The social amplification of risk : theoretical foundations and empirical applications

Abstract

The article presents the framework of social amplification of risk which integrates the technical assessment and the social experience of risk. Risk perception research has revealed that contextual factors shape individual risk estimations and evaluations. Identification of these factors, such as voluntariness, personal ability to influence risks, familiarity with the hazard, and catastrophic potential, provides useful information about the elements that individuals consider in constructing their interpretation of risks. In addition, analyses of people's heuristics in making inferences have shed some light on how risk information is generalized and evaluated intuitively. These psychological studies fail to explain, however, why individuals attend to certain characteristics of risks and ignore others. Furthermore, in focusing only on the individual as an information processor, these studies exclude from the analysis the social and cultural variance of risk interpretations. The social amplification framework postulates that the social and economic impacts of an adverse event are determined not only by the direct physical consequences of the event, but by the interaction of psychological, cultural, social, and institutional processes that amplify or attenuate public experience of risk and result in secondary impacts.