Evaluating the Seriousness of Disasters: An Empirical Study of Preferences

In making societal decisions concerning hazards with potentially disastrous consequences it is important to have soundly based knowledge of how people evaluate the seriousness of disasters. In the present study a group of students evaluated the seriousness of disasters described in terms of four basic attributes (and their ranges): number of fatalities (0-1000), number of serious injuries (0-4000), economic loss (0-40 billion SEK), and cause of the disaster (natural, accidental, terrorism). Attribute weights were elicited by two separate methods, which taken together provides insight into the stability and the uncertainty of the weights elicited. Most participants regarded attributes related to physical harm, especially the number of fatalities, a finding that, however, must be seen in relation to the ranges of the attributes. In addition, the cause of a disaster also affected many of the participants’ judgments of its seriousness. The findings of this paper are of value to societal decision making, particularly in the case of projects of small to medium size in which specific elicitations of stakeholders’ values are rarely made.