The interpretation of uncertainty is frequently a source of conflict in deciding on an appropriate course of action regarding the remediation of radioactive waste sites. Experts and laypeople may disagree on the uncertainty involving critical driving factors-political, economic, social, and technical (PEST)-of a proposed remediation. Questions such as, what constitutes a reasonable risk and wha...

Laypeople's perceptions of health and safety risks have been widely studied, but only a few studies have addressed perceptions of ecological hazards. We assembled a list of 39 attributes of ecological hazards from the literatures on comparative risk assessment, ecological health, environmental conservation and management, environmental psychology, and risk perception. In Study 1, 125 laypeople ...

The purposes of this study were to rate the attractiveness of different smile variables, to compare the perception of Jordanian laypeople, general practitioners, and orthodontists to altered smile aesthetics, and to identify the threshold where different variables begin to impair smile aesthetics. A smiling photograph of a female dental student was selected and digitally manipulated to create c...

Several highly-cited experiments have presented evidence suggesting that neuroimages may unduly bias laypeople's judgments of scientific research. This finding has been especially worrisome to the legal community in which neuroimage techniques may be used to produce evidence of a person's mental state. However, a more recent body of work that has looked directly at the independent impact of neu...

Abstract Jonathan Livengood and Justin Sytsma have published a series of studies on “Actual Causation Compositionality,” in which they investigate causal attributions laypeople. We use one their vignettes to follow up research. Our findings cast doubt conclusion that ordinary tend violate the compositionality constraint if looks at cases someone is responsible for an effect by way intermediary ...

Spinal manipulation, as practiced by US-trained osteopathic physicians, is a safe and effective method of resolving patient pain and encouraging desirable physiologic improvement--often without pharmacologic intervention. Though novices, laypeople, and other clinicians also use manual techniques with similar goals in mind, their results are varied and sometimes dangerous to those they would hel...

Using the prism of skin disease, this short letter examines the overall impact that disfigurement can have on sufferers’ lives. Often trivialised by health professionals and laypeople alike, the common misconception that skin disease is not ‘serious’ is challenged. Looking in turn at the overall psychosocial impact and psychiatric co-morbidities, the effects of stigmatisation are examined as we...