Public perceptions conclusions

Perception of Risk. Fairly recently, it has been appreciated that public perception of risk is important in risk policy (11). Some of the major conclusions that can be drawn about public perception are (12,13) ... 

Rather, it stresses the importance of the incident information being presented in a unified manner. The person communicating to the news media should be able to answer questions clearly without jumping to conclusions or making sensational or alarmist statements. The public perception created with just a few minutes of TV or radio interview could have a lasting effect on the worker s plant site—for good or bad. Many plants maintain a bank of dedicated computer networks and phones and faxes and a specially trained team of people that facilitate the flow of information to the public and news media. 

In conclusion, hydrogen appears to pose risks of the same order of magnitude as other fuels. In spite of public perception, in many aspects hydrogen is actually a safer fuel than gasoline and natural gas. 

To improve the public acceptance of hydrogen, it is important to understand the current perception of hydrogen by the broad public so that conclusions can be made by producers. Knowledge about the current state of social acceptance is a basis for detecting improvement points to increase it in future. 

While it is clear that some people will not accept a definition of safety that is relative, it appears that most people feel safe when they are convinced that risks to their well-being are sufficiently low, even if not completely absent. (There are some dramatic and important qualifications on this conclusion, as we shall see in the later section concerning people s perceptions of risk. While for the most part people accept that the condition of safety is not equivalent to the condition of being completely risk-free, most people do not perceive risk as simply a matter of probability, as do the experts. This intriguing and well-documented fact complicates greatly the public dialogue on matters of risk.)... 

Our account presents some personal perceptions of the concepts and the models that have found the most successful apphcations in the recent literature, with the aim of initiating a debate intended to contribute towards advancement of the theory of the subject. There are many citations of our own publications. These naturally emphasize the conclusions for which we feel the greatest personal confidence. References are made to older works when the chemical concepts are more satisfactorily described, or the discussions show greater insights than in the more modem articles. The need for greater emphasis on chemical, rather than mathematical, representations of behaviour (molecular models for mechanistic proposals, comparisons of properties with reference to chemical compositions, etc.) is a main theme of this book. 

The EPA commissioned study on how the public received the message that EDB was unsafe (15) used content analysis of 50 newspapers, news programs, national press stories and weekly magazines to arrive at a conclusion that indicts "macro-risk and micro-risk" perceptions on the part of EPA s specialists vs. the public s vision. According to this study, neither the EPA nor the public were in error about risk perceptions. The difference between perspectives (macro vs. micro) caused a barrier. Nonetheless the report characterizes the public during this six month period in 1983-84 as "confused and antagonistic (16)."... 

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