Sjoberg L
Stockholm School of Economics, Center for Risk Research, Sweden.
Risk Anal. 2000 Feb;20(1):1-11.
Risk perception is a phenomenon in search of an explanation. Several approaches are discussed in this paper. Technical risk estimates are sometimes a potent factor in accounting for perceived risk, but in many important applications it is not. Heuristics and biases, mainly availability, account for only a minor portion of risk perception, and media contents have not been clearly implicated in risk perception. The psychometric model is probably the leading contender in the field, but its explanatory value is only around 20% of the variance of raw data. Adding a factor of "unnatural risk" considerably improves the psychometric model. Cultural Theory, on the other hand, has not been able to explain more than 5-10% of the variance of perceived risk, and other value scales have similarly failed. A model is proposed in which attitude, risk sensitivity, and specific fear are used as explanatory variables; this model seems to explain well over 30-40% of the variance and is thus more promising than previous approaches. The model offers a different type of psychological explanation of risk perception, and it has many implications, e.g., a different approach to the relationship between attitude and perceived risk, as compared with the usual cognitive analysis of attitude.
风险认知是一种有待解释的现象。本文讨论了几种方法。技术风险估计有时是解释感知风险的一个重要因素，但在许多重要应用中并非如此。启发式和偏差，主要是可得性启发，仅占风险认知的一小部分，而且媒体内容与风险认知之间的关联并不明确。心理测量模型可能是该领域的主要竞争者，但其解释力仅占原始数据方差的20%左右。加入“非自然风险”因素可显著改进心理测量模型。另一方面，文化理论对感知风险方差的解释力不超过5%-10%，其他价值量表也同样未能成功。本文提出了一个模型，其中态度、风险敏感度和特定恐惧被用作解释变量；该模型似乎能解释超过30%-40%的方差，因此比之前的方法更具前景。该模型提供了一种不同类型的风险认知心理学解释，并且有许多启示，例如，与通常的态度认知分析相比，它对态度与感知风险之间关系的解释不同。
