1993 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Quantity of Reporting About Hazards: The Case of Naturally Occurring Radon
Author : Allan Mazur
Published in: Prediction and Perception of Natural Hazards
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Included in: Professional Book Archive
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People have intellectual and visceral motives for their behavior. The first is often weaker than the second, which is why many dieters succumb to the sight of food. Environmental hazards may be viscerally motivating too, when they are immediate and threatening, like the thunder and lightning of a storm, or a recent earthquake, to which people usually make reasonable alleviating responses (Quarantelli and Dynes, 1972). But most environmental hazards are too distant or improbable to be viscerally threatening — for example, naturally occurring indoor radon, or future earthquakes. We know intellectually that these are potentially harmful, but they do not evoke anxiety. Therefore, though risk analysts tell us that as rational calculating actors we ought to protect ourselves, most of us do nothing.