From your Slovic reading, which scenario would likely trigger the strongest public reaction?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

A new synthetic virus causing 3 casualties would provoke the strongest public reaction because it rates very high on the psychometric factors that drive fear: dread, unknown risk, uncontrollability, catastrophic potential, and moral outrage.

1. Relevant knowledge points and concepts
- Psychometric paradigm (Paul Slovic): people judge risks by qualitative factors (dread, unknown, catastrophic potential, controllability, voluntariness, familiarity).  
- Affect heuristic: emotional responses drive perceived risk more than statistics.  
- Identifiable victim effect: a small number of known victims often elicits stronger outrage than large anonymous statistics.  
- Social amplification of risk: novelty and media coverage magnify public reaction.

2. Step-by-step reasoning
- Synthetic (man-made) = unfamiliar and morally salient → high “unknown” and “dread” scores.  
- Virus = potential for contagion and rapid escalation → high catastrophic potential and low perceived controllability.  
- Three casualties = identifiable victims → strong emotional response despite low absolute numbers.  
- Combined, these factors produce intense media attention and public fear, far out of proportion to the raw casualty count.

3. (Qualitative) intermediate scoring
- Assign high/medium/low: dread = high, unknown = high, controllability = low (i.e., perceived control poor), voluntariness = low (involuntary exposure), familiarity = low. Summing these yields a very high overall perceived-risk score compared to familiar or noncontagious risks.

4. Why this answer is correct
- Slovic’s work predicts the highest public reaction for events that are novel, man-made, uncontrollable, potentially catastrophic, and that produce vivid, identifiable victims. A synthetic virus with casualties meets all those criteria.

5. Why other scenarios would be weaker
- Familiar risks (e.g., car accidents, seasonal flu), chronic environmental hazards, or statistical deaths lack novelty, contagion potential, or identifiable victims and therefore generate less intense immediate public outrage. Natural, well-understood events are judged as more controllable and familiar, reducing perceived risk.

6. Conclusion
- Based on Slovic’s psychometric factors and the affective response they trigger, the correct and confirmed answer is: A new synthetic virus causing 3 casualties.

From your Slovic reading, which scenario would likely trigger the strongest public reaction?单项选择题

类似问题

In Neil Weinstein's research, he listed 24 negative events ranging from relatively small to catastrophic, and asked college students to estimate their risk for each. He found that:

According to the Slovic reading, what characteristics would place a risk in the highest dread/unknown quadrant?

Which of the following trees corresponds to a potential parse of the ambiguous sentence below, with correct syntactic categories? Some diagnostics are provided.

Which of the following sentences contain two non-finite verbs? Select all that apply.

Analyze the following sentence: The sentence contains [ Select ] 8 6 5 7 3 4 functional words, [ Select ] 2 3 1 4 5 count nouns, [ Select ] 4 5 2 1 3 mass nouns, and [ Select ] 1 5 2 3 4 adjectives.

更多留学生实用工具

智能学习助手

风格化写作助手

论文查重助手

文献引用助手

课堂转译助手

课堂笔记助手

Quiz搜索助手

学校历年真题

智能刷题助手

智能匹配练习

希望你的学习变得更简单