Risky Thinking: Irrational Fears about Risk and Society

Abstract

Scientists have made remarkable progress in dealing with technical challenges but not in dealing with society. Given that public concerns have grown, in the face of declining “real” risks, the common if simplistic tendency has been to blame public ignorance or irrationality and to argue that policy decisions should be based on quantitative risk estimates, effectively ignoring public concerns. Such assertions are superficially plausible, but they reflect fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of technological societies, as well as of the reasons behind declining scientific credibility and of actual strengths and weaknesses of risk assessment. Scientific credibility has been undermined not so much by shadowy enemies as by actions of self-proclaimed friends, and there are inherent limitations to the practical usefulness of risk assessment in policy disputes. If proposals for risk-based decision making were actually implemented, they could well lead not to increased credibility for specific technologies but to self-reinforcing losses of credibility for science and technology as a whole.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. Mary A. Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky , Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

Peter Beckmann , Eco-Hysterics and the Technophobes (Boulder, CO: Golem Press, 1973).

3. Max Weber , “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (1918; New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129-156.

4. The data on the waste facility, as well as much of the basic argument, have been drawn from William R. Freudenburg , “Risk and Recreancy: Weber, the Division of Labor, and the Rationality of Risk Perceptions,” Social Forces, 71:909-932 (1993).

William R. Freudenburg et al. , “Media Coverage of Hazard Events: Analyzing the Assumptions,” Risk Analysis (in press).

J. F. Short, Jr. and Lee Clarke , eds, Organizations, Uncertainties, and Risk (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).

7. William R. Freudenburg , “Perceived Risk, Real Risk: Social Science and the Art of Probabilistic Risk Assessment,” Science, 7 Oct. 1988, pp. 44-49.

8. For details, plus a broader discussion, see Lee Clarke , “The Disqualification Heuristic: When Do Organizations Misperceive Risk?” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 5:289-312 (1993).

9. Charles Perrow , Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

10.

10. Cora B. Marrett , “Public Concerns About Nuclear Power and Science,” in Public Reactions to Nuclear Power: Are There Critical Masses? ed. E. A. Rosa and W. R. Freudenburg (Boulder, CO: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Westview Press, 1984), pp. 307-328.

11.

11. For a broader discussion of the concept and an analysis of its use in a specific controversy, see William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling , Oil in Troubled Waters: Perceptions, Politics, and the Battle over Offshore Drilling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).

12.

12. Paul Slovic , “Perceived Risk, Trust, and Democracy,” Risk Analysis, 13(6):675-682 (1993).

13.

13. Todd R. LaPorte and Daniel Metlay , “Technology Observed: Attitudes of a Wary Public,” Science, 18 Apr. 1975, pp. 121-127.

14.

14. Robert K. Merton , On Theoretical Sociology: Five Essays, Old and New (New York: Free Press, 1967).

15.

15. Paul Slovic , “Perception of Risk,” Science, 17 Apr. 1987, pp. 280-285.