Risk perception

The study of risk perception arose out of the observation that experts and lay people often disagreed about how risky various technologies and natural hazards were.

His major finding was that people will accept risks 1,000 times greater if they are voluntary (e.g. driving a car) than if they are involuntary (e.g. a nuclear disaster).

Implied in this assumption is that additional information can help people understand true risk and hence lessen their opinion of danger.

These early works maintained that people use cognitive heuristics in sorting and simplifying information, leading to biases in comprehension.

[10] The valence theory of risk perception only differentiates between positive emotions, such as happiness and optimism, and negative ones, such as fear and anger.

[12] The earliest psychometric research was done by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who performed a series of gambling experiments to see how people evaluated probabilities.

[14] People greatly rely on the scientific community to assess the threat of environmental problems because they usually do not directly experience the effects of phenomena such as climate change.

[16] Research within the psychometric paradigm turned to focus on the roles of affect, emotion, and stigma in influencing risk perception.

They found that, contrary to Starr's basic assumption, people generally saw most risks in society as being unacceptably high.

[18] Research in psychometrics has proven that risk perception is highly dependent on intuition, experiential thinking, and emotions.

One line of the Cultural Theory of risk is based on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky first published in 1982.

Even Douglas says that the theory is controversial; it poses a danger of moving out of the favored paradigm of individual rational choice of which many researchers are comfortable.

[22] On the other hand, writers who drawn upon a broader cultural theory perspective have argued that risk-perception analysis helps understand the public response to terrorism in a way that goes far beyond 'rational choice'.

As John Handmer and Paul James write: In the area of embodied risk, people are not as fearful of themselves as perhaps they should be on the issues of illicit drug use, unsafe sex and so on.

Yet with the compounding of both more abstract and more embodied risk this package appears to have met its goal to generate support for government policy.

[24] The Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF), combines research in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and communications theory.

Behaviors of individuals and groups then generate secondary social or economic impacts while also increasing or decreasing the physical risk itself.