Journal ArticleDOI
Risk Perception: Experts and the Public
TLDR
The authors reviewed behavioral research on perceived risk of the public and experts, giving special attention to nuclear waste risk and pointed out that risk perception is probably less cognitive than has previously been believed, and that such factors as attitudes and moral values play a crucial role.Abstract:
Perceived risk is a crucial factor in the social dilemmas surrounding the risks and hazards of the environment. This paper reviews behavioral research on perceived risk of the public and experts, giving special attention to nuclear waste risk. Experts and the public frequently have very different views of risk, and three cases are distinguished and explanations for the differences between experts and the public are outlined. Theories and models of perceived risk are then discussed. Most theories have been found to have only low or modest explanatory power with regard to level of perceived risk, and even less when it comes to risk acceptability. It is pointed out that risk perception is probably less cognitive than has previously been believed, and that such factors as attitudes and moral values play a crucial role.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Factors in risk perception
TL;DR: In this article, a model was proposed in which attitude, risk sensitivity, and specific fear were used as explanatory variables; this model seems to explain well over 30-40% of the variance and is thus more promising than previous approaches.
Journal ArticleDOI
Perception of hazards: the role of social trust and knowledge
TL;DR: Negative correlations between perceived risks and perceived benefits are found and suggest that the lay public relies on social trust when making judgments of risks and benefits when personal knowledge about a hazard is lacking.
Journal ArticleDOI
Salient value similarity, social trust, and risk/benefit perception
TL;DR: Results indicate that social trust is a key predictive factor of the perceived risks and benefits of a technology, and provide support for the salient values similarity theory of social trust.
Journal ArticleDOI
Risk perception and the media
TL;DR: A survey of research on how media influence risk perception can be found in this paper, where it is shown that even for heavy media users, media are probably not a strong causal factor in (especially not personal) risk perception.
Journal ArticleDOI
Public Attitudes toward Emerging Technologies: Examining the Interactive Effects of Cognitions and Affect on Public Attitudes toward Nanotechnology
TL;DR: This article used data from a national telephone survey to test this interactive model of decision making about emerging technologies and found that emotional heuristics moderate the effect that knowledge about nanotechnology has on people's overall attitudes toward nanotechnology, with knowledge having a weaker effect on attitudes for people who do show strong emotional reactions to the topic.
References
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Book
Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research
Martin Fishbein,Icek Ajzen +1 more
Book
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Amos Tversky,Daniel Kahneman +1 more
TL;DR: The authors described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, availability of instances or scenarios, and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
Book
Handbook of social psychology
TL;DR: In this paper, Neuberg and Heine discuss the notion of belonging, acceptance, belonging, and belonging in the social world, and discuss the relationship between friendship, membership, status, power, and subordination.
Journal ArticleDOI
Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
Amos Tversky,Daniel Kahneman +1 more
TL;DR: A judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by availability, i.e., by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind, is explored.
Book
Personality and Assessment
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the acquired meaning of stimuli and on the situation as perceived, viewing the individual as a cognitive-affective being who construes, interprets, and transforms the stimulus in a dynamic reciprocal interaction with the social world.