Rational and personal aspects of risk

Abstract Several ill-related lines of inquiry deal with problems of ‘risk’ and ‘perceived risk’. First, there is a handful of formal definitions of risk, and a line of normative-descriptive research on human decision making. Second, there is a social-clinical psychological body of theory and evidence on topics like stress, risk tolerance, and emergency decision making. And recently, a multi-disciplinary literature is developing on ‘risk analysis’. In it, one frequently encounters such ‘aspects of risk’ as ‘voluntariness of exposure’, ‘controllability of consequences’ and ‘catastrophality’. In this paper we will discuss contributions from these research lines in relation to one another. Our primary interest, however, lies in a ‘psychological categorization’ and a rational ordering of the many possible aspects of risk. Implications and the potential value of these schemes are discussed.