Understanding risk in forest ecosystem services: implications for effective risk management, communication and planning

Modern theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicate that there are two fundamental ways 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. The "experiential system" is intuitive, fast, mostly automatic, and not very accessible to conscious awareness. 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. Proponents of formal risk analysis tend to view affective responses to risk as irrational. Current wisdom disputes this view. The rational and the experiential systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other for guidance. Studies have demonstrated that analytic reasoning cannot be effective unless it is guided by emotion and affect. Rational decision making requires proper integration of both modes of thought. Both systems have their advantages, biases, and limitations. Now that we are beginning to understand the complex interplay between emotion and reason that is essential to rational behavior, the challenge before us is to think creatively about what this means for managing risk. On the one hand, how do we apply reason to temper the strong emotions engendered by some risk events? On the other hand, how do we infuse needed "doses of feeling" into circumstances where lack of experience may otherwise leave us too "coldly rational"? This article addresses these important questions.

According to a common conception in behavioral decision research, two cognitive processes-overestimation and overweighting-operate to increase the impact of rare events on people's choices. Supportive findings stem primarily from investigations in which people learn about options via descriptions thereof. Recently, a number of researchers have begun to investigate risky choice in settings in which people learn about options by experiential sampling over time. This article reviews work across three experiential paradigms. Converging findings show that when people make decisions based on experience, rare events tend to have less impact than they deserve according to their objective probabilities. Striking similarities in human and animal experience-based choices, ways of modeling these choices, and their implications for risk and precautionary behavior are discussed.