Perceived Risk, Stigma, and the Vulnerable Society. Paul Slovic, Decision Research, 1201 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97401
In an earlier time, infectious diseases raged uncontrollably in pandemics that took hundreds of thousands and sometimes even millions of lives. The image of these pandemics is alive today in the perceptions of the public. This is illustrated dramatically by events in the UK where a hint that eating beef might lead to a fatal brain disease had an immense impact on the British beef industry, and even threatened the economic and political stability of Britain itself. The cause of this crisis was the deaths of about a dozen persons from a mysterious brain disease that looks similar to the effects of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (CJD) in humans.
The BSE scare is noteworthy because it is a textbook example of what has been called the "social amplification of risk" and it illustrates a new form of societal vulnerability. Whereas in the past human health was the primary vulnerable commodity, increasing technical and medical sophistication combined with hypervigilant monitoring systems to detect incipient problems make such scourges less likely now. If eating infected beef truly has the potential to trigger an epidemic of brain disease in humans, we will likely be able to limit the damage by catching the problem early and publicizing the threat and measures to contain it. But the price of this vigilance, based in part upon the incredible ability of modern media to "spread the word," is the impact that this information itself has upon social, political, industrial, and economic systems—witness the effect on the British beef industry and the reduction in beef consumption in other countries as well. Thus we live in a world in which information, acting in concert with the vagaries of human perception and cognition, has reduced our vulnerability to pandemics of disease at the cost of increasing our vulnerability to social and economic catastrophes of unprecedented scale.
In hindsight, the BSE scare fits well with what has been learned about risk perception and risk-induced stigmatization of products, places, and technologies. The challenge before us is to learn how to manage stigma and reduce the vulnerability of important products, industries, and institutions to its effects, without suppressing the proper communication of risk information to the public.