CONTEXT Quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction, and rate of change of health inequalities play a crucial role in creating and assessing policies aimed at eliminating the disproportionate burden of disease in disadvantaged populations. It is generally assumed that the measurement of health inequalities is a value-neutral process, providing objective data that are then interpreted usi...

Scientists increasingly find themselves at the center of contentious public policy debates over issues such as chemical regulation and climate change. The general public and politicians often expect scientific advisors to be purely objective. However, a new commentary in this issue of EHP asserts that scientific research is intrinsically inf luenced by value judgments and that researchers shoul...

Letter NICE and its value judgments Utilitarian values are inadequate EDITOR—The values of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) turn out to be utilitarian and economic.1 Predictably, NICE's attempt to use them to generate advice to professionals for achieving the highest attainable standard of care often founders on the narrowness of perspective. High quality care demands an un...

Estimating the relative frequency of a class of objects or events is fundamental in subjective probability assessments and decision making (Estes, 1976), and research has long shown that people rely on heuristics for making these judgments (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002). In this report, we identify a novel heuristic for making these judgments, the value heuristic: People judge the freque...

Measuring and monitoring socioeconomic health inequalities are critical for understanding the impact of policy decisions. However , the measurement of health inequality is far from value neutral, and one can easily present the measure that best supports one's chosen conclusion or selectively exclude measures. improving people's understanding of the often implicit value judgments is therefore im...