Risk Prioritization in the Food Domain Using Deliberative and Survey Methods: Differences between Experts and Laypeople.

This study examined how experts and laypeople using both a deliberative and a survey method prioritized 28 hazards related to food and everyday items. To enable them to make deliberative decisions, participants received detailed descriptions of the hazards. The participants prioritized the hazards before and after a group discussion, in which the group's average prioritization was discussed. The rankings of the hazards before and after the group discussion were highly correlated. However, laypeople and experts differed significantly in their rankings for 18 of the 28 hazards. Trust and confidence were important predictors for laypeople's risk rankings. To test the influence of the deliberative method (e.g., providing detailed information about each hazard), data from a second group of laypeople were collected with a no-information survey. This group did not receive specific information about the hazards. The risk rankings of the laypeople who received information were highly correlated with the risk rankings of laypeople who did not receive information. Overall, the results suggest that deliberative methods of risk-ranking or no-information survey methods with no information about hazards provide similar results among laypeople. The conclusion is that government agencies should not only base their risk prioritization on evidence from risk assessments but also need to consider laypeople's hazard rankings. This procedure may result in an efficient and publicly accepted risk management strategy.