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substantially higher predictive power 3, 41 . In the United States,
distrust in repository management was mainly linked to
opposition to the proposed siting of the Yucca mountain
radioactive waste repository, because of the perceived
risk of the waste site 42 . Other studies show that trust is
significant across a range of hazards and risks 43 , although the
precise underlying reasons for trust and distrust may vary
in different risk cases and contexts. In the case of GM crops,
for example, it was the ambiguity of risks (see Chapter 4)
alongside concern about the activities of large multinational
corporations imposing risks on people without their
consent; for foot and mouth disease, it was the insensitivity
to local impacts of the central management strategies.
In conceptual terms, trust cuts across all of the main
approaches to risk perceptions described above, while
a number of recent risk controversies — including BSE
and GM crops — have made policymakers aware that the
public have become key players in many controversial risk
issues, and that (dis)trust may be a core component of
this 39, 44 . Trust is often conceptualized as a set of cognitive
judgements along discrete dimensions that are primarily
related to the (presumed) behaviour of risk managers,
particularly around their care, competence and vested
interest 43, 45 . We trust people, experts and institutions if they
act in a caring way towards us, are knowledgeable about
the domain at hand, and are demonstrably free from any
self-serving interest or partisan bias (and ideally those who
simultaneously exhibit all three!). These three dimensions
help to explain why ‘independent scientists’ remain some of
the most trusted social actors in relation to communicating
about controversial risk issues. Other more recent work
suggests that social trust and cooperation can also be built
on the identity-based concepts of value similarity. That is, we
tend to trust people who share our values or are members
of our own social group, especially when information about
a risk is either uncertain or sparse 46 .
Walls et al 47 point out that these different components
of trust can exist in tension, with social trust likely to
emerge as multidimensional and fragmented, as a product
of a reconciliation of competing ideas, knowledge and
impressions. They introduce the important concept of ‘critical
trust’ as an organising principle, something which lies on
‘Independent scientists’
remain some of the
most trusted social
actors in relation to
communicating about
controversial risk issues.
It is entirely rational not
to wish to place complete
blind faith on any
organization or individual
who holds the power of
life or death over us or
over the environment.
a continuum between outright scepticism (rejection) and
uncritical emotional acceptance. Such a concept attempts
to reconcile a situation in which people actually rely on
risk managing institutions while simultaneously possessing
a critical attitude toward the effectiveness, motivations or
independence of the agency in question 43,48 . Again, from
a policy perspective it is entirely rational not to wish to
place complete blind faith on any organization or individual
who holds the power of life or death over us or over the
environment. And although for many policymakers the
‘reclamation of trust’ has become an explicit objective, this
suggests that risk communication efforts that are aimed
at directly increasing trust may not be universally effective
in solving risk controversies 49 . Such policies could well be
counterproductive where they are based on the incorrect
assumption that trust can be simply manipulated in order
to increase the acceptance of a controversial risk. If Beck
and Giddens are right about the emergence of a risk society,
risk communicators will have to find new ways of working
under conditions of permanently eroded trust. Accordingly,
policy advice today tends to stress the importance of
analytic-deliberative engagement and dialogue as the
means for exploring the values and perceptions underlying
risk controversies and for exploring routes to better
risk communication and conflict resolution 50, 51 (see also
Chapter 5 and Chapter 9). Although such methods have
an established empirical track-record when used to resolve
local site-based facility siting and other controversies, scaling
up to national-level questions such as national energy
strategies or policies to tackle global environmental risks
set a range of very difficult conceptual and methodological
challenges 52 . Pidgeon and Fischhoff 8 argue, in the context
of climate change risks, that all of this points to the need
in the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, to develop novel
strategic capacity and skills in risk communication and
public engagement with science. This requires us to bring
together expertise from fundamental domain sciences such
as radiation protection, climate change, or biosciences, with
the appropriate social sciences of decision analysis and risk
communication.