Risk Assessment and the Science of Public Opinion

Source: John Moeses Bauan/Unsplash

"I looked into his eyes and knew that he would keep doing this." So said one victim of rape to the probation service following her rapist’s release from prison; her legitimate wish to convey the traumatic nature of her experience was held up by others as confirmation of the view that the release decision was misguided on the grounds of risk.

If you type "killer (or rapist) released from prison" into an internet search engine, then you get a sense of the extent of the public’s utter disbelief that any professional or organisation could be so naïve as to believe in an individual’s safe return to the community, when he or she has already perpetrated an unspeakable act of violence.

As a specialist in the field of risk assessment, I occasionally find myself indulging in a moment of maudlin self-pity as I wonder whether heart surgeons also face this degree of contempt for their skills. However, the fact is that professionals who work with risk—and expose others to the potential of harm—should rightly be held accountable to the public for the quality of their expertise and advice.

Risk assessment in relation to violent offenders is no longer the somewhat random and poorly evidenced professional activity that it once was. Theories and empirical data underpin the newer generation of tools—whether based on actuarial methods or structured judgment—and are repeatedly tested for their relevance and ability to predict negative outcomes with any accuracy.

Daniel Kahneman (2011), a Nobel prize-winning behavioural psychologist working in the field of economics who wrote the seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow, examined rational and irrational motivations underpinning thinking processes and judgment. His findings help us to understand why our apparently wise and scientific risk messages fall on public stony ground. He described the substitution heuristic as a process whereby we substitute mental shortcuts for difficult target questions in order to solve a problem more easily, particularly in order to match our mood. Applied to the world of forensic psychology and the risk assessment of violent life-sentenced prisoners, then we would understand the target question as, "Does this individual now pose sufficiently low enough risk of harm to others that he can be released into the community under supervision?" This is what parole boards—one way or another—across the world have to consider. The public finds this question impossibly difficult to answer, as it clashes fundamentally with their negative emotional response to the original crime; unconsciously, the public substitutes the easier question—"Can the individual be forgiven for his crime?" to which the answer is a resounding "no." I think that the task of acknowledging someone might pose a low risk of reoffending is experienced as an invalidation of the enormity of the original offense.

However, it is not just the public who struggles; such misjudgments are mirrored by an extraordinary professional reluctance to relinquish preferred myths—see my previous post on denial and lack of victim empathy being unrelated to future risk as an example.

Colleagues and I conducted a simple but fascinating piece of research on this topic. We introduced some descriptive words that evoked negative emotions into two of our four case vignettes that were rated for risk level by experienced professionals. For example, we substituted "he hit her over the head with a brick" in the low-emotion vignette with "his face contorted as he smashed her over the head with a brick" in the high-emotion vignette. We were able to demonstrate that negative affect was far more significant in influencing risk ratings than were the evidence-based risk variables with the case vignettes. This was described by Kahneman as exaggerated emotional coherence; a phenomenon in which our attitudes are driven by our emotional responses, such that we suppress information that is ambiguous or contradictory in order to achieve coherence.

My chapter on risk assessment in the book explores these issues in more detail and walks the reader through the key steps to good quality risk assessment.