This paper deals with the question of how societal impacts of fatal accidents can be integrated into the  anagement of natural hazards. In Switzerland, the well-known α-model, which weights the number of expected fatalities by the function Nα (with α > 1), is used across governmental agencies and across hazards to give additional weight to the number of potential fatalities in risk estimations. Although the use of this function has been promoted in several federal publications, it is not evident whether laypeople want public managers to overweight less frequent accidents of larger consequences against more frequent ones of smaller  onsequences. Here we report on a choice experimental task that required respondents to decide on three risky situations. In each situation they were asked, which of two roads they would protect from avalanche risk, given that they were the responsible hazard manager and had only resources to protect one of the two roads. The results of this experiment show that laypeople behave on average risk seeking (α < 1) rather than risk averse (α > 1), when they make decisions on avalanche risks involving fatalities. These results support earlier research, finding experts to behave risk prone when deciding on multi-fatality risks (N > 100). In conclusion, people tend to give more weight to the probability of fatalities than to the number of expected fatalities.