Risk Perception: Analyzing Images and Fears

Abstract

We cannot know what we call reality in the same direct fashion as a curious baby does, testing a bottle of milk by touch, by taste, by sniff, and by other manipulations. We know the evidence of our senses, but we also have the evidence that these senses are easily deceived. We make inferences about people from what they say and what they do, but these inferences often prove wrong, partly because the perceived image we have of people, their words, and their behavior, largely depend upon signs, or the indirect pseudoenvironment, which only fragmentally describes the object or person. The images we have of government, industry, or experts, therefore, might often contradict what they actually are. We also make inferences about things and events from what we hear other people say and what the mass media report about them. Again, these inferences often prove wrong, partly because the image we have of them, their nature and meaning, largely depend upon our pseudoenvironment. Thus we may perceive what is actually unsafe as safe and what is reasonably safe as unsafe.