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.