Perceptions of Terrorism and Disease Risks: A Cross-National Comparison

Threats seem to abound. In just the last weeks of 2003 and the first week of 2004, a cow slaughtered in Washington state was found to have BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis), and fears of mad cow disease brought United States beef exports practically to a halt. A third and fourth new case of SARS were reported in China, reviving the anxieties of the previous year, when the hitherto unknown illness caused hundreds of deaths around the world. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security ratcheted up the terrorist threat level to orange, indicating a “high” risk of terrorist attacks. What makes people feel more threatened by some risks than others? To what extent are their perceptions of risk influenced by quantitative data on the likelihood and severity of the risk, and to what extent by their emotional responses to the risk? What are the relationships, if any, between people’s risk perceptions and their risk-related attitudes and behaviors, including their willingness to take personal action and/or support governmental action to address the perceived risk? Understanding why people evaluate health and safety risks as they do is essential for public decision makers to be able to communicate effectively with the public regarding those risks. It will also help them anticipate with reasonable accuracy the public’s reactions both to the risks and to the measures the decision makers may recommend or order in response. The social, political, and economic consequences of poor risk communication and/or other disjunctions between government policy and public response may be momentous. Research on risk perception and related topics has addressed many aspects of these and similar questions. In contrast to experts, whose assessments of risk are supposed to be grounded (although not necessarily exclusively) in the objective probability of relevant adverse events (e.g., death or serious illness), laypeople’s perceptions of and attitudes toward risks to health and safety have been shown to be influenced by many other factors, including