Updating Mental Models of Risk for the Modern Era
North Carolina flooding after Hurricane Helene. (Creative Commons)
SoDy’s Founder & Director, Dan Hoyer, has written an important op-ed article in Issues in Science and Technology along with our colleagues in the world of Polycrisis, Rod Schoonover and Daniel Aldrich (details below). The piece, “Updating Mental Models of Risk for the Modern Era”, discusses the increasing frequency and severity of environmental disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, and landslides in the USA (as well as across the world) that are bringing communities to their knees, while insurance companies pull policies from more regions, and the federal government’s relief efforts are stretched to its limit, and, more importantly - how we got in to this mess in the first place, and how we can navigate our way out of it.
But how do we move past the idea that events like this are simply unfortunate and sequential, and recognise that they are in fact part of a wider, complex and longer lasting global issue?
“The emergent reality of complex risk demands a fundamental change in how we conceptualize it. To date, policymakers, risk managers, and insurers—to say nothing of ordinary people—have consistently treated disasters as isolated events. Our mental model imagines a linear progression of unfortunate, unpredictable episodes, unfolding without relation to one another or to their own long-term and widely distributed effects. A hurricane makes landfall, we rebuild, we move on. A pandemic emerges, we develop vaccines, we return to normal.
This outdated model of risk leads to reactive, short-sighted policies rather than proactive prevention and preparedness strategies.”
One problem lays in how humans process ‘risk’:
“Our struggle to grasp complex risk has roots in human psychology. The well-documented tendency of humans is to notice and focus on immediate, visible dangers rather than long-term or abstract ones. Even when we can recognize such longer-term and larger-scale threats, we typically put them aside to focus on more immediate and tangible short-term threats. As a result, lawmakers and emergency managers, like people in general, often succumb to what psychologists and cognitive scientists call the availability heuristic: Policies are designed to react to whatever is most salient, which tends to be the most recent, most dramatic incidents—those most readily available to the mind.”
The authors call for a change in risk assessments, reduction and management which “…must move beyond static maps to dynamic models that capture how exposure evolves through interconnections.”
Rod Schoonover is an ecological security expert and adjunct professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Daniel P. Aldrich is Dean’s Professor of Resilience, codirector of the Global Resilience Institute, director of the MS Resilience Program, and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University.
