The Role of Liability Preferences in Societal Technology Choices: Results of a Pilot Study

Abstract

At the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis, Steve Rayner presented a paper that challenged the conventional wisdom of risk management research. In that paper, he argued that resolving the question, “How safe is safe enough?” is less important in making societal technology choices than “How fair is safe enough?” Adopting the fairness question as the concern of risk management would imply that the process of technology choice should recognize explicitly the preferred principles different parties hold with respect to obtaining consent from those affected by the risks, distributing the liabilities, and justifying trust in the relevant institutions. This paper discusses a recent empirical pilot study which explored the fairness hypothesis in the context of nuclear power.

Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted to examine whether or not preferred principles for liability distributions were consistent with those suggested by the cultural characteristics of the constituency. The results suggest that for this type of societal technology choice, violation of these preferred principles may be a major source of the conflict between different constituencies. Additionally, the study contributes towards the development of a new approach in risk management that combines the cultural model of risk perceptions with the decision-theoretic approaches found in economics and psychology.