Expert perceptions have been increasingly used to perform risk assessments in
airport predictive risk assessments in recent years. Although it is known that
biases are less influential in groups of experts when compared to laypeople,
they still can be residually present in such tasks with this specific group.
Therefore, this article aims to propose (1) the pragmatic organization of
knowledge about the biases that may affect airport risk assessments by groups of
experts and (2) which of them most often arise in this type of analysis and at
what intensity. For the development of the work, we carried out a dense
bibliographic review of the theme. Later, we performed a predictive risk
assessment and a survey, with the support of an experienced group of 30 experts
from Brazilian regulatory agency and airport operators. After 1224 risk
judgments, experts were able to clearly indicate regulations and their sections
that are disproportionately more and less important in terms of risk, leading
States to a better regulatory quality only by changing their logic of actions to
a risk-based approach. Later the group answered a survey on a list of 12
heuristic biases created from the bibliographic review. Results showed that, in
fact experts have a resistance to biases influence, mainly based in their
academic and professional background, but also showed this influence is not
exactly negligible. It was also possible to rank the heuristic biases in terms
of importance and indicate that experts tend to concern with three hierarchical
information characteristics when judging risk: at first, would be the form in
which risk problems are presented; second, how they interpret information
presented; and third, the amount of information presented.
