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Dealing with Risk: Why the Public and the Experts Disagree on Environmental Issues. By Howard Margolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 236p. $27.95.
Edella Schlager, University of Arizona
Why, in cases that are especially contentious, do the perceptions of environmental risk by lay persons vary so radically with those of experts? For instance, why do citizens routinely characterize nuclear waste depositories as extremely dangerous, while experts perceive the risk associated with such facilities as minimal? In many of these cases, not only are perceptions completely at odds, but also experts experience little success in convincing laypeople otherwise. In this volume, Margolis applies his earlier work on human cognition grounded in pattern recognition to answer such questions.
In some respects Margolis's answer is very simple. Sharp conflicts between perceptions, especially cases in which experts believe risk is quite low and laypeople believe it to be quite high, boils down to fungability-balancing the "opportunities forgone when we take precautions, and danger accepted when we do not" (p. 2). Experts are more capable of balancing opportunities and dangers, whereas citizens, who do not have direct experience with the risk or the opportunities forgone in dealing with the risk, tend to focus on danger to the exclusion of all else.
Laypeople lock into a better-safe-than-sorry mode because they misperceive the context, failing to attend to cues concerning the costs of forgone opportunities. Starting from that point rather than fungability, people become further...