Worcester, Massachusetts
Surprise occurs when perceived reality departs qualitatively from expectations (Holling, 1986). Surprise is therefore dependent on expectations, behaviors and interpretations. Since expectations are a key element of surprise, how and why expectations arise in different beholders is central.
Expectations arise from metaphors and concepts that provide order and understanding to science and society. Concepts are rooted in experience and since concepts are incomplete, eventually they produce surprises. The longer expectations are held beyond their time, the greater the degree of surprise and adjustment. Surprises are of many types; some involve rareness and large uncertainties, others do not. One hypothesis is that the degree of surprise is a function of the strength of expectations, the signal value of the event, and the salience of the hazard to the beholder; each of these variables is important to the strength of the response. Surprises also depend on the "surprise specialists" (i.e., environmental groups, non- governmental organizations, etc.), who, Kasperson says, search for and sometimes manufacture surprises.
Risk signals are messages about a technology, activity, or event indicating that a new risk has appeared or that an existing risk is more or less serious or manageable than previously thought. Attributes that affect signal value include newness, catastrophic potential, involuntary exposure, blame, management of risk events distributional effects, and the societal processing of the risk or event.
The social amplification/attenuation of risk and risk events are products of the information system (media, interpersonal network, etc.), the response system (organizations, groups, individuals, attentive publics) and ripple effects (cascading effects, secondary and tertiary). The social-amplification process may either amplify or attenuate the risk event and the event's signal value. Surprise is very much about how this process operates. The figure below is a highly simplified representation of the social amplification of risk and potential impacts on (in this example) a corporation.
Kasperson believes that society's current management system keeps generating surprises; it is management system failure in many cases, i.e., we "couldn't believe" the extreme measurements of the ozone hole or we would have known about it sooner; we could have prevented Three Mile Island and the Valdez oil spill, but the mind set that it could not happen kept us from doing so. This is management failure; we need to expand the uncertainty bounds. People systematically underestimate the potential for error and overestimate how much we know.
