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Summary Risk as analysis and risk as feelings: Some thoughts about affect, reason, risk, and rationality.
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Description of the two risk analysis metods.
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Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamentalways 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. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on hazard
management.
- The “experiential system” is intuitive, fast, mostly automatic, and not very accessible to
conscious awareness. Risk as feelingsrefers to our fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to
danger.
- When our ancient instincts and our modern scientific analyses clash, we become painfully
aware of a third reality—risk as politics.
The experiential system enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution and
remains today the most natural and most common way to respond to risk. It relies on images and
associations, linked by experience to emotion and affect (a feeling that something is good or bad).
This system represents risk as a feeling that tells us whether it is safe to walk down this dark street or
drink this strange-smelling water.
The rational and the experiential systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other
for guidance
“faint whisper of emotion” called affect. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of
“goodness” or “badness” (1) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (2)
demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and
automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure”
or the word “hate.” We argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect
heuristic.”
Affect also plays a central role in what have come to be known as dual-process theories of thinking,
knowing, and information processing
We now recognize that the experiential mode of thinking and the analytic mode of thinking are
continually active, interacting in what we have characterized as “the dance of affect and reason”
The affect heuristic is a type of mental shortcut in which people make decisions that are
heavily influenced by their current emotions. ... In this case, it is the way you feel (your
affect) toward a particular stimulus that influences the decisions you make.
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