Risky Thinking: Irrational Fears about Risk and Society

William R. Freudenburg

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1996, vol. 545, issue 1, 44-53

Abstract: Scientists have made remarkable progress in dealing with technical challenges but not in dealing with society. Given that public concerns have grown, in the face of declining “real†risks, the common if simplistic tendency has been to blame public ignorance or irrationality and to argue that policy decisions should be based on quantitative risk estimates, effectively ignoring public concerns. Such assertions are superficially plausible, but they reflect fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of technological societies, as well as of the reasons behind declining scientific credibility and of actual strengths and weaknesses of risk assessment. Scientific credibility has been undermined not so much by shadowy enemies as by actions of self-proclaimed friends, and there are inherent limitations to the practical usefulness of risk assessment in policy disputes. If proposals for risk-based decision making were actually implemented, they could well lead not to increased credibility for specific technologies but to self-reinforcing losses of credibility for science and technology as a whole.

Date: 1996
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716296545001005 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:545:y:1996:i:1:p:44-53

DOI: 10.1177/0002716296545001005

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().