Summary of Meeting Paper

The 1996 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis-Europe

Individual and Social Determinants of Attitudes Towards the Construction of a Waste Incinerator: Two Case Studies. M. L. Lima, Dept. of Social and Organisational Psychology, ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal

INTRODUCTION

Local opposition to waste transformation technologies is often described as an example of a NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome, and interpreted as a form of irrationality and egotism. After Slovic et al. (1978) have introduced the concept of risk perception, the psychometric approach has crown and many other studies provided a broader view of public concerns, stressing the importance of some of its perceived characteristics. Particularly, risks are considered to be greater for hazards which are seen as involuntary, uncontrollable, potentially catastrophic and created by technology, which usually are grouped into a general factor called dread risk (Petts, 1994). However, aside from that perspective, many studies have identified psychological and social psychological variables which seem useful to understand public acceptability of technologies.

So, at present times, although social sciences have made it more difficult to label as irrational or emotional the public's concerns, the same social scientists could not agree on the set of variables that can predict local opposition to the construction of unwanted technologies. This issue is particularly relevant not only to understand or modify public views, but also ensure the success of risk communication strategies. In this paper, we analysed and compared the predictive value of different theoretical perspectives on the public acceptability of two waste incinerators to be constructed in Portugal.

We decided to use a very broad theoretical framework, and we derived specific hypothesis from each. Specifically, we worked the following theoretical perspectives:

• Risk perception: according to the traditional approach to risk perception, we expected to find a dread risk factor, and expected it to be negatively associated with public acceptability of the incinerator.

• Perceived justice: Many authors have referred in different ways the importance of perceived justice in risk acceptability. For example, Vlek and Stallen (1981) found that risk acceptability is better predicted by perceived benefits than by perceived risk. But when we try to define the benefits associated to a project like a waste incinerator, we realise that the beneficiaries are not usually the same as the population at risk. In this case, the risks may be perceived as unfair, because those who will benefit from the project are not exposed to the risks, and many times the populations can strategically enhance their losses and the injustice of their situation to gain negocial power during the sitting process. The concept of distributive justice (referring to the balance in the distribution of risks and benefits of a project) seems then particularly useful to understand the local acceptability of a waste incinerator project, and we can expect that perception of fair distribution of benefits and costs will be associated to higher levels of local acceptability.
  

  Although distributive justice plays an important role in risk acceptability, procedural Justice needs also some consideration. Procedural justice has to do with the decision process itself Risks can be considered as unacceptable by a population, simply because the decision was made without a proper consultation with the local authorities, or because the population claims have been ignored during the decision process, or even because the decision process was not clear (Lind & Tyler, 1988). These feelings of injustice are usually very difficult to overcome, because they menace the trust in the authorities, the government or the technicians, and they can cancel an on-going process. The only way of preventing this specific kind of perceived injustice (and the consequent unacceptability of a project) is to increase public participation in the project, since its beginning (Tyler, Rasinski & Spodick, 1985; Tyler & McGrew, 1986; Lane, 1988; Tyler, 1994; Wandersman & Hallman, 1993). According to this perspective, public acceptability of a project should be associated with the perception of a fair process of decision-making.

• Expectancy-value perspectives on the consequences of the project: Expectancy-value models of behaviour have a long theoretical and empirical tradition in Social Psychology (e.g. Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975; Ajzen, 1980), and they are often forgotten in sitting studies. According to this perspective, the acceptability of a project is related to the degree of certainty on the consequences of a project and the value of this consequences for the subject.

• Social trust - This variable has recently been referred in the literature as a fundamental one in risk acceptability (Pidgeon et al., 1992; Sloan, 1993; Clarke & Short, 1993; Kasperson et al., 1992; Bord & O'Connor, 1990; Freudenburg, 1993). In fact, as the discussion about a sitting process becomes more and more technical, risk acceptability by the local population turns into a question of credibility of the source, or in other words, a question of trust in social actors.

• General values - Apart from these more specific factors, risk acceptability can be threatened by the general values of the population. Specifically, strong environmental attitudes and strong local identity should be associated to lower levels of acceptability of a waste incinerator.

• Knowledge about waste incineration - Sometimes, the protest about an incinerator has been explained by the public ignorance about the process. This hypothesis was also tested in this study.

The two studies we will briefly describe were included in the environmental impact studies for the first two waste incinerators to be built in Portugal. They were planned to treat the domestic waste of the major cities in Portugal, and environmental groups largely opposed to both of them. In Lisbon, the local population also organised several protest actions.

METHOD

Subjects: A random sample of 450 subjects in Lisbon and 300 subject in Oporto was directly interviewed, using a structured questionnaire. In each of the two studies, three subsamples were extracted, including residents living in different distances of the local where the waste incinerator was to be built (within a ray of 1, 5 and 10 Km). The two samples were very different. In Lisbon, the incinerator was sitted to a suburban area, and in Oporto in a rural area.

Ouestionnaire: The survey included the operationalised of each of the variables listed above, demographic information about the subjects and the dependent variable, the attitude towards the project. Attitudes were operationalised including the three traditional dimensions (cognitive - beliefs about the incinerator, emotional - negative emotions associated to the incinerator- and behavioural - protest action and intentions to protest or to move).

RESULTS

Attitudes toward the incinerator: The items were aggregated into three indexes (emotional, cognitive and behavioural). The inter-correlation of these indexes showed high levels of internal consistency (=.74 and =.84) in both samples, and that allowed us to compute a total index of acceptability. These data were available to 410 subjects in Lisbon and only 102 in Oporto. This mortality was dues to lack of information about the project in about 60% of the sample in the second study.

The means of the final attitude index was significantly different in the two studies, as it is clearly shown in Figure 1: In the lst study, residents reject more strongly the incinerator than residents in the 2nd one.

Association of attitudes toward the incinerator and the other variables considered To test our hypothesis, each block of items was submitted to a factor analysis and an index was computed when the internal consistency of the data allowed. Table 1 shows the results of the correlation. Most of our hypothesis received support. Contrarily to our predictions, the general values were not significantly related to the attitudes.

Prediction of the attitude toward the incinerator. Two multiple regression analysis were performed on the data, including also all the socio-demographic data about the subject (Table 2 and 3). The results are very similar in the two studies. From socio-demographic variables, only the distance of the residence to the local where the incinerator should be built entered the equation (a NIMBY effect). The other important predictors were the perception of a dread risk, the perception of benefits to the local population, and the expectancy of positive consequences of the project. The level of explained variance was good in both cases.

DISCUSSION

In these last few lines, I will briefly stress three points: (1) it was very surprising to find such a similar pattern of predictors of the attitudes towards the incinerator in such different samples; (2) there are important links between the attitude toward the incinerator and other cognitive variables, but demographic characteristics do not seem to play an important role; (3) perceived threat and perceived benefits seem to be the key to the understanding of public position.