Large-Scale Risk As a Problem Of Technological, Psychological and Political Judgment

The purpose of this paper is to identify, order, and explain basic concepts, problems, and issues in what may be called the societal debate on large-scale risks. In Section 2 the problem is introduced with a discussion of large-scale risk-taking by analogy with a small-scale example. A number of policy questions are listed and six different kinds of “risk research” are identified. Various problems characterizing large-scale risky decisionmaking are enumerated. In Section 3 a theoretical overview is given of various concepts of risk, both from a statistical-economical point of view and as the result of a psychological analysis. Section 4 starts outlining a multi-disciplinary field research project serving as a source of ideas, findings, and conclusions treated in this and later parts of the paper. It then deals with a number of problems lying at the theoretical basis of methods and procedures for risk analysis. In Section 5 the perception and judgment of risk are discussed in connection with an empirical study about the evaluation of several hazardous materials’ uses by different interest groups. Possible evaluation and decision procedures concerning large-scale risky activities are briefly surveyed in Section 6, together with the design and some results of a decision-theoretic study on the use of hazardous materials.

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