The objective was to test whether precrisis inoculation‐stimulated conversations can positively impact key beliefs vital to the prosperity of a nation following an act of terrorism. The experiment introduced a precrisis inoculation message about the Department of Homeland Security prior to a simulated crisis portraying the downing of an aircraft. Results affirmed: that, compared to individuals in the control condition, inoculated individuals were less likely to believe that past failures of acts of terrorism resulted from terrorist incompetence; inoculated individuals indicated greater belief that the politically motivated acts of violence will not limit their future opportunities; and that interpersonal talk about such acts and the government's ability to effectively handle them were inversely associated with the likelihood of postponing air travel.
Residents in the State of Nevada hold strong opinions about the federal government's proposal to site the nation's first high‐level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The model developed in this study is designed to examine the relationship between public perceptions of risk, trust in risk management, and potential economic impacts of the current repository program using a confirmatory multivariate method known as covariance structure analysis. The data used to test the model was collected in a 1989 statewide survey of Nevada residents. The results indicate that, for a statewide sample, perceptions of potential economic benefits do not have a significant role in predicting support or opposition to the repository program. On the other hand, risk perceptions and the level of trust in repository management are closely related to each other and to positions on Yucca Mountain. Trust directly influences risk perceptions which, in turn, have a direct effect on the attitude toward the repository, and an indirect effect through perceived stigma effects.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently commissioned a risk analysis of the passenger threat vector in which an adversary gains access through the screening checkpoint. The goal of the project was to provide insights to the TSA to improve both safety and resource allocation as they continue to develop new security procedures in a constantly evolving threat environment. The result was a probabilistic risk model to support the TSA as they plan future safety and resource allocations procedures. Because aviation passenger screening involves highly sensitive information, we discuss the insights gained from the study that are applicable for other highly critical security systems that rely on alarm-based warning technologies to detect anomalies.
Disasters garner attention when they occur, and organizations commonly extract valuable lessons from visible failures, adopting new behaviors in response. For example, the United States saw numerous security policy changes following the September 11 terrorist attacks and emergency management and shelter policy changes following Hurricane Katrina. But what about those events that occur that fall short of disaster? Research that examines prior hazard experience shows that this experience can be a mixed blessing. Prior experience can stimulate protective measures, but sometimes prior experience can deceive people into feeling an unwarranted sense of safety. This research focuses on how people interpret near‐miss experiences. We demonstrate that when near‐misses are interpreted as disasters that did not occur and thus provide the perception that the system is resilient to the hazard, people illegitimately underestimate the danger of subsequent hazardous situations and make riskier decisions. On the other hand, if near‐misses can be recognized and interpreted as disasters that almost happened and thus provide the perception that the system is vulnerable to the hazard, this will counter the basic "near‐miss" effect and encourage mitigation. In this article, we use these distinctions between resilient and vulnerable near‐misses to examine how people come to define an event as either a resilient or vulnerable near‐miss, as well as how this interpretation influences their perceptions of risk and their future preparedness behavior. Our contribution is in highlighting the critical role that people's interpretation of the prior experience has on their subsequent behavior and in measuring what shapes this interpretation.
After disasters such as the attacks of September 11, 2001, the public experiences a heightened response that naturally returns to some lower level of concern. We demonstrate that this pattern of heightened response followed by a decline as time passes also occurs for terrorist events that are near misses. Data from a field study and two experimental lab studies show that people's perceptions of the risk of similar category events and their perception that the near-miss attempt was close to being a successful terrorist attack decline over time. Moreover, the decline in the perception of how close the near miss was to being a successful terrorist attack partially explains the decline in the perception of the risk of future similar category events. We also show that the perceived risk for terrorism in general decays more slowly than for a specific category event, and is reactivated by additional terrorist attempts. Finally, we show that people rely on reference points to provide the context for near-miss terrorism events, and without reference points assessing perceptions of risk and perceptions of how close an event was to having a truly bad outcome are difficult. The reliance on reference points for context can result in different people evaluating the same event differently depending on that person's information about prior terrorist attempts. Our contributions provide guidance to organizations such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for encouraging stakeholders to make rational decisions on the basis of the nature, scale, and scope of the attack that balance recovery with continued vigilance. We also provide information to other intelligence agencies who need to consider their own individuals' personal biases that may arise when repeatedly examining terrorist near misses.
Benefit–cost analyses are critical to support U.S. agencies' programmatic decision making. These analyses are particularly challenging when one of the benefits is adversary deterrence. This paper presents a framework for calculating the value of deterrence related to countermeasures implemented to mitigate an attack by an adaptive adversary. We offer an approach for partitioning the benefit of countermeasures into three components: (1) threat reduction (deterrence), (2) vulnerability reduction, and (3) consequence mitigation. The benefit of a countermeasure is measured by the expected value of countermeasure implementation (EVCI) attributable to a specific countermeasure. It is based on the concept of expected value of imperfect control, defined as the difference in the expected values of alternatives with and without countermeasures. The EVCI represents all the benefits of implementing the countermeasure and is derived from three sources: (1) changes in attack probability (threat reduction from deterrence), (2) changes in detection probability (vulnerability reduction), and (3) changes in the distribution of attack outcomes (consequence mitigation). We partition the EVCI and estimate the portion attributable to each of these three sources to quantify the unique benefit of each. We provide two applications of the partitioning methodology using examples from the published literature that examine countermeasures designed to protect commercial aircraft against man-portable air defense systems. The proposed framework provides an approach for explicitly accounting separately for deterrence, vulnerability reduction, and consequence mitigation in benefit–cost analyses. It provides quantifiable insights into how countermeasures reduce terrorism risk. Funding: This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under [Grant Award 22STESE00001-02-00]. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This award was made to Northeastern University and the University of Southern California is a sub-awardee. This work was also supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant 2027296] awarded to Decision Research.
U.S. airports and airliners are prime terrorist targets. Not only do the facilities and equipment represent high‐value assets, but the fear and dread that is spread by such attacks can have tremendous effects on the U.S. economy. This article presents the methodology, data, and estimates of the macroeconomic impacts stemming from behavioral responses to a simulated terrorist attack on a U.S. airport and on a domestic airliner. The analysis is based on risk‐perception surveys of these two scenarios. The responses relate to reduced demand for airline travel, shifts to other modes, spending on nontravel items, and savings of potential travel expenditures by U.S. resident passengers considering flying domestic routes. We translate these responses to individual spending categories and feed these direct impact results into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the U.S. economy to ascertain the indirect and total impacts on both the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Overall, the estimated impacts on GDP of both types of attacks exceed $10B. We find that the behavioral economic impacts are almost an order of magnitude higher than the ordinary business interruption impacts for the airliner attack and nearly two orders of magnitude higher for the airport attack. The results are robust to sensitivity tests on the travel behavior of U.S. residents in response to terrorism.
A comprehensive approach to managing risk must draw on both the descriptive insights of the behavioral sciences and the prescriptive clarity of the management sciences. On the descriptive side, this study develops structural models to explain how the impact upon society of an accident or other unfortunate event is influenced by the physical consequences of the event, perceived risk, media coverage, and public response. Our findings indicate that the media and public response play crucial roles in determining the impact of an unfortunate event. Public response appears to be determined by perceptions that the event was caused by managerial incompetence and is a signal of future risk. On the prescriptive side, we briefly discuss how these findings based upon structural models can be incorporated into a decision‐analytic procedure known as an influence diagram.
