Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences

Introduction

Introduction Originally this was intended as a review of the literature on social influences on risk perception. However, it proved difficult to achieve the usual fonn of a literature review. When there is a large, focused body of work to be abstracted, various outlying areas and innovations can be related within a single framework. In this case the relevant work is found entirely in the outlying areas, and the central core of interest in social influences on risk perception is missing. At the same time a very significant body of work views risk perception as an individual and not as a social phenomenon. To start with, surveying the state of the art in that substantial field would take all the time and attention away from the set project since it turns out that that art is in no state at all. The best strategy seems to be to use the question of risk acceptability to make the case for focusing on social factors as strongly as possible. With the change of title, it becomes obviously necessary to point to the scattered, exceptional places where this focus is employed. It seems that the neglect of culture is so systematic and so eiltrenched that nothing less than a large upheaval in the social scJt'nces would bring about a change. 1 The subject matter of these pages is strictly described by the title. It is not about risks. Those who want to learn about the risks we face in the present day are advised to read no further. It is not about risk management. Those who want to learn how to handle risks of any kind should save their time and read no more. These notes are about perception as treated in the various social sciences, and the particular focus is upon risk perception according to the social sciences. Purity and Danger (Douglas 1966) presented an anthropological approach to human cognition which this volume develops. The argument is that humans pay attention to a particular pattern of disasters, treating them as omens or punishments. On this argument there would always be a mutual adaptation of views about natural dangers and views about how society works: Rewards and punishments are stored in the environment. Purity and Danger was well received except for the damning reservation that its argument does not apply to enlightened Western society. In 1978 Aaron Wildavsky, then president of the Russell Sage Foundation, inquired whether anthropology made its cultural analyses only for tribal peoples and ancient civilizations. Are we moderns always exempted from its hypotheses? He was concerned to interpret a cultural change in contemporary America: the new awareness of technological dangers. It was a privilege to collaborate with him in working out the argument of Risk and Culture (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Although both books stand in the respectable tradition of Durkheim and Mauss, Risk and Culture has struck competent reviewers as either novel or outrageous, and always as difficult. So it seemed important to examine the contrary intellectual tide against whose currents the argument about social influences on cognition has so little force. Hence the intended literature review. Close inspection reveals no tide, but some inertia; no contrary currents, but some timidity. Sometimes the curiosity of scholars fastens steadily upon certain formulations and problems, to the neglect of others. There is enough agreement among psychologists that when this happens there is nothing haphazard about it. The sociology of perception (which includes the history, philosophy, and SOCiology of science and the sociology of everyday knowledge) is especially interested in persisting gaps in information. We may expect some random patches of inattention because of the impossibility of attending to everything at once. But regularly scheduled obliviousness is more 2 intriguing. Persistent shortsightedness, selectivity, and tolerated contradiction are usually not so much signs of perceptual weakness as signs of strong intention to protect certain values and their accompanying institutional forms. The current gaps in research in risk perception can be used as a paradigmatic example. Intellectual activity takes place in history. No way of knowing is privileged from contemporary cultural pressures. Gaps and contradictions in a system of thought are a good guide to the institutional fabric which supports it and to which it gives life. The professional discussion of cognition and choice has no sustained theorizing about the social influences which select particular risks for public attention. Yet it is hard to maintain seriously that perception of risk...