Risk Perception in the Area of Global Environmental Change Events. Gisela Böhm, University Bremen, Department of Psychology, Grazer Str. 2a, D-28359, Bremen, Germany, telephone +49 - 421 - 218 7079, fax +49 - 421 - 218 4605, e-mail boehm@zfn.uni-bremen.de
In recent years, the impact of human activities on global changes in the natural environment and on human living conditions has become a controversial issue in public debate and politics as well as a major challenge for the natural and social sciences. Activities such as burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, and manufacturing and consuming chemical products not only change the earth’s surface and appearance, but also interfere with biological and geological systems and massively disturb ecological balance. The present paper will be concerned with risk perception in the area of global environmental change phenomena, such as climate change and ozone depletion. The most prevalent approach in risk perception research is he so-called psychometric paradigm, which has identified a number of empirical dimensions, such as dread and controllability, that describe the cognitive structure of risks. However, the psychometric scales commonly used constitute a rather intuitive collection of items and lack theoretical foundation. It is argued that these dimensions imply causal judgments and that risk evaluation is based on subjective causal scenarios, i.e., on the causes and consequences ascribed to risks. These causal scenarios are modelled following a decision-theoretical risk concept that consists of three basic elements: potential losses, loss significance, and uncertainty. Even though this risk concept was formulated for risks that constitute decision options, it can be applied to global environmental risks, such as depletion of the ozone layer. Their consequences, e.g., skin cancer, represent potential losses that are uncertain and subjectively significant and can thus be characterized by these three elements in the same way as decision outcomes.
A study is presented that investigates the role of lay causal scenarios about global change phenomena as judgmental basis of risk judgments. Twenty-five environmental risks were presented to 150 subjects. Subjects performed two types of judgmental task. One task consisted of an evaluation of each topic on 13 psychometric scales. The other task consisted of causal judgments, subjects were asked to indicate the most important cause of each risk and its most important consequence. Multivariate analyses reveal that the causal structure of the environmental risks as derived from the causal ascription task is systematically related to differences in their risk evaluation on psychometric scales. The implications of these findings for the risk appraisal process are discussed.
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