The development of expertise in risk assessment

Symposium: Psychological topics in risk perception and risk decision-making Paper 1/4 Risk Assessment is a process conducted by people in almost every field of human activity. The UK Health & Safety Executive proposed... [ view full abstract ]

Symposium: Psychological topics in risk perception and risk decision-making
Paper 1/4

Risk Assessment is a process conducted by people in almost every field of human activity. The UK Health & Safety Executive proposed ‘Five Steps to Risk Assessment’. These five steps, which are consistent with most models, are: 1) Identify the hazards, 2) Decide who might be harmed and how, 3) Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions, 4) Record your findings and implement them, and 5) Review your assessment and update if necessary. Steps 1 and 2 can be considered as having to do with ‘risk perception’, Step 3 as ‘risk decision-making’, and Steps 4 and 5 as ‘risk communication’. There are many examples in the literature about differences in risk perception between experts and laypeople, and there have been recent breakthroughs in risk attitude learning (e.g. Eiser, Fazio et al.). The literature also abounds with how heuristics and cognitive biases affect risk decision-making, and leading models of risk communication (e.g. Granger Morgan et al.’s Mental Models Approach) advocate reconciling the differences between expert and lay mental models of risk for more effective risk communication. Despite vast and growing literatures about risk perception, risk decision-making, and risk communication, little is known about how individuals develop expertise in risk assessment.

The “10 000 hour rule” is often cited as a prerequisite for expertise in many fields. With respect to risk assessment, it is unclear how cognitive processes (risk perception, risk decision-making) may differ between novices (people learning to assess risk) and experts (people who can reliably assess risk vastly more comprehensively and vastly more accurately than other risk assessors).

This paper describes a study about Manual Handling Risk Assessment by healthcare professionals in community settings to start to develop a model of how expertise develops in risk assessors. In doing so, this paper draws on models of expert medical reasoning (e.g. Norman & Brooks) which argue that novices engage in analytic reasoning (reasoning from the specific to the general) whereas experts engage in non-analytic reasoning (reasoning from the specific to the specific, similar to Klein’s model of Recognition Primed Decision Making). The proposed model considers how risk perception, risk decision-making, and risk communication develop as a function of experience of risk assessment, and when a risk assessor may start to engage in non-analytic reasoning.