Surveyed

[redbird]

I just answered a phone survey about asbestos, whether/how much companies care about worker and customer safety, and related things. There were a lot of questions that I wasn't really thrilled with the phrasing of, but only three I refused to answer: two were factual epidemiological questions to do with incidence of cancer and other illness due to asbestos, and the third was about how often cancer is related to genetic predisposition. I told the survey-taker that those weren't opinion questions, and I didn't know the answers. I did, however, offer best guesses on things like how often companies conceal health risks in their products.

There was also one genuinely interesting question: When making a decision, are you more concerned with making the right decision or avoiding a bad decision? I told her "avoiding a bad decision," but I'm not sure. Clearly, as with a lot of these generalizations, it depends on the kind of decision and the possible outcomes.

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about whether this was a NYC-specific survey. Dust from old building materials was distributed over your city more than many places. At the time, other anxieties may have been distorting people's perceptions of risks. (I'm not sure how to count "fear of being lied to" with other anxieties. I think it can have an unusually strong ripple effect.)

I know rather a lot about asbestos safety, if you're curious. Were there any questions about the synergy between smoking and asbestos exposure? The combination is very much more dangerous than either alone, but I don't know to what extent that's common knowledge outside the fire protection industry or asbestos liability lawsuits.

[redbird]

It started general and got more specific, ending with questions about a lawsuit in which the plaintiff was a welder, alleging that his painful, fatal cancer had been caused by asbestos in welding rods; the defendant, the manufacturer of same, contended that the plaintiff had been exposed to much larger amounts of asbestos from other sources, including other work-related exposure. Nothing said about smoking, suggesting that either it isn't an actual case (though they asked if I knew any member of two or three specific families) or that the plaintiff and his household were non-smokers.