Scientific advances in identifying, predicting and mitigating hazards are likely to produce significant changes in how the public assesses moral and ethical responsibility for disaster losses. It should also affect the way in which those involved in disaster mitigation, including design professionals, businesses, and government officials, judge their own responsibility. This project begins an examination of the factors that influence judgments of responsibility for losses from both technological and natural disasters. This initial period of the research will be devoted to two tasks: the development of concept papers addressing the major intellectual traditions that have contributed to understanding of judgments of responsibility; and the identification of the principal dimensions (and the variables that reflect components of those dimensions) of the attribution of responsibility for disasters. With the guidance of an interdisciplinary advisory group, in the first six months of the project, the investigators will develop a series of concept papers reviewing major intellectual traditions that have been used to understand how people judge responsibility, and review case study materials in the archives of the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center to identify potentially useful examples of disasters that can form the basis for initial scenario development work. Drawing on the papers and the hazards literature, key dimensions that influence potentially different attributions of responsibility will be identified. The second half of the project will generate a set of relevant dimensions and a large number of scenarios. The dimensions will then be varied experimentally to examine how they influence lay judgments. Premiminary work will be conducted with convenience samples . However, to produce generalizable data from this phase of the research, the investigators also plan to conduct some of the secnario development work with paid subjects from the community and with representatives of one "stakeholder" group, most likely engineers. The first year of the project will procude a set of scenarios to be used in experimental and survey phases of the research. The scenarios will be based on an analysis of the subjects' responses. The concept papers will be published in various outlets, and the early experimental analysis should also result in publishable papers addressing the methodological issues involved in scenario-based research as well as conceptual development of attribution processes for disaster consequences.
