the stakeholders (experts, decision makers, political and social leaders, media, groups of interest and people involved) is possibly the best condition to be successful in health risk management. Nevertheless, this process usually runs up against severe obstacles. These are not only caused by existing conflicts of interest. Differences in values, languages, perceptions, resources to have access to information, and to express one's own point of view are other key aspects.     

Environmental migrants,structural injustice,and moral responsibility

Climate change and environmental problems will force or induce millions of people to migrate. In this article, I describe environmental migration and articulate some of the ethical issues. To begin, I give an account of these migrants that overcomes misleading dichotomies. Then, I focus attention on two important ethical issues: justice and responsibility. Although we are all at risk of becoming environmental migrants, we are not equally at risk. Our risk depends on our temporal position, geographical location, social position, and the kind of society in which we live. We all contribute to environmental problems, but we do not contribute equally. About 11% of the world population is responsible for 50% of carbon emissions. These inequalities raise issues of justice because many of the people who are at high risk have contributed little to the problems. Since the issues of justice are relatively clear and compelling, I focus more attention on issues of responsibility. I use Iris Marion Young’s account of responsibility for structural injustice to address four key questions about moral responsibility and environmental migration.     

Risk perception of air pollution: An exploration of self-relevancy

Air pollution is a serious environmental issue that has been long recognized. Whereas government policies attempt to reduce air pollution by controlling various pollution sources, research on risk perception of air pollution tends to treat air pollution as a single unified risk and neglects the complication of the polluting sources. Previous research consistently demonstrates that lay people have an inaccurate understanding of air pollution and are unwilling to change their behaviors to decrease pollution. However, these findings can hardly be employed in policy-making because researchers and policy-makers treat air pollution differently. The aim of the present study is to obtain a nuanced understanding of people's risk perception of air pollution from different sources. Moreover, we propose a new risk dimension, Self-Relevancy, and try to understand people's reluctance to change their behaviors to reduce pollution. Three main findings emerged. First, we demonstrated that people perceived each air pollution source differently. Second, factor analysis of risk characteristics showed that ratings of Self-Relevancy questions mainly loaded on the same factor, which indicates the robustness of the Self-Relevancy risk dimension. Finally, we found that people's ratings of Self-Relevancy positively predicted their perceived risk for some of the pollution sources. These findings highlight the importance of investigating sub-categories of risks and exploring the risk dimension of Self-Relevancy in future risk perception research to provide detailed and informative data for policy-makers.     

An Integrated Framework for Risk Management and Population Health

The traditional medical model of health and health policy development has focused on individuals and the role of medical care in preventing and treating disease and injury. Recent attention to health inequities and social determinants of health has raised the profile of population heath and evidence-based strategies for improving the health of whole populations. At the same time, risk science has emerged as an important new discipline for the assessment and management of risks to health. This article reviews historical developments in the fields of risk management and population health and proposes a joint population health risk management framework that integrates the key elements of both fields. Applying this integrated approach to managing population health risks will facilitate the development of evidence-based health policy. It will encourage a more systematic and comprehensive evaluation of population health issues and promote the use of a broader suite of interventions to reduce health risks and enhance population health status.     

Analysis of Determining Factors of the Public's Risk Acceptance Level in China

This work will characterize risk acceptance in China, based on the psychometric paradigm, and explore the determining factors that influence the risk acceptable level to the Chinese public. For this purpose, a survey was conducted including 12 hazards, 10 risk attributes (including risk acceptance), and demographic variables. First, the research attempted to explore Nanjing citizens’ average risk acceptable level for 12 hazards in China. Second, intercorrelation analysis and factor analysis of nine risk attributes were performed to obtain the suitable risk perception factors as independent variables. Three risk perception models of acceptance were constructed, which were named “Environmental risk model,” “Daily risk model,” and “Technical risk model,” that explained 59.0–69.6% of variance separately. In general, the variables of Knowledge, Benefit, and Trust were found to be significant in all models, implying that these variables are the main determining factors. However, in the environmental risk model, the variable of effect was also significant, which means the determining factors would change for different types of hazards. These results could help the Chinese government to improve the communication of risks with the public and make effective mitigation policies to improve people's rational judgment on the acceptability of risks.     

Procreation,Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.     

European Settlement and the Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Identities

This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place‐related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly discernable long‐term relationship with the area in the vicinity of the town do not relate to places, nor conceptualise them, in stereotypically ‘traditional’ terms. Their relationships to town and nearby places tend to be of an ideologically unelaborated, homely sort. Kinds of territorial relationships their antecedents can be shown to have had to the area have undergone dissolution. The paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical and sociological processes involved. The Katherine case brings the social and historical significance of ‘towns’ as sites of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal interrelationship into focus, and also requires a critical view of notions of ‘group’ that have tended to dominate recent public process and understanding in Australia.     

Defining risk: Normative considerations

The public thinks about (i.e., defines) environmental human health risks in different terms than the “experts.”; And because the manner in which we conceive of risk goes a long way in determining how risk management is conceived and carried out, any definition of risk has important normative elements. I argue that environmental policy based on the public's conception of risk fails to adequately protect fundamental human rights to health and liberty, by taking undue account of certain psychological factors that enter into the public's perception of risk. A survey of some of these factors is offered in an attempt to determine their policy relevance. The traditional scientific conception of risk, although not adequate to entirely define risk policy, serves as an important anchor for the protection of these rights by focusing on the probability or number of adverse health effects.     

The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic severity

The alarming levels of spread and severity of COVID-19 have dominated global attention. In this time of crisis, there is an urgent need for studies identifying the linkages between the pandemic and social welfare. To help policymakers respond to the situation better, we investigate how the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic can condition people's psychological well-being. Employing the latest weekly panel data within an individual fixed effects framework, we uncover the damaging consequences of the COVID-19 severity, as measured by mortality rate, on the incidences of daily anxiety, worry, displeasure, and depression in the United States. Our work underlines the importance of public spending on mental health, both during and after the pandemic.     

On the Alleged Right to Participate in High‐Risk Research

Reigning regulatory frameworks for biomedical research impose on researchers and research ethics committees an obligation to protect research participants from risks that are unnecessary, disproportionate to potential research benefits, and non‐minimized. Where the research has no potential to produce results of direct benefit to the subjects and the subjects are unable to give consent, these requirements are strengthened by an additional condition, that risks should not exceed a certain minimal threshold. In this article, I address the question of whether there should be limits of permissible risks in non‐therapeutic research involving competent and healthy subjects. Some commentators argue that competent and informed individuals should have a right to participate even in extremely risky research and that research ethics committees should never reject studies because they are too dangerous. To use David Shaw's expression, competent volunteers should have ‘a right to participate in high‐risk research’. I argue that this idea is ill‐founded, as it does not take into account the social mission and complex collaborative nature of research practice as well as the inequity of power between researchers and subjects. Imposition of limits on permissible risks for healthy volunteers is justified by the need to protect research enterprise and the need to protect the weaker party, namely the subjects. Also, I suggest that the best way to set boundaries on research risks is to leave the judgment of risk acceptability to research ethics committees.     

Integrated Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: A Case Study of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Humans and Wildlife

Since the mid-1900s, the global environment has become increasingly contaminated with Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), including many with dioxin-like properties. These compounds generally have low water solubility, do not degrade readily in the environment, bioaccumulate in food chains, and have been linked to adverse health effects in both humans and wildlife. The presence of such compounds in terrestrial and aquatic food chains is relevant to those concerned with both human health and environmental protection because of the many common exposure pathways and biological effects among different species. In the past, some chemicals with health risks for humans have been identified following reports of adverse effects in wildlife. Integrating human and ecological risk assessments may improve society's ability to manage the design, manufacture, use and disposal of chemicals in a safe and efficient manner. This can be demonstrated with this case study, which summarizes approaches to evaluating the sources, transport and fate of certain POPs, used largely in the past, and their associated health risks to humans and biota.     

Precaution,threshold risk and public deliberation

It has been argued that the precautionary principle is incoherent and thus useless as a guide for regulatory policy. In a recent paper in Bioethics, Wareham and Nardini propose a response to the ‘precautionary paradox’ according to which the precautionary principle's usefulness for decision making in policy and regulation contexts can be justified by appeal to a probability threshold discriminating between negligible and non‐negligible risks. It would be of great significance to debates about risk and precaution if there were a sound method for determining a minimum probability threshold of negligible risk. This is what Wareham and Nardini aim to do. The novelty of their approach is that they suggest that such a threshold should be determined by a method of public deliberation. In this article I discuss the merits of Wareham and Nardini’s public deliberation method for determining thresholds. I raise an epistemic worry about the public deliberation method they suggest, and argue that their proposal is inadequate due to a hidden assumption that the acceptability of a risk can be completely analysed in terms of its probability.     

Environmental attitudes and preference for wetland conservation in Malaysia

The incorporation of latent psychological factors in wetland valuation studies may improve our understanding of why some people value ecosystem services while others do not. This article focuses on public preferences for enhanced protection of the Setiu Wetland in Malaysia and explores the influence of environmental attitude on preference and the willingness to pay (WTP) for wetland conservation. The study reported here employs a discrete choice experiment to investigate household's WTP for a set of wetland attributes. A scale-adjusted latent class (SALC) model is applied to identify a latent preference structure combining choice attributes with attitude measures derived from the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP). We identified four NEP components in the respondent population to integrate with SALC model, and this revealed four latent classes and two scale classes which varied in their preferences. Class 1 was largely against wetland protection, although it showed a flooding preference, and was more likely to be ‘Anthropocentric’ but less likely to be ‘Biocentric’. Class 2 had a positive preference for all attributes, and was more likely to be ‘Biocentric’. Class 3 did not refer to any of the NEP components. A handful of responses in Class 4 were respondents more likely to be in the ‘Risk of overuse’ group and less likely to be ‘Anthropocentric’. The result suggests that natural resource managers need to evaluate people's concerns over environmental protection to understand potentially conflicting views across populations.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.     

RISK DETECTION IN INDIVIDUAL HEALTH CARE: ANY LIMITS?

Background: Biomedical science is producing an avalanche of data about risk factors, often with a small predictive value, associated with a broad diversity of diseases. Prevention and screening are increasingly moving from public health into the clinic. Therefore, the question of which risk factors to investigate and disclose in the individual patient, becomes ethically increasingly urgent. In line with Wilson and Jungner's public health‐related 10 principles for screening, it seems crucial to distinguish important from unimportant health risks. Aim: to explore the ways in which clinicians distinguish important from unimportant health risks. Methods: We interviewed 36 respondents (gastroenterologists and gynaecologists/obstetrics) in 5 focus group interviews and 15 open in‐depth interviews on their interpretation of what makes a health risk important. Results: Physicians primarily interpreted importance as the severity of the possible harm, less often its probability. Possibilities of prevention or reassurance strongly influenced their judgment on importance. Discussion: It is not likely that interpreting ‘important’ as ‘severe’ will help in differentiating meaningful from meaningless risk knowledge. A more fundamental change in our ways of dealing with risk may be called for. We discuss existing literature on resilience as an alternative way to deal with risk. Balancing prevention and risk reduction with resilience could be a fruitful direction.     

Michael Banton's critique of John Rex's ‘mistakes’

This paper asserts that academics, unless they work for or in malign regimes, do not make ‘mistakes’, but work within their own historical period using their knowledge of past thinking. Thus, debates on race, ethnicity, race relations and so on, and the plethora of competing definitions and approaches, take place within specific historical times. The paper notes that for John Rex, racism was always the problem, to be defined and explained. It reviews the research carried out in Handsworth, Birmingham 1974–78, Rex's use of classical social theorists, and it refutes Banton's assertion that Rex did not engage with his critics. It concludes that Rex may well have been prophet in foreseeing the permanence of issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, migration, integration, citizenship and a ‘war on terror’ in a global era.     

The consumption of ritual and the changing values of filial piety in ancestor worship

Ancestor worship is regarded as the key element of the Han people's belief system across most of China. However, the rituals pertaining to death, such as in funerals and annual ancestor worship, vary from place to place. For decades, the state has made tremendous efforts to reform and standardise funerals consistent with its path to modernization by insisting on more socialist practices rather than those that are perceived as ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’, such as burning paper and incense or performing rituals. I argue that despite regulating the use of funeral materials or memorial types, the state has failed to reform the essence of death rituals, that is, the duty of filial piety and people's conception of the afterlife. In addition, funerals and other rituals related to death contribute to individual's social reputation.     

The Use of Epidemiology in Risk Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities

The assessment of risk from environmental and occupational exposures incorporates and synthesizes data from a variety of scientific disciplines including toxicology and epidemiology. Epidemiological data have offered valuable contributions to the identification of human health hazards, estimation of human exposures, quantification of the exposure–response relation, and characterization of risks to specific target populations including sensitive populations. As with any scientific discipline, there are some uncertainties inherent in these data; however, the best human health risk assessments utilize all available information, characterizing strengths and limitations as appropriate. Human health risk assessors evaluating environmental and occupational exposures have raised concerns about the validity of using epidemiological data for risk assessment due to actual or perceived study limitations. This article highlights three concerns commonly raised during the development of human health risk assessments of environmental and occupational exposures: (a) error in the measurement of exposure, (b) potential confounding, and (c) the interpretation of non-linear or non-monotonic exposure–response data. These issues are often the content of scientific disagreement and debate among the human health risk assessment community, and we explore how these concerns may be contextualized, addressed, and often ameliorated.