Looking for a Straw in a Haystack by Bridging the Cracks Between Individual Judgments: Narrowing the Knowledge Gap To Anticipate Surprises by Transforming Risk Assessors’ Small Worlds Into Large Worlds

Risk Anal. 2026 May;46(5):e70256. doi: 10.1111/risa.70256.

ABSTRACT

The world is constantly changing, yet a risk assessment is based on the knowledge available at one point in time. There will therefore be a gap between the range of possibilities known or conceivable to the assessor at that time and all the possibilities that could occur over infinite time. This will leave the door open to surprises. Anticipating surprises, therefore, requires the narrowing of this knowledge gap. We outline an approach to narrowing it that transforms risk assessors’ small-world representations into a large-world representation by configuring them into a small-world network. Small-world representations are individuals’ partial and subjective perspectives on an aspect of reality. What we call a large-world representation integrates these small-world representations. This transformation narrows the knowledge gap by integrating dispersed knowledge about, and intersecting alternative framings of, a focal risk, thereby dynamically updating the knowledge landscape underpinning its assessment. We use the 9/11 attack as an example. That surprise resulted from a failure to intersect the frames “suicide attack” and “hijacking,” meaning that the possibility of a “suicide hijacking” went unconsidered. Configuring risk assessors into a small-world network would have increased the chance that these two frames would intersect in a risk assessment, thereby anticipating this surprise outcome. In sum, the approach we outline operationalizes the recently extended (C, U) risk-assessment framework. It increases the chance that surprises are anticipated by enabling risk assessors to see as an integral whole what they could otherwise see only fragmentarily.

PMID:42026857 | DOI:10.1111/risa.70256