What Makes Lay Intuition So Often Fundamentally at Odds with Expert Assessments of Environmental Risks

The prevailing account of expert vs. lay conflicts of risk intuition on such matters as nuclear waste and pesticides is that experts focus on a very narrow range of consequences, but ordinary people have a much richer sense of what is involved in choices about risk. Experts may feel comfortable with a level of precautions that seems wholly inadequate to ordinary people, because they typically assess risks in terms of quantitative assessments, while ordinary citizens care a great deal about qualitative aspects of risk, such as voluntariness, and how far authorities responsible for managing the risk have earned their trust, and about risk to future generations. In a very recent book Dealing with Risk (University of Chicago Press, 1996) I argue that this widely accepted view is in fact wrong.