Risk of Reliance on Perceived Risk, The
![handle is hein.journals/risk3 and id is 69 raw text is: The Risk of Reliance on Perceived Risk
Frank B. Cross*
During the 1970's, Chauncey Starr and others alerted society to the
inaccurate risk perceptions held by the general public.1 As
documented in a variety of sources, the public's perceived risks from
activities such as electric power production corresponded very poorly
with actual or objective risks presented by these activities, as
actually measured or estimated from empirical data. The initial
commentaries tended to dismiss the perceived risks of the public as
uninformed opinions to be ignored or corrected by decision makers.
A response to this position has increasingly arisen to defend reliance
on perceived risk as opposed to what is often referred to as objective
risk. The critics have observed accurately that the public concept of
risk is complex and means more than a simple probabilistic estimate of
morbidity or mortality. These critics have performed a service by
making explicit the relevance of values in the assessment of risk. Some
critics have gone even farther, though, to suggest that the public
perceptions of risk are in some sense better than more scientifically
grounded probabilistic estimates and that public perceptions should
drive public policy decisions.
In fairness, these critics do not recommend the total exclusion of
scientific information from the public policy debate. They may argue,
however, that public perception should take some precedence over
probabilistic estimates. These authors have made such suggestions as
* Dr. Cross is Associate Professor of Business Regulation at the University of
Texas at Austin.
1 See, e.g., Starr, Introductory Remarks in SOCIETAL RISK ASSESSMENT:
HOW SAFE IS SAFE ENOUGH? 4 (R. Schwing and W. Albers eds. 1980). This work
is quoted briefly in Thompson, infra note 2, at 3.
3 RISK - Issues in Health & Safety 59 [Winter 1992]](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/risk3&div=11&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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