ABSTRACT
Risk assessment is growing in importance as a system design tool. The attraction of analytic methods is their capacity to make explicit the assumptions, value judgments, and criteria used for making a decision. This chapter considers the implications of the premise that risk acceptance is ultimately inseparable from the psychology of risk perception and evaluation. Given the role of individual judgments of risk and benefit in determining the political acceptability of specific technologies, it seems particularly valuable to try to understand intuitive risk-benefit analysis. Efforts to develop this understanding were made by C. Starr, whose approach was based on a study of historically accepted risk and by B. Fischhoff et al. and P. Slovic et al., whose approach was usually based on risk-taking behavior as determined by questionnaire. There is an attraction to try to develop an understanding of intuitive risk-benefit decisions by constructing parallels to the analytical methods.
