Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers

By Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas

Book Overview

Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we can? but yes, we must act as if we do. Some dangers are unknown; others are known, but not by us because no one person can know everything. Most people cannot be aware of most dangers at most times. Hence, no one can calculate precisely the total risk to be faced. How, then, do people decide which risks to take and which to ignore? On what basis are certain dangers guarded against and others relegated to secondary status? This book explores how we decide what risks to take and which to ignore, both as individuals and as a culture.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520050630
• ISBN13: 9780520050631
• Release Date: October 1983
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Classic

This book is a classic in the study of risk perception. It is the genesis of the so-called "cultural theory of risk," which is an alternative to the dominant rational-actor and psychometric theories of risk perception. Douglas and Wildavsky's basic claim is that individuals conform their perceptions of various societal and personal risks to their preferred visions of a good society. Although (as noted by Gintis in his review) Risk and Culture is only casually empirical, it furnished a blueprint for a subsequent program of rigorous empirical study that is by now very far advanced and that corroborates Douglas's and Wildavsky's account.