Consequences, morality, and time in environmental risk evaluation

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

Environmental risks pose a serious problem to individual and societal decision-making, and the public debate is often characterized by a conflict between morally-principled and technically oriented points of view. Drawing on previous work of Böhm and Pfister (2000), we propose a model on how environmental risks are cognitively represented and how risks are evaluated. The model suggests two evaluative pathways, evaluations of consequences and evaluation of moral considerations, each leading to a distinct set of emotions and action tendencies. Either one of these pathways may become dominant depending on the evaluative focus of the person, which, in turn, depends on the causal structure of the risk. An experimental study yields confirming evidence for this model. Furthermore, the influence of time perspective, that is, the delay of negative consequences caused by an environmental risk, is investigated. Contrary to the common assumption, only weak evidence for temporal discounting effects is found. It is concluded that environmental risks, due to their strong moral component, are partly immune to time perspective.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftJournal of Risk Research
Jahrgang8
Ausgabenummer6
Seiten (von - bis)461-479
Anzahl der Seiten19
ISSN1366-9877
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 01.09.2005

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
This research was supported by Grant He 1449/2-2 from the German Research Association (DFG) as part of the program ‘Human Dimensions of Global Change’. The authors wish to thank Marcus Ladineo and Dorothee Körner for their help in conducting the experiments.

DOI

Zuletzt angesehen

Publikationen

  1. Inner conflict resolution and self-empowerment as contribution for personal sustainability on the case of intentional community practices
  2. Home for Hire
  3. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
  4. Local organochlorine pesticide concentrations in soil put into a global perspective
  5. “Teach like you do in America”—Personal reflections from teaching across borders in Tanzania and Germany
  6. Small Input Devices Used by the Elderly -
  7. Organizational Decline and Innovation in Manufacturing
  8. Branding the campus
  9. Rätselhafte Röhren in der Landschaft
  10. Jazz in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s
  11. Noah's ark or world wild web? Cultural perspectives in global scenario studies and their function for biodiversity conservation in a changing world
  12. Mycorrhizal type and tree diversity affect foliar elemental pools and stoichiometry
  13. Comparison of PSA-specific CD8+ CTL responses and antitumor immunity generated by plasmid DNA vaccines encoding PSA-HSP chimeric proteins
  14. Emotions and Information Diffusion on Social Media
  15. Looking at workers, working with workers
  16. Effect of TiBor on the grain refinement and hot tearing susceptibility of AZ91D magnesium alloy
  17. Transculturality in Top Model
  18. Results of disseminating an online screen for eating disorders across the U.S.
  19. Sustainability Reporting as a Consequence of Environmental Orientation
  20. Lost in Media
  21. Synergistic cooperation between wastewater-born algae and activated sludge for wastewater treatment
  22. Umwelt-Governance und Partizipation
  23. The impact of risk aversion, role models, and the regional milieu on the transition from unemployment to self-employment
  24. Toward Learning Distributions of Distributions
  25. Isolation Playground
  26. Spurred Emulation