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55British Journal of Social Psychology (2003), 42, 55–73© 2003 The British Psychological Societywww.bps.org.ukRisk: From perception to social representationHélène Joffe*Department of Psychology, University College London, UKThis paper is concerned with how people make meaning of the risks they face. Itexplores certain assumptions of the risk perception approaches, which dominatethe area. It argues that despite changes currently taking place in the eld, such modelsstill focus on static, intrapersonal processes, with many viewing human thinking asanalogous to erroneous information processing. In the place of an individual ‘de cit’focus, the paper proposes a more intersubjective theory of the response to risk.Social representations theory is evaluated and its validity assessed by highlightingempirical work on representations of biotechnological and health risks. The reviewreveals that the response to risk is a highly social, emotive and symbolic entity.Therefore a theory and methods appropriate to such qualities are proposed, toproduce a valid psychology of risk.This paper explores how lay people make meaning of risks, ranging from dangersposed by genetically modified (GM) food to developing acquired immune deficiencysyndrome (AIDS). It argues that the ‘perception’ approaches, dominant in the psychologyof risk, might usefully be challenged by a ‘social representations’ approach.The perception approaches stress the intrapersonal level, often excluding broaderinfluences, and highlight cognitive issues such as the biases and heuristics used in theapprehension of risks. In the place of an individualized ‘deficit’ model of static riskperceptions, the paper proposes a psychological approach concerned with how theparticular representation of a risk evolves, why it is created and accepted, and thesymbolic factors that feed it. Existing theories of the perception of risk are summarizedto show how the chosen approach avoids their shortcomings. The aim of the paper isto explain the relevance and utility of social representations theory (SRT) for the risksphere, with the hope that this provides food for thought to those working withinother approaches. The validity of SRT is ascertained by reviewing the English-languagesocial representations literature on risk.De ning riskAt the outset, the definition of risk utilized in this paper must be clarified. There is nocommonly accepted definition of the term ‘risk’, either in science or in lay perception(Renn, 1998). However, many definitions share the notion of anticipating future,uncertain outcomes. Since the concern of this paper lies predominantly with lay*Requests for reprints should be addressed to Hélène Joffe, Department of Psychology, University College London,Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK (e-mail: h.joffe@ucl.ac.uk).

56 Hélène Joffepeople’s responses to the health and safety risks they face, it adopts Douglas’ (1994)definition of risk as simply ‘danger from future damage’ and focuses only on negativerisks. Douglas recognizes that the classical, contemporary definition used in the expertrealm is: ‘the probability of an event combined with the magnitude of the losses andgains that it will entail’ (p. 40). However, she argues that in contemporary thought, riskis less likely to include a positive outcome, and, furthermore, from a lay perspective,the connection to probability theory and rational choice is not paramount. Laypeople’s tendency to bypass probability theory is not explained in terms of theirinability to understand ‘the sums’, but in relation to the absence, in the classicaldefinition, of some of the issues that people care about.The overarching definition of risk as ‘danger from future damage’, at least from thelay perspective, is antithetical to a strand of the risk literature in which painstakingdifferentiation is made between ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’ disasters, as well asbetween ‘hazards’ and ‘risks’. 1 While the division appears irrefutable, from the layperspective, it is tenuous. One of the more robust findings in social psychologyindicates that lay thinkers conceptualize misfortunes as if human choices wereinvolved, whatever their material basis. People engage in such ‘spontaneous’ causalthinking particularly in relation to unexpected and more negative events (Weiner,1985). Therefore, distinctions between different categories in the risk literature areundermined by people’s tendency to implicate individual decisions—such as those tolive in a particular place or to fail to implement safety checks—in their readings ofmisfortunes (see Walster, 1966). The scenarios discussed in this paper are both negativeand unexpected, and are therefore likely to evoke the ‘why’ question, and also tohave a degree of the ‘human-made’ element read into them, whatever their materialbasis.Finally, when defining risk, a question arises concerning the need to consider itsexistence ‘out there’. It might be argued that one cannot talk of lay responses to risks,since those phenomena that are perceived as ‘risks’ already embody people’s constructions.In this paper, risks, and the responses to them, are viewed as separate entities,but there is recognition that phenomena read as risks already contain social constructions.This follows Yardley’s (1997) material-discursive position in which a ‘risk’ isboth a material phenomenon and a socially constructed one. However, it is with the‘readings’ of risks, particularly from the lay perspective, that the paper is concerned.Understanding the relationship between a potential danger and the reading thereofdepends upon the theoretical position adopted.Perceiving risk: Optimistic bias and beyondSince the 1950s, psychologists have been increasingly interested in how lay peopleperceive risks. Mainstream, psychological research has focused on the cognitive processesthat occur when humans are faced with risks. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky(1982) state that: ‘Cognitive psychology is concerned with internal processes, mentallimitations, and the way in which the processes are shaped by the limitations’ (p. xii).1 ‘Natural’ disasters include earthquakes, hurricanes, and oods. The ‘human-made’ disasters are those producedabundantly in contemporary Western society: nuclear and industrial accidents, the greenhouse effect, acid rain and so on.‘Hazards’ tend to be distinguished from ‘risks’ in that damage comes from an external source. The properties associatedwith the ‘natural’ disaster and ‘hazard’ categories overlap substantially. ‘Hazards’ are said to become ‘risks’ as soon asanything becomes known about how the danger might be averted; in other words, once human action can be taken inrelation to it.

Perception of risk 57In line with this, the area of judgment and decision-making regarding risks tends toevaluate the probabilities that individuals offer in relation to their chances of becomingaffected by a particular risk. Probabilities offered are often compared with scientificestimates of probability, and the focus has been upon the existence and source of layerror (see Kahneman et al., 1982, for a review).Thriving branches of the Tversky and Kahneman (1974) inspired risk perception areahave remained centrally focused on individual perceptual or cognitive errors. The areasthat examine the tendency towards ‘overconfidence’ regarding one’s own judgments ofrisk, and the optimistic ‘bias’ (OB) tradition, pursue the notions of the fallibility orfaultiness of human information processing. In some sense, the two areas are connectedin their focus on people’s optimism, and the latter tradition will be highlighted.Scope and ndings of the OB approachThe OB approach has examined responses to a vast array of the health and safety risksthat people confront both daily and in more unexpected circumstances. It is employedextensively in the burgeoning health risk sphere forming a core element in many socialcognition models that attempt to predict factors that facilitate risk-taking. Theseinclude the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1974), Protection Motivation Theory(Rogers, 1975) and the Health Action Process Approach (Schwartzer, 1992). The coreof the theory is examined, in brief, as an inroad into some of the limitations of thecognitive models. 2OB focuses on errors made when people compare their own, as opposed to others’,chances of coming into contact with a host of misfortunes such as car accidents, radonproblems in the home, and HIV. When asked to think about their chances of facingrisks, people imagine, unrealistically, that the future holds few adverse events (Taylor,1989) and expect these to strike others, rather than themselves (Weinstein, 1982).Weinstein’s and Taylor’s influential work on OB describes the robust and widespreadnature of the personal sense of invulnerability. Taylor and Brown (1994) go as faras to assert that, typically, more than 95% of the population may exhibit unrealisticoptimism in relation to a wide range of risks.Weinstein (1987) attributes OB to information-processing errors: people’s lack ofexperience with the problem makes it difficult for them to imagine how it might affectthem; people compare themselves with others who are at particularly high risk inorder to maintain a sense of low personal risk; people overestimate the skills theypossess that would allow them to avoid being affected by the risk. This focus on thecognitive tricks played by individual minds resonates throughout the risk-perceptionliterature, with its focus on biases such as those of availability, overconfidence and thedesire for certainty (see Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 2000). Even though there isconsiderable debate concerning the ubiquity of the OB phenomenon, it centres onchallenges to aspects of the model rather than to its core assumptions. 3 The key tenet,2Since the focus of the current paper is on approaches used to map people’s thoughts, rather than their behaviouralintentions concerning potential dangers, models concerning people’s behavioural intentions in risky situations are notreviewed. These include the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behaviour, which have been employedextensively for assessing behavioural intentions such as those to practice safer sex (see Sheeran, Abraham, & Orbell,1999). The author has appraised these models elsewhere (see Joffe, 1996a).3Question marks hang over the degree to which OB manifests in the population as a whole (see Myers & Brewin, 1996;Myers & Renolds, 2000), to whether it exists cross-culturally (see Heine & Lehman, 1995; Kleinhesselink & Rosa, 1991;Peeters, Cammaert, & Czapinski, 1997; Taylor & Armor, 1996), to its links to the ‘actual’ risks faced (see Klein &Radcliffe, 1999) and to whether it is an illusion of control rather than of optimism (McKenna, 1993).

58 Hélène Joffeenshrined in OB and a broad spectrum of risk perception models, that many humansare basically risk-averse, but unintentionally miscalculate their risks due to cognitivedeficits, such as an inefficient handling of information, remains unquestioned.Challenging the assumptions of risk ‘perception’This assumption can be challenged along a number of dimensions. Wynne (1982)coined the now widely used term ‘deficit model’ to denote how objective scientists arejuxtaposed to irrational lay people in many theories of the human response to risk.Although the 1990s have heralded modifications in such theorization (see Pidgeon,Hood, Jones, Turner, & Gibson, 1992), it survives in both psychological theory andthe policy arena. Here the public is seen to be lacking intellectually, when measuredagainst ‘authoritative science’. In relation to nuclear power, for example, itsproponents have demanded that public debates evaluate the ‘hard facts’, withoutreference to other realms (Wynne, 1982). Yet when lay people think about nuclearpower they do not merely process information concerning the ‘hard facts’ utilizingvarious biases and heuristics. Nuclear power is a highly emotive issue. It carriessymbols of scientific and technological hubris and of environmental destruction. Theemotive, symbol-laden response to nuclear power is as legitimate as the scientific takeon it, rather than a delusional deviation from ‘objective reality’.Furthermore, talk of deficits in handling risk information, to varying degrees,assumes that the human mind is analogous to a machine. This obscures not only thesymbolic, meaning-making and emotive realms, but also the inter-subjective qualities ofhuman experience. Each will be highlighted. The cognitivist view of the human beingis a simplification, according to Moscovici (1984a), because society is not a source ofinformation, but of meaning. People forge questions and seeks answers about issuesthat concern them, rather than purely perceiving and processing the information theyreceive (Moscovici, 1984b). The notion of a mechanical processing of information alsounderplays the emotive element of the response to danger from future damage. In arecent re-evaluation, Slovic (2000a) states that:Although risk perception was originally viewed as a form of deliberative, analytic informationprocessing, over time we have come to recognise how highly dependent it is upon intuitive andexperiential thinking, guided by emotional and aVective processes (p. xxxi).The 1990s heralded a modification from the almost exclusive cognitive emphasis in therisk perception field, towards recognition of the importance of affect. While this shifthas yielded useful findings, which will be illustrated, the status given to affect stillspeaks to the ‘deficit model’.Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, and Johnson (2000) state that individuals use an‘affect 4 heuristic’ to make judgments. In relation to risk perceptions, these are mentalshort-cuts by which individuals judge the risks and benefits of a hazard by accessingthe pool of positive and negative feelings that they associate with it. They do this eitherconsciously or unconsciously. In a related line of argument, emotions are viewed asentities that limit the search space of the reasoner: ‘They are heuristics that help usmake occasional leaps in life where no rational structures have yet been built to bridgethe ravines of our ‘‘ignorance’’ ’ (Oatley, 1996, p. 194). By way of example, Oatleystates that falling in love is a heuristic for having a relationship. According to his4 Affect, according to these authors, includes both feeling states that people experience (e.g. sadness) and qualitiesassociated with a stimulus (e.g. badness). However, much of the affective work that Slovic (2000a) is associated withcounts as affect the positive or negative valence with which various associations are rated.

Perception of risk 59argument, falling in love is a ravine of ignorance for which there will yet be built arational structure. It appears that a concern with cognitive theorists gripped by theemotion turning point still cling to some of their rationalist assumptions: ‘Emotionsbias thinking’ (Oatley, 1996, p. 194). In relation to the spate of studies borne of such ashift, Slovic (2000a) states that ‘it is tempting to conclude that these studies demonstratethat lay people’s perceptions of risk are derived from emotion rather thanreason, and hence should not be respected . . .’ (p. xxxii).Even though the ‘emotional turn’ appears radical, it perpetuates the downgrading ofemotional aspects of lay thinking by privileging rational structures of the mind. Theexplicit low status accorded to the emotional underpinnings of ‘perception’ belies theapparent openness to moving away from conceptualizing responses to risk as (ideally)rational information processing.Not only do cognitive theories of risk perception remain focused on informationprocessing, but they are unified in their centre of attention being the intrapersonallevel. Cognitive psychologists recognize that until the 1990s the social nature of mostcognition was rather neglected (e.g. Oatley, 1996). Yet theorists such as Slovic, again,have been at the forefront of rethinking the role of social issues in risk perception. ForSlovic (1997), ‘worldviews’ or social, cultural and political attitudes, guide people’sjudgments of risks. In Slovic and colleagues’ empirical work, fatalism, individualism,egalitarianism and technological enthusiasm are key ‘worldviews’ used. They discoverthat public perceptions of risks are correlated with particular worldviews (e.g.egalitarians tend to be strongly anti-nuclear). For Slovic and colleagues, worldview, likeaffect, is an orientating mechanism, directing how people judge risks.While this focus has the potential to revolutionize the field, worldview is theorizedas a quasi-dispositional, static state in this research. Yet, the worldview with whichpeople approach danger is shaped by other people, as well as cultural and institutionalforces. A challenge that Douglas (1994) lays at the foot of risk perception is that it saysalmost nothing about inter-subjectivity, consensus-making and social influences ondecisions. The public perception of risk is treated as if it were an aggregated responseof many private individuals. Irwin and Wynne (1996) augment this line of critiquewhen they state that in the risk perception approaches, the public is ‘implied to be anaggregate of atomised individuals with no social composition, hence no legitimateautonomous cultural substance’ (p. 215).This reflects a commitment to methodological individualism, on the part ofcontemporary cognitive psychologists: the doctrine that social phenomena can beunderstood solely with reference to ‘facts’ about individuals (Bhaskar, 1979). Thenatural sciences are emulated, and abstract, universal laws of human behaviour thattranscend individual, social, cultural and temporal boundaries are sought (see Kim,1999).The complex array of interpersonal, intergroup and ideological forces at work in risk‘perception’ cannot be linearly mapped. Slovic (2000a) laments that the psychometricrisk approach, in its desire for breadth and quantitative measures, sacrifices depth.Perhaps the risk-perception models have not moved as far from ‘cognitive algebra’(Spicer & Chamberlain, 1996), or the process of enclosing variables in boxes andlinking them with arrows to designate causality, as had been hoped. Spicer andChamberlain (1996) describe this as the ‘pathology of flow-charting’, which militatesagainst careful theory building (see Chamberlain, 2000).In summary, in the cognitive models the machine-like, rather than meaning-makingqualities, of the individual mind are emphasized. For Moscovici (2000), perception has

60 Hélène Joffeprimacy in less social branches of psychology, but representation has primacy in asocial psychology of common sense. While perception is based upon sensorial knowledge,representation is concerned with symbols, social reality and social knowledge.Closely related to this line of argument, Pidgeon et al. (1992) point out that while thestimulus to the perception can be relatively objectively characterized in perceptualpsychology, in the psychology of risk the stimulus is already represented by scientists,when most people come to think about it. One might add that media representationsalso intervene. Consequently, a series of representations underpin lay people’s readingsof risks. The paper moves to addressing the need for a valid theory of how peopleconstruct risks. Instead of producing a generalized framework for pinpointing thejudgment strategies under way when people respond to risks, the aim is to enter intothe specific complexity of the meanings made of risks by people positioned withinspecific social contexts.Representing risk: The social representations approachFrom the 1960s onward, a strand of psychological research, which conceptualizes thereading of risk very differently from the dominant paradigm, has developed. In theplace of risk perception, the social representation (Moscovici, 1976, 1984a, 1984b,2001) of risk (Joffe, 1999) places great emphasis upon factors beyond individualinformation processing. Rather than conceptualizing lay readings of risk as deficient,they are viewed as entities that contain the eccentric contents of people’s repositoriesof knowledge (Michael, 1996), which both express and protect their identities.SRT refers both to the process through which representations are elaborated and thestructures of thought that emerge (Duveen, 2000). The theory maps the processeswhereby sociocultural, historical and group-specific forces become sedimented ininner experiences, how the ‘we’ becomes contained in the responses of the ‘I’. Themass media play a major role as do interpersonal interactions whereby existing representationsthat circulate in a given culture are communicated between people andenter their explanations of new events. The social representations that emerge arerelatively consensual understandings of phenomena, particular to specific socialnetworks.Although not restricted to the risk sphere, SRT is particularly useful for it, since it isoriented towards exploration of explanations that arise in the face of new events(Hewstone & Augoustinos, 1998). Two key research areas are chosen to cast light onthe contribution offered to the risk field by this approach: responses to health threatsand to biotechnology. Alongside examples from work on responses to mental illness,they are used to demonstrate the role played by forces external to individuals, ratherthan intrapersonal processing, in shaping people’s risk-related thinking.The transformation of science into common senseA key concern within SRT relates to how knowledge about a phenomenon, such as GMfood, changes as the mass media transform it from the more reified, scientific universeinto lay thinking. Moscovici introduced the concept of social representation as a toolto explore the transformation of science in the course of its diffusion, and to examinethe common sense that arises in its wake (see Moscovici, 1998). ‘Transformation’, byits very definition, involves making changes to the initial content. In contemporarysociety, the mass media play the leading role in transforming expert into lay

Perception of risk 61knowledge. The lay person’s first contact with a potential danger is often via thenews media, or via other people relaying items presented there. News media do notmerely present a ‘photocopy’ of expert knowledge of risks. Instead, they simplify andsensationalize it, and set up debates concerning responsibility and blame, in the hopeof attracting the attention of mass audiences. The process often results in risks beingframed in a manner more akin to moral outrage than to scientific notions of calculablerisk (see Brown, Chapman, & Lupton, 1996; Herzlich & Pierret, 1989).By concluding that dissemination of scientific ideas involves its saturation withvalues, one does not negate that scientific ‘facts’ already contain a considerable valuedimension (see Latour & Woolgar, 1979). The point is not that a ‘pure’ scientificaccount is transformed into a value-ridden common sense. Rather, as will be demonstrated,different ways of thinking arise in the different spheres, and these are linked toprocesses of meaning-making that emerge between institutions and individuals ratherthan intrapersonally.How is the scientific knowledge that the mass media transform taken up bylay people? Social psychology disavowed the notion of the ‘direct effects’ of themass media back in the 1950s, and there has been increasing realization that laythinkers bring aspects of an ‘already known’, 5 to their understanding of mediacontent. Yet the link between the individual’s understanding of newly encounteredphenomena and the particular messages to which he/she is exposed has remainedinsufficiently operationalized both outside and within social psychology (Wagner,Valencia, & Elejabarrieta, 1996). SRT’s energies are increasingly placed in attempts todevelop the media–mind link, as opposed to the risk perception field’s intrapersonalfocus.The European public’s response to biotechnology, studied from a SRT perspective,forms a stage in the progress of this endeavour. In parallel to the moral intimation withwhich risks are imbued in the media realm, the European public (gauged by way ofrepresentative samples of national residents over 15 years old in all European Unioncountries) emphasizes the moral dimension in thinking about whether variousbiotechnological risks are acceptable to society (Concerted Action Group, 1997).Although they are deeply ambivalent about biotechnology, Europeans tend to acceptcertain risks, such as the medical uses of genetics, and this is dependent upon theirsense of its usefulness 6 and moral correctness. These authors define moral issuesas a collection of anxieties about the unforeseen dangers involved in a range oftechnologies that are perceived as ‘unnatural’. This very definition points to thenon-perceptual approach to risk adopted in this study. It hypothesizes that anxietiesand the symbolization of biotechnology as ‘unnatural’, rather than cognitive strategiesand errors in information processing, occupy centre stage in the process of riskrepresentation.Are the moral concerns found in both media and lay representations of riskslinked to a direct transmission process? The representative European findings werecompared with those from a US survey that asked the same key questions. In parallelto the survey, the press reportage of biotechnology in Europe and the USA was5 That which is ‘already known’ includes personal experience, political beliefs, and criticisms held in relation to media andgovernment sources of information. Those with certain constellations of the ‘already known’, such as broadsheet readers,constitute interpretative communities or interest group (see Corner, 1991; Joffe & Haarhoff, 2001).6 This resonates with the psychometric tradition’s nding that those hazards perceived to have high benet are perceivedto have a low risk, and vice versa. This has recently been linked to affect (e.g. things people like are imagined to be lessrisky than those they do not; Alhakami & Slovic, 1994).

62 Hélène Joffecontent- analysed. Gaskell, Bauer, Durant, and Allum (1999) found that the Europeanpress coverage tended to talk more positively about biotechnology than the US coverage.Yet European public opinion was more negative than in the USA. This finding putsto rest the supposition that public attitudes correspond to what the public reads in thepress. Other factors colour what is read: trust in the authorities that regulatebiotechnology is greater in the USA than in Europe. This may bolster the NorthAmericans’ positive relationship to biotechnology while leaving the Europeans with anelevated sense that they will not be protected from risk. A sense of confidence thatexperts can be relied on to act benevolently, rather than intrapersonal, cognitivefactors, may play a determining role in risk apprehension. Furthermore, and with majorimplications for the SRT field, the Europeans are found to have a significantly greatersense of the adulteration, infection and monster-qualities associated with GM food 7 ,than the North Americans. The importance of this sense of menace, like the issues oftrust and anxiety-based concerns, spotlights the emotive aspects of the responseto risk 8 .While the findings presented from the biotechnology study are rather broad in theirfocus on whole cultures, rather than on members of specific groups, the cross-culturalcomparison suggests how different cultural currents build specific patterns of laythinking. They also show that rather than being passive or erroneous perceivers ofideas from experts and the mass media, lay people actively forge representations in linewith their concerns, which are often driven by emotions. Anxiety and trust, ratherthan ‘cold’ information-handling processes, may well play pivotal roles in theapprehension of risk.Joffe (1996b, 1999) develops this thesis. In line with a psychodynamic extension ofsocial representations theory, it is posited that individuals faced with potential dangeroperate from a position of anxiety that motivates them to represent the danger in aspecific way. The psyche develops from affective roots, with the infant experiencinganxiety from birth. A key and deep-seated mental process used to alleviate anxiety issplitting. This unconscious defence mechanism is generally associated with takinginto the self good experiences and feelings, and projecting outward bad experiencesand feelings. The goal of splitting, manifest in representations, is to keep the bad awayfrom the good in the hope that the good will not be invaded and destroyed. Thus, inthe earliest years of life, individuals protect a positive inner space by holding splitrepresentations of what they experience. A universal life force motivates this protectiveprocess. This mechanism comes to the surface when dangers are representedthroughout life.In a study of responses to AIDS in Britain and South Africa, Joffe (1996a) shows thatthe early pattern that allows individuals to handle anxiety manifests in representationsof people who ‘leak’ AIDS into the space of the ‘general public’. They are fantasized interms of a cocktail of sinful activities. Yet the content of the categories ‘moral/good’and ‘sinful/bad’, and whether the splitting response is evoked, does not stem fromintrapersonal information processing. Rather, messages that circulate in the socialenvironment constrain or exacerbate splitting. Initial links made by scientists betweenAIDS and that which lies outside of the morally acceptable terrain of western thought7Such qualities were only gauged in relation to food biotechnology in this study.8 Slovic and colleagues work with similar concepts. Slovic, Flynn, and Layman (1991) asked respondents to note thethoughts or images that came to mind related to ‘underground nuclear-waste repository’ and found the majority ofthe associations to be negative, revealing dread, revulsion and anger.

Perception of risk 63(e.g. links to ‘poppers’, Haitian voodoo and blood-based rituals with animals) werepicked up, magnified and sensationalized by the Western mass media. The sharedrepresentations that emerged in lay thinking responded to the anxiety raised bysuch reports, and their content, projecting this illness away from the space of in-groupand self.Social representations research has been criticized on a number of different counts(e.g. see Fife-Shaw, 1997; Joffe, 1997; Potter & Edwards, 1999; Potter & Wetherell,1998). Regarding its application to the risk field, in particular, it might frustrate thoselooking for a predictive theory. Since linear, causal models are dominant in psychology,non-predictive models appear flawed. SRT’s deliberate attempt to build acomplex model of common-sense understanding, which contains multiple, reciprocalinfluences, appears insufficient. Although the theory leads one to expect that certainfactors will be present in responses to risk, such as associating them with ‘bad’ others,aspects of the meaning systems regarding each risk will be unforeseen. The very aim ofempirical work is to discern the specific constellation of meaning that evolves aroundeach particular risk.How common sense is built: Anchoring and objectifyingAn SRT approach to risk is distinctive in that it proposes that two specific processesare used when people, be they scientists, journalists or lay people, build representationsof events: anchoring and objectification (Moscovici, 1984b). Common senseis built by these rather than being an error-prone response to probabilistic scientificreasoning. These processes not only ensure that the core values and norms of thesociety are stamped onto new events, as the AIDS-linked representations demonstrate,but drive mutations in common sense over time. As a consequence of anchoring, whena new event must be understood, its integration is accomplished by moulding it in away that it appears continuous with existing ideas (Moscovici, 1984b). Therefore,meaning is made of many newly discerned mass illnesses in line with those known,whatever their differences, at a material level. This is exemplified in AIDS beingreferred to, initially, as a ‘gay plague’ and its sufferers being ‘avoided like the plague’ inline with its anchor to the ‘great plague’ (Wellings, 1988).Anchoring is not purely an intrapersonal process of assimilation. Rather, the ideas,images and language shared within groups steer the direction in which memberscome to terms with the unfamiliar. This makes the alien event imaginable. However,it removes from the new event both its specificity and its potentially threateningquality.Since an emphasis in SRT is on how new risks are anchored to known dangers, agoal of a number of studies is to explore the continuities and discontinuities betweencurrent and past representations of seemingly similar social objects. In taking thislongitudinal view, the field highlights the influence of socio-historical, rather thaninternal cognitive processes, on risk-related thinking. Markova and Wilkie (1987)showed that early social representations of AIDS, in the West, reflected voices from themass media, the women’s and the gay movement, transforming the representationsabout sexually transmitted diseases that had circulated in the syphilis epidemic of theFirst World War. Both syphilis and AIDS had been anchored to death, stigma, immoralbehaviour and just punishment. The government-led campaigns accompanying bothhad, to varying degrees, emphasized protection of the body, via condom use, and thedefence of dominant value systems via monogamy.

64 Hélène JoffeDespite this anchoring, major differences between the responses to the twoepidemics included: recognition of the sexuality of both genders in the time of AIDS,rather than dwelling upon male sexuality requiring outlet as occurred in the time ofsyphilis; and sexually explicit AIDS campaigns when juxtaposed with the discreetnature of the discussion of sexuality at the time of syphilis. The women’s and gaymovement had shifted the representation of the contemporary illness away fromheterosexual masculinity to wider sexual forces, yet the moralistic and stigmatizingresponses had survived. The longitudinal view of social representations of these illnessesreflects the impact of social processes, such as social influence, on lay thinking.This demonstrates that meanings of risks contain, in addition to the emotive elementsdiscussed, political dimensions, rather than purely cognitive elements.In social representation formation, the process termed objectification works intandem with anchoring, transforming the abstract links to past ideas that anchoringsets up into concrete mental content. Unfamiliar ideas can be made familiar by beinglinked to historically familiar episodes and/or to the culturally familiar. While anchoringinvolves drawing on shared knowledge from the past, objectification involvesdrawing on the current experiential world of the particular group member (Wagner,1998; Wagner et al., 1999). Objectification saturates an unfamiliar object with somethingmore easy to grasp. The earliest study in the SRT area demonstrates this. Whendifferent milieus (or naturalistically occurring social networks) in France werefaced with the new profession of psychoanalysis, it was initially saturated with theimage of ‘the confession’ among Catholic French people, and, in keeping with their setof concerns, they rejected its focus on sexuality (Moscovici, 1976). This made itimaginable for this group’s members in a way that did not threaten their existingworldview. Other groups, such as the Communist milieu and the bourgeoisie,assimilated it in terms of different images: Confession and sexual repression played aless significant role in their experiential world.The trove of familiarity that is drawn upon to make a new phenomenon more concretelies in a social network’s images, symbols and metaphors (Wagner, Lahnsteiner, &Elejebarrieta, 1995). SRT-driven research on people experiencing the threat of mentalillness illustrates this. When rural, French families were interviewed about their role ashosts of mentally ill lodgers, they drew on images close to their everyday experience:They talked of decay, souring, going off and curdling to explain the process of becomingmentally ill (Jodelet, 1991). Their everyday experience offered up a diet of images fromwhich they could choose to characterize the phenomenon they sought to understand.The common thread in their responses indicates that the farmers’ social existence, ratherthan intrapersonal reactions, shaped their representations.The mass media appear to form part of people’s social existence, their experientialworld. While the direct, visceral level is absent, mass media images may operate in asimilar manner to experience. The souring milk metaphor adhered to by the Frenchrural people may be the equivalent of the ‘monstrous’ and ‘contagious’ images ofgenetically engineered food held in Europe. In competing for mass audiences, tabloidstylenewspapers transmit menacing images of the biotechnology issues they cover(Wagner & Kronberger, 2001), and these may act as an ‘experiential’ resource forrepresenting such issues in the groups that consume them. The biotechnology studydemonstrates that the media–mind link is complex. In the same way that people preferto converse with others of similar opinions, so they may read newspapers likely toconfirm their own beliefs. This confounds the notion of a unidirectional flow ofinformation from media to mind.

Perception of risk 65As noted, cognitive risk traditions do not tend to pay attention to the externalmessages that people may draw on. Talking of cognitive traditions in general, Marcusand Plaut (2001) state that variation in individuals’ attitudes and schemas in differentimmediate social contexts (such as when other people are present or not, or otherpeople are in positions of authority or not) have been examined. Yet only scantattention has been paid to meaning systems that are likely to be shared as a result ofpeople being similarly positioned in the social world. Thus meaning systems have notbeen acknowledged to be a significant aspect of the social context. Sociologists havedevoted considerable energy to stressing the distinctive social context in which meaningsof risks are currently forged. The ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1986/1992) or ‘risk climate’(Giddens, 1991) refers to the conditions of contemporary western society in whichpeople have high levels of awareness of myriad risks, yet a lack of trust in the expertswho might be relied upon for protection from them. Such conditions are potentiallyanxiety-provoking, particularly since the nature of the risks created by the momentumof contemporary innovation—genetic, nuclear, chemical and ecological—increasinglyeludes the control of society’s protective institutions (Beck, 1986/1992, 1996). If laythinking is assumed to be linked to this external world of risks, to be shaped inthe communications that people experience, it would be curious to conceptualizereadings of risks as intrapersonal processes, devoid of interaction with (and within)this pervasive environment.This is an environment replete with symbols. The process of objectification overlapssignificantly with that of symbolization, a useful though severely under-representedconcept for risk research 9 . Symbols provide people with a means to understandabstract matters. In a study of social representations of Ebola in Britain, Joffe andHaarhoff (2002) found that Ebola was symbolized in terms of science-fiction imagery.While none of the newspaper articles that gave the Britons their information onEbola referred to science fiction directly, pictures of people in protective clothingaccompanied some articles. Participants in the study may have ‘read’ these clothes asspace suits and, along with the popular film of the time (‘Outbreak’) that depictedsimilar images, this appears to have activated talk about a science-fiction scenario. Suchimagery not only designated Ebola’s distance from the present space of the Britishrespondents, but fed their sense of immunity from it.The focus on such symbols highlights a very specific role for SRT. It locatessome of its concerns beyond the linguistic expression of individual respondents. Thisdistinguishes it from those psychological traditions dependent on language for theirinroads into psychic life. While work on the impact of imagery is in its early stages,Corner, Richardson, and Fenton (1990) argue that images can exert a ‘positioning’power on viewers’ imagination, which may be resistant to commentaries that challengethe feelings they produce. They may be readily absorbed in an unmediatedmanner because viewers are not generally provoked to reflect on or to deconstructthem.The identity-protective motivation that drives social representationThis does not imply that stimuli are ‘perceived’ in an unmediated fashion. Rather, textsand images are seen through a lens of existing, often socially shared representations9 For noteworthy exceptions, see a few recent studies by Slovic and colleagues (Slovic, 2000a).

66 Hélène Joffewhich in turn, are underpinned by various motivations. A core motivation 10 in relationto risk apprehension is identity protection, which refers, simultaneously, to the protectionof in-group and self identity. Social representations are entwined with identity in anumber of ways. They emerge precisely in response to danger to the collective identityof the group, and consequently, a central purpose of representation is to defendagainst feeling threatened (Moscovici, 1976). However, the process whereby representationsserve to defend identity is not an intrapersonal one, as certain readings of OBwould see the optimism or sense of invulnerability that manifests in relation to threat(see Taylor et al., 1992). When risks are encountered, individuals draw—oftennot consciously—on ways of thinking that have always been, and continue to be,acceptable to the groups with which they identify. When such events are objectified,groups favour the images, symbols and/or metaphors compatible with in-group values.So the identity positioning of the representor determines the vision held of a newthreat. Different groups ascribe to different representations of risks in accordance withthe identities that require protection.SRT emphasizes how thinking that develops in relation to risks is a way of coping,following Moscovici’s (1976) supposition that all thinking is a means of solving psychicor emotional tensions, a compensation to restore inner stability. Wagner andKronberger (2001) juxtapose two types of coping in the face of potential danger.Material coping includes the activities of scientists, engineers and politicians undertakento reduce health hazards and to control ecological risks. This involves technicalactions, political decisions and legislation. However, symbolic coping involves theappropriation of the novel and unfamiliar in order to make it intelligible and communicable.Social representations reflect the endeavour to cope with threat, at a symboliclevel, and a splitting defence against anxiety is often manifest in them.Methodological challenges posedThe processes and motivations involved in social representation formation are notsimple to discern empirically. Major methodological challenges are posed by the shiftto identity-based, emotional and symbolic facets of human thinking. Once one assumesthat the factors that forge readings of risk are not necessarily located in the privateknowledge of individuals, self-report data cannot be taken at face value. Individuals’responses to scale items cannot be used as a sole measure, as generally occurs in manymore mainstream models of risk ‘perception’. The studies reviewed above demonstratethat triangulation (see Flick, 1992), in terms of exploring ideas that reside in structuresoutside of individual minds (e.g. in the mass media, scientific publications and textbooks),as well as those that emerge from (closed and open-ended) surveys, andinterviews (with individuals and focus groups), has emerged as a key mechanism forensuring that both individual thinking and its context are sampled. The goal is toobserve the transformations that occur as knowledge circulates between the differentrealms and to discover how particular group members make meaning of risk messages,and what functions these meanings have for them.10 Social representation is motivated by other factors too. While not centrally concerned with the ideological function ofrepresentation, it is recognized that at the same time as protecting self and in-group vulnerability to risks, the chosensocial representation maintains the status of certain groups in a society. Of course, in maintaining the dominance ofcertain groups, the SR can con ict with the identity protective function: Those people who are members of ‘out-groups’ nd themselves at the receiving end of projective material that potentially can ‘spoil’ their identity (see Joffe, 1995). Afurther motivation is that the representation fosters solidarity within groups and facilitates communication between groupmembers. Kaes (1984) indicates that shared representations provide a nucleus of identication for the group, allowing itto distinguish itself from its out-groups.

Perception of risk 67Like more mainstream risk studies, SRT research still suffers from over-reliance onconsciously accessible data. However, empirical methods for examining the implicit,symbolic content of thought are being developed. Attention is being paid to images,and tools such as word-association tasks (e.g. see Wagner et al., 1996), participantobservation and drawings are used. These provide useful counterpoints to self-reportdata. The added value of such methods is evident in aspects of Jodelet’s (1991) study ofmental illness that emphasize the importance of the workings of the response to threatthat have not reached a verbal level but are nevertheless informative of action. Herparticipant observation revealed that when mentally ill lodgers stayed with hostfamilies, their eating utensils and clothing were washed separately from those belongingto the hosts. This indicates the existence of a representation of mental illness ascontagious. Yet the interview material was more consistent with modern medicine’sunderstanding of mental illness, which does not refer to contagion. Fears of contagionwere expressed via the keeping apart of the belongings of the lodgers through ‘wordlessthought’ but not consciously thought about or, at least, mentioned in the interviews.The gulf between the meanings that emerge from the participant observationand interviews points to the importance of utilizing multiple methods. The gulf mayreflect the presence of self-presentation in the interviews, but, as plausibly, it mayindicate that the hosts hold complex, contradictory ideas about mental illness (Bauer &Gaskell, 1999).A focus on the non-verbal realm highlights that when self-report data are used alone,they do not provide a sufficiently valid account of risk-related thinking. Researchersneed to sample conscious and non-conscious material in naturally occurring socialnetworks if they are to ascertain whether patterns of identity protective representationexist.Implications of a social representations approach for the psychology of riskIn itself, SRT represents a critique of models of ‘perception’ in the risk sphere, wherepeople are regarded as erroneous perceivers, and their patterns of perception aggregatedin order to establish nomothetic laws (see Lamiell, 1998). In place of this, manySRT-driven studies focus on commonalties across groups of persons in particular, howthey make sense of particular risk issues, and how their meaning structures evolve.SRT’s goal is to discern meaning, rather than to perform ‘cognitive algebra’. Identityprocesses largely influence the content of these meaning systems. For example, interms of meanings of ‘potential dangers’, representations may defend the representorfrom the anxiety that they evoke. A motivation to protect the inner space underpinsconcepts wherein ‘others’ become linked with danger by absorbing that which isregarded as morally reprehensible.In addition to the meaning-based and emotive foci, SRT also injects into risk psychologya concern with methods for grasping the contextual factors that feed thecontent of individual belief structures. This differs substantially from the intrapersonalfocus of much psychological risk research. Menacing imagery in the mass media,for example, feeds objections to many biotechnological risks, despite any positiveaccounts conveyed in written form (see Gaskell et al., 1999).In the place of attempting to track and to understand what the cognitive traditionlabels ‘heuristics and biases in decision-making’, SRT studies human thoughts in themselves,without reference to an ideal. It is presumed that different pockets of sharedknowledge, in different groups, delimit what each group member sees as ‘rational’ (see

68 Hélène JoffeWagner, 1993). By way of contrast to the set of individualist assumptions contained inthe mainstream Anglo-Saxon models of risk psychology, where human thought processesare studied as if they arise within, and lie exclusively inside, individual minds,the social representational approach proposes that human thought is relational at root.Explanations and judgments are not constructed within individual minds but in the‘unceasing babble’, the ‘permanent dialogue’ that people have with each other(Moscovici, 1984b) and with institutions.This paper has demonstrated that the link between individual thought and broaderinstitutional forces, such as those of science and of the mass media, is crucial to anunderstanding of the psychology of risk. In making the shift from cognition to thesocial transmission of ideas, and to the emotional and symbolic realms, the approachabandons reliance upon the respected experimental and survey methods. SRT’s dualfoci on group-based, and internal, rationality dictates that the contents of both thesocial context and individual minds be sampled. Consequently, triangulation, in termsof drawing material from both the social context and from individual minds, hasemerged as a key aspect of the method of many social representational studies.ConclusionThe paper has focused on what SRT can contribute to the study of responses to risks.Its scope has been to emphasize those elements of the readings of risks that havebeen dormant (or seen as epi-phenomena) in cognitively-driven risk psychology. Thecontributions offered are summarized below.A key revelation is the lack of focus on the specific meaning made of one or otherrisk, in mainstream risk research. Instead of concentrating on intrapersonal cognitiveprocesses and their limitations, SRT emphasizes the specific, complex content ofcommon-sense thinking regarding particular risks. The mental illness example demonstratesthat the content of the response to risk is not only complex but often containscontradictory elements, which are difficult to discern by way of scales and surveyitems. SRT’s interest is not in whether a response to risk is correct or erroneous. Theconcern is not with whether it is false, weak, biased, or in any other way deficient(Bauer & Gaskell, 1999). Rather, the raison d’être of the theory lies in why and howsociety creates social representations, and the common sense that evolves from this.People construct risks through lenses tinged with elements of group attachment and ofthe experiences of their in-groups and selves, in terms of both the contemporaryimagery they are exposed to and past misfortunes. These elements do not distort a ‘realrisk’. Rather, they are the ‘reality’ in the minds of those who look upon the risks.The social representation is a relatively consensual or shared understanding within agroup, which is forged by way of communicative processes, and also facilitates them.As such, a social representations perspective addresses one of Douglas’ (1994) keyproblems with the risk field: that it fails to take into account ‘intersubjective mobilisationsof belief’ (p. 40). SRT is uniquely positioned to address this. The level of examinationin SRT is the ‘we’ contained in the thinking of the ‘I’. The ‘we’ aspect is moredeveloped in the broader social sciences. Yet SRT, in focusing on the media–mind link,as well as anchoring and objectifying, makes a distinctive contribution to risk theory bypositing how the ‘we’ enters into and constructs the representations of the ‘I’. The linkbetween group and individual identity, on the one hand, and the representation of risk,on the other hand, offers a rich area for future investigation.

Perception of risk 69A further important aspect of the content of risk-related thought is its link to affect,and this provides an ongoing area of investigation in the SRT sphere. Emotions are notabsent from the cognitive theories. Taylor et al. (1992) obliquely acknowledge a rolefor the emotional dimension, such as heightened anxiety, and the mobilization of OBas a defence against it. In addition, the dimension of ‘dread’ in the psychometric workon risk (see Slovic, 2000b) speaks to a sense underpinned by emotion. However, it isonly in recent years that affect has been given a role in the risk-perception field.The paper has shown that sectors of the cognitive literature have also recentlybecome engaged with the symbolic and social aspects of the apprehension of risks.This results, in part, from awareness of the host of challenges to earlier cognitivetheory. The changes are reflected in the title of a recent review (Schwarz, 2000) ofwhere the social judgment and attitude field as a whole is heading: ‘Social judgementand attitudes: warmer, more social, and less conscious’. While the content of thereview reflects a less radical shift than the title implies 11 , these directions are certainlyevident in the field. Yet three key ways in which the new direction in the cognitiveliterature still differs radically from the SRT literature can be distinguished.First, the extant idea that emotions are distorters of cognition differentiates this newwave of literature in the risk perception field from the SRT approach, which proposesplural facets of the response to risk rather than distorted, as opposed to non-distortedways. Second, when social factors, such as ‘worldview’, are taken on board in the moremainstream literature, they are slotted into a regression equation to predict ‘riskperception’. A rich explanation of the complexity of what people feel and think aboutrisks may be better theorized without reliance on a reductive typology. Third,representation is treated as a static element of cognitive organization in the newercognitive theories, while within SRT, the concept ‘representation’ is imputed withdynamism since it refers as much to the process through which representations areelaborated (i.e. by way of transformations of material as it is mediated to lay peoplefrom the expert realm, and their anchoring and objectification) as it does to thestructures of knowledge that are established. Slovic and his colleagues have introducedto the risk field many dimensions for which rich theorization already exists in theSRT realm.In challenging mainstream risk psychology with findings that do not take the naturalsciences as their yardstick of good science, the unscientific, the ‘soft’, threatens toinvade a tradition that works hard to conform to particular scientific aspirations. Thisproposition can be viewed in at least one of two ways. Either one recognizes that ideasgenerated outside predictive models are valuable for increasing understanding ofphenomena, but provide less ‘evidentiary weight’ (see Westen, 1998), or one adoptsthe stance that, contrary to beliefs held within and outside the scientific community,not just one scientific method exists (see Boulding, 1980). Science strives to developmethods that correspond to different epistemological fields. Within the latter vision,social and natural scientific approaches are of equal value. The social-representations11 Schwarz (2000) states that the focus on the computer metaphor in terms of the encoding, storage and retrieval ofinformation (i.e. information processing) not only fostered concentration on individuals as isolated information processors,but ‘did not invite attention to subjective experiences and emotional and motivational inuences’ (p. 150). Despite hiscritique of this vision, his notion of where the eld is heading is not radically different. The metaphor he uses to sum upthe shift into these realms is of the human as a ‘motivated tactician’. He says, of this new characterization, that ‘thismetaphor does not question the truism that humans are information processors. It merely highlights that informationstands in the service of, and is tuned to meet, the individual’s goals and needs’ (p. 151) (emphasis in original). In thisvision, humans are still essentially information processors, rather than meaning-makers.

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