Attitudes and Stress in the Presence of Technological Risk: A Test of the Supreme Court Hypothesis

The 1983 Supreme Court decision on Three Mile Island held it would be almost impossible to distinguish between persons suffering genuine psychological stress and those who merely opposed the facility. While this argument was treated as factual by the justices, it is merely a hypothesis. This article provides an empirical test of the hypothesis, using the only other nuclear host community known to have experienced as much opposition as Three Mile Island. If the Supreme Court hypothesis were correct, attitudes toward the facility would be almost perfectly correlated with stress symptomatology. In fact, the strongest attitude-stress correlation in this community was -.096, even though simple sociodemographic variables showed far stronger correlations with the stress measures. By contrast, the broader literature reveals growing support for the alternative hypothesis implicitly rejected by the Supreme Court, namely that the risk of technological accidents may indeed be a significant predictor of psychological stress. The findings have implications for both policy and future research. In April of 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the first time on the role of social and psychological factors in certain federal decisions about controversial facilities. The case, Metropolitan Edison Co. v. People Against Nuclear Power (1983), dealt with the undamaged nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, which happened to be shut down for refueling at the time of the infamous accident at the site's other reactor. People Against Nuclear Power (PANE), a local citizens' group, argued that restarting the reactor would create negative consequences for their community's psychological health and that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was required to perform additional analyses before allowing the * The authors wish to thank Stephen R. Couch, Thomas E. Drabek, Riley E. Dunlap, Kai T. Erikson, William S. Jordan III, Catherine E. Ross, and anonymous Social Forces reviewersfor helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article, which was originally developedfor the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, College Station, Texas. Direct correspondence and requests for reprints to Dr. Freudenburg at the Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706. i) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, June 1991, 69(4):1143-1168 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 04:42:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1144 / Social Forces 69:4, June 1991 reactor to resume operation. A high court (the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals) had agreed, but the nation's highest court did not. The main thrust of the Supreme Court's reasoning was that the justices had not been shown a sufficiently close causal connection between the physical fact of starting the undamaged reactor at the site and the likelihood of increased psychological impairment (for further discussions, see Annas 1983; Jordan 1984; Llewellyn & Freudenburg 1989; Meidinger & Freudenburg 1983). A key consideration in the Supreme Court decision was the assumed relationship between attitudes toward a facility and the psychological impacts created by that same facility. The local citizens in the Three Mile Island case emphasized that their case was based on the issue of psychological health, and not merely on disliking the nearby nuclear power plant. The distinction between negative attitudes and psychological distress was vital to the citizens' case, but they failed to convince the Court that the two could be separated.' The citizens pointed to studies showing heightened stress levels in the community after the accident, with quantitative evidence of physiological symptoms such as digestive problems, headaches, and difficulty with sleeping or daily physical activity (see the summary of studies in Dohrenwend et al. 1981). The citizens were also supported by "Friend of the Court" briefs from the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association. They were opposed, however, by the agency that would have been required to prepare a new assessment if the court had ruled differently the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In its arguments, the NRC emphasized the subjective rather than the physiological aspects of psychological distress, such as tension and anxiety, and it characterized psychological distress as being engendered, if at all, solely through 'public disagreement with the agency's decision" (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 1982:41). The NRC argued that, as a practical matter, these subjective responses would make it impossible to differentiate between the persons living near a reactor who suffered "genuine" psychological distress and those who reported distress merely because of their opposition to the facility. The Supreme Court justices evidently agreed in large part with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Writing for the Court, Justice Rehnquist noted that the D.C. Court of Appeals had previously accepted PANE's argument that the case: ... raised an issue of health damage, while [earlier] cases presented questions of fear or policy disagreement. We do not believe this line is so easily drawn. Anyone who fears or dislikes a project may find himself suffering from "anxiety, tension, fear, [and] a sense of helplessness ...." Neither the language or the history of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) suggest that it was intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy objections to proposed federal actions. The political process, and not [legal action], provides the appropriate forum in which to air policy disagreements. We do not mean to ... suggest that the psychological health damage [PANE] fear[s] could not, in fact, occur. Nonetheless, it is difficult for us to see the differences between someone who dislikes a government decision so much that he suffers anxiety and stress, someone who fears the effects of that decision so much that he suffers similar anxiety and stress, and someone who suffers anxiety and stress that 'flow directly' .. .from the same decision. It would be extraordinarily difficult for agencies to differentiate between 'genuine' claims of psychological health damage and claims that are grounded solely in disagreement with a democratically adopted policy. (51 LW:4374)2 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 04:42:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Attitudes, Stress, and Technological Risk / 1145 While Justice Rehnquist's observations were treated as findings of fact, they are clearly based on the underlying assumption that host community residents who opposed an unpopular reactor would report significantly more psychological distress than persons in the same community who favored the facility. The assumption was evidently seen as plausible by the various parties involved, but in fact it appears to be an untested hypothesis. Although the hypothesis is inherently a testable one, PANE's attorney has reported that he was unable to find any evidence to support or to refute it at the time of the case (ordan 1983). SOCIAL SCIENCE APPROACHES While all nine Supreme Court justices apparently felt negative attitudes would be strongly correlated with reported distress in the host community, at least some social scientists appear to view the question differently, suggesting that it may indeed be possible to separate stress symptomatology from negative attitudes toward a given development. Indeed, the existing literature rarely relates the two concepts, treating them instead as being both operationally and conceptually distinct. Operationally, attitudes toward a given facility tend to be dealt with in a relatively straightforward manner (e.g., "Do you favor or oppose the construction of facility X?"). Issues of psychological health are sometimes dealt with in a more complex matter, but particularly in the case of studies dealing with stress and its consequences, the most common approach is to use sets of questions about relatively distinct physical symptoms (e.g., "how often are you bothered by an upset stomach?" or "do you often have trouble with your heart beating hard?"). The PANE arguments emphasized these types of physiological measures rather than the more subjective considerations such as "anxiety, tension, fear, and a sense of helplessness," stressed by the Supreme Court (51 LW:4373). Conceptually, moreover, attitudes toward a given facility and impairments to psychological health are seen in quite different terms, although here the distinction is perhaps less clear than it is in the case of operationalization. Attitudes, of course, have been conceptualized in many different ways. Allport's classic review (1935) was able to consider over 100 definitions, and other definitions have accumulated since then. The type of attitudinal research of interest here, however, is consistent with relatively common definitions, e.g., that of Edwards (1957), 'the degree of positive or negative affect associated with some psychological object' (2), or of Hill (1981), "evaluations of objects" (352). In what is probably the most frequently employed conceptual approach, attitudes are generally seen as emerging in a relatively straightforward way from the perceived characteristics of an object (e.g., a given facility) and the individual's evaluations of what s/he perceives (see Fishbein 1963, 1967 for discussions of the additional complexities involved in measuring attitudes toward technological development and the environment; see Freudenburg 1991a; Heberlein 1981; Van Liere & Dunlap 1981 for analyses of attitudes toward nuclear power; in particular, see Brody 1984, or Rosa & Freudenburg