In a national online survey, 505 participants reported their perceptions of energy consumption and savings for a variety of household, transportation, and recycling activities. When asked for the most effective strategy they could implement to conserve energy, most participants mentioned curtailment (e.g., turning off lights, driving less) rather than efficiency improvements (e.g., installing more efficient light bulbs and appliances), in contrast to experts' recommendations. For a sample of 15 activities, participants underestimated energy use and savings by a factor of 2.8 on average, with small overestimates for low-energy activities and large underestimates for high-energy activities. Additional estimation and ranking tasks also yielded relatively flat functions for perceived energy use and savings. Across several tasks, participants with higher numeracy scores and stronger proenvironmental attitudes had more accurate perceptions. The serious deficiencies highlighted by these results suggest that well-designed efforts to improve the public's understanding of energy use and savings could pay large dividends.climate change | decision making | judgment | environmental behavior | anchoring A nthropogenic CO 2 emissions are contributing to global climate change (1) and could negatively impact our way of life if serious action is further delayed. The United States produces 21% of the world's CO 2 emissions, with 98% of US emissions attributed to energy consumption (2).According to Pacala and Socolow (3), increasing energy efficiency and curtailing activities that consume energy may be our cheapest options for stabilizing atmospheric CO 2 concentrations below a doubling of preindustrial concentrations. Following the analogy of stabilization wedges (3), Dietz et al. (4) devised a potential behavioral wedge, recommending specific behavioral changes, such as weatherization investments, to be adopted by US households to decrease their emissions. Vandenbergh et al. (5) identified seven actions, such as reducing automobile idling and substituting compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for incandescent bulbs, that have the potential to achieve large emission reductions at a low cost to the government and with a net savings for individuals. In related work, Gardner and Stern (6) identified a short list of the most effective actions US households could take to decrease their contributions to climate change. They argued that by changing the selection and use of household and motor vehicle technologies, households could reduce their energy consumption by nearly 30%-without waiting for new technologies, making major economic sacrifices, or losing a sense of well-being. If households effectively implemented all of Gardner and Stern's recommended changes, US energy consumption would be reduced by approximately 11%. Similarly, Dietz et al. (4) estimated that behavioral interventions could reasonably achieve a 20% reduction in CO 2 emissions from household energy use (a 7.4% reduction in total US emissions) within 10 y.Gardner and...

People place greater importance on equity than is reflected by cost-effectiveness analysis. Even many experts in medical decision making -- those often responsible for conducting cost-effectiveness analyses -- expressed discomfort with some of its implications. Basing health care priorities on cost effectiveness may not be possible without incorporating explicit considerations of equity into cost-effectiveness analyses or the process used to develop health care policies on the basis of such analyses.

A deliberative method for ranking risks was evaluated in a study involving 218 risk managers. Both holistic and multiattribute procedures were used to assess individual and group rankings of health and safety risks facing students at a fictitious middle school. Consistency between the rankings that emerged from these two procedures was reasonably high for individuals and for groups, suggesting that these procedures capture an underlying construct of riskiness. Participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their groups' decision-making processes and the resulting rankings, and these reports were corroborated by regression analyses. Risk rankings were similar across individuals and groups, even though individuals and groups did not always agree on the relative importance of risk attributes. Lower consistency between the risk rankings from the holistic and multiattribute procedures and lower agreement among individuals and groups regarding these rankings were observed for a set of high-variance risks. Nonetheless, the generally high levels of consistency, satisfaction, and agreement suggest that this deliberative method is capable of producing risk rankings that can serve as informative inputs to public risk-management decision making.

Risk ranking offers a potentially powerful means for gathering public input to help set risk-management priorities. In most rankings conducted to date, the categories and attributes used to describe the risks have varied widely, the materials and procedures have not been designed to facilitate comparisons among risks on all important attributes, and the validity and reproducibility of the resulting rankings have not been assessed. To address these needs, a risk-ranking method was developed in which risk experts define and categorize the risks to be ranked, identify the relevant risk attributes, and characterize the risks in a set of standardized risk summary sheets, which are then used by lay or other groups in structured ranking exercises. To evaluate this method, a test bed involving 22 health and safety risks in a fictitious middle school was created. This article provides an overview of the risk-ranking method and describes the challenges faced in designing the middle school test bed. A companion article in this issue reports on the validity of the ranking procedures and the level of agreement among risk managers regarding ranking of risks and attributes.

Two experiments explored the role of perceivers (judges) in aggregating social behavior into impressions. In Experiment 1, it was predicted and found that judges influence impressions (i.e., eye-of-the-beholder effects) not only because they disagree on how to interpret single acts but because they aggregate multiple acts in unique ways to arrive at idiosyncratic impressions. Using D. A. Kenny's (1991) general model of accuracy and consensus, it was found that judges perceived much greater consistency in the behavior of targets across situations when they were asked to aggregate the behavior than when they were not. Differential interpretation of single acts did not change as a function of aggregating behavior. This aggregation process was characterized as the construction of models of persons. In Experiment 2, the concept of person models was explored further, and it was argued that perceivers develop these models on the basis of what is viewed as the central concept of a target. For any given target, a limited number of models can be identified, and different perceivers develop different models. The particular model formed has implications for the perceiver's underlying memory representation and the perceived personality profile of the target.

When a visual pattern is displayed at successively different orientations such that a rotation or translation is implied, an observer's memory for the final position is displaced forward. This phenomenon of representational momentum shares some similarities with physical momentum. For instance, the amount of memory shift is proportional to the implied velocity of the inducing display; representational momentum is specifically proportional to the final, not the average, velocity; representational momentum follows a continuous stopping function for the first 250 ms or so of the retention interval. In a previous paper (Kelly & Freyd, 1987) we demonstrated a forward memory asymmetry using implied changes in pitch, for subjects without formal musical training. In the current paper we replicate our earlier finding and show that the forward memory asymmetry occurs for subjects with formal musical training as well (Experiment 1). We then show the structural similarity between representational momentum in memory for pitch with previous reports of parametric effects using visual stimuli. We report a velocity effect for auditory momentum (Experiment 2), we demonstrate specifically that the velocity effect depends on the implied acceleration (Experiment 3), and we show that the stopping function for auditory momentum is qualitatively the same as that for visual momentum (Experiment 4). We consider the implications of these results for theories of mental representation.

This article reports an extension of the Carnegie Mellon risk-ranking method to incorporate ecological risks and their attributes. On the basis of earlier risk-perception studies, we identified a set of 20 relevant attributes for describing health, safety, and environmental hazards in standardized risk summary sheets. In a series of three ranking sessions, 23 laypeople ranked 10 such hazards in a fictional Midwestern U.S. county using both holistic and multiattribute ranking procedures. Results were consistent with those from previous studies involving only health and safety hazards, providing additional evidence for the validity of the method and the replicability of the resulting rankings. Holistic and multiattribute risk rankings were reasonably consistent both for individuals and for groups. Participants reported that they were satisfied with the procedures and results, and indicated their support for using the method to advise real-world risk-management decisions. Agreement among participants increased over the course of the exercise, perhaps because the materials and deliberations helped participants to correct their misconceptions and clarify their values. Overall, health and safety attributes were judged more important than environmental attributes. However, the overlap between the importance rankings of these two sets of attributes suggests that some information about environmental impacts is important to participants' judgments in comparative risk-assessment tasks.

Any practical process of risk ranking must group hazards into a manageable number of categories. Defining such categories requires value choices that can have important implications for the rankings that result. Most risk-management organizations will find it useful to begin defining categories in terms of environmental loadings or initiating events. However, the resulting categories typically need to be modified in light of other considerations. Risk-ranking projects can benefit from considering several alternative categorization strategies and drawing upon elements of each in developing their final categorization of risks. In principle, conducting multiple ranking exercises by using different categorizations could be interesting and useful. In practice, agencies are unlikely to have either the resources or patience to do this, but other groups in society might. Done well, such additional independent rankings could add valuable inputs to democratic risk-management decision making.