@article{a9f45ce8d0f94e4d8d403af99eeab8cb,
title = "Industry-Dominated Science Advisory Boards Are Perceived To Be Legitimate…But Only When They Recommend More Stringent Risk Management Policies",
abstract = "In 2017, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was criticized for two controversial directives that restricted the eligibility of academic scientists to serve on the agency's key science advisory boards (SABs). The EPA portrayed these directives as necessary to ensure the integrity of the SAB. Critics portrayed them as a tactic by the agency to advance a more industry-friendly deregulatory agenda. With this backdrop, this research examined board composition and its effect on the perceived legitimacy of risk management recommendations by the SAB. In an experiment, we presented participants with hypothetical EPA SABs composed of different proportions of academic and industry scientists. We then asked participants to rate their satisfaction with, and the legitimacy of, these boards in light of their decisions in scenarios based on actual EPA SAB deliberations. Participants perceived higher levels of satisfaction and legitimacy when SABs made more stringent risk management recommendations. While SABs dominated by industry scientists were perceived to be more strongly motivated to protect business interests, we found no effect of board composition on perceptions of satisfaction and legitimacy. These results are consistent with prior research on decision quality that suggests people use normative outcomes as a heuristic for assessing the quality of deliberations. Moreover, these results suggest that members of the public are supportive of federal SABs regardless of their composition, but only if they take actions that are consistent with normative expectations.",
keywords = "Decision making, EPA, legitimacy, procedural justice, risk management",
author = "Joseph {\'A}rvai and Gray, {Sara Goto} and Raimi, {Kaitlin T.} and Robyn Wilson and Caitlin Drummond",
note = "Funding Information: INTRODUCTION issued by former EPA Administer, Scott Pruitt, and upheld by the agency's current Administrator, Andrew Wheeler. This directive (henceforth referred to as the “Pruitt directive”) introduced more restrictive rules governing the eligibility of academic scientists to serve on the EPA SAB 2 by barring those who received research grant support from the EPA from serving on the SAB. These rules did not restrict the service on SABs of scientists from EPA‐regulated industry, or from state agencies that receive EPA funds. A second directive, building directly on the first, prematurely terminated the appointments of several EPA SAB members. —may be seen by outside observers as causing them to think and act in the interests of their employers, and not necessarily in the interests of the environment or the American public. Indeed, outside perceptions of a lack of impartiality among industry scientists may be the mechanism behind the observation (Besley et al., 2017 ) that they tend to be viewed with greater skepticism when compared with academic scientists. In support of this assertion, other research has suggested that perceptions about the presence (or absence) of conflict of interest may be used by observers as a heuristic for more negatively judging the legitimacy of a process, or their satisfaction with the outcomes that result from it (McComas et al., 2007 ; Thibaut & Walker, 1975 ). Funding Information: One of the reviewers of this article pointed out that the mechanism underlying this result may be that respondents did not understand the difference between academic scientists and industry scientists. This is possible, but given the clear differences in perceptions of academic and industry scientists observed in other studies (e.g., Besley et al., 2017 ), and because academic and industry scientists were clearly differentiated in the experiment's preamble (see the Supporting Information), we believe that this would have been the case here. Alternatively, participants may have believed that academic scientists are just as conflicted (e.g., in terms of their financial or research ties to companies) as are industry scientists. Indeed, it is true that academic scientists are often recruited by (and receive compensation from) regulated industries to assist with research and development; Similarly, they may lead research efforts, or are quite likely to be employed by universities that are funded (in part) by grants from industry. We did not ask participants rate their perceptions of conflict of interest as they relate to academic versus industry scientists; thus, we are unable to test for this possibility. We intend to address this question in a future study. not Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 Society for Risk Analysis",
year = "2020",
month = nov,
doi = "10.1111/risa.13540",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "40",
pages = "2329--2339",
journal = "Risk Analysis",
issn = "0272-4332",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "11",
}