Choice Symposium Workshop: Consuming (and Communicating) Risk-Related Information for a Better World

In making everyday choices about food, medical treatment, transport, adopting/rejecting technologies, etc., people encounter scientific information and claims about risk. Many of these choices are critical to consumers’ physical and psychological well-being; yet, the information available to consumers is often difficult to comprehend, incomplete, or contradictory.

Evidence is typically presented in probabilistic terms which people find hard to understand, and the information is subject to uncertainty and comes from multiple sources and through channels associated with different levels of trust. Worse still, claims about scientific evidence relating to risks may be biased, deceptive, or even
false.

The 30+ years since the seminal work of leading researcher Paul Slovic (1987, 2020) on risk perception have seen the arrival of instant communications and the fourth industrial revolution (AI, IoT, genetic engineering, etc.). These advancements, along with the rapidly
evolving cultural and socioeconomic environment, have transformed the risk landscape substantially. Against this backdrop, what is the role of scientific information (and claims) in consumers’ risk perceptions, judgments, and decisions/choices?

In this workshop, we assemble an international multidisciplinary team of domain experts to dive more deeply into the extant volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA), and increasingly instantaneous information environment, how consumers navigate such an environment and engage with different types/sources of risk information in their decision-making, and how risk-related information can be more effectively communicated by
researchers, experts, and policymakers, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We shall focus on three goals most directly related to consumers’ daily risks and choices: SDG 3 (Good health and well-being), SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production), and SDG 13 (Climate action).

Specifically, we shall examine the following questions:

• Under what conditions do people incorporate scientific information about risk and claims about science into their consumption decisions?
• What factors drive/moderate consumers’ cognitive and emotional engagement with scientific (or pseudo-scientific) information (e.g., decision domain, source of information, information channel, level of complexity, degree of uncertainty)?
• How can domain experts (with deep knowledge of relevant science) best convey risk information to consumers in ways that align consumers’ choices with the SDGs?
• To what extent, and in what ways, do changes in how people use scientific and pseudo-scientific information in their choices today necessitate revisions to existing theories about risk perception and risk communication?
• To what extent do models of information processing by consumers (Bettman,
  1979) have to be modified/extended to account for patterns in contemporary decision-making?