Risk and Rationality : The 'Frame Problem' Revisited, from the Laboratory to the Public Sphere

The risk research literature is widely dispersed and marked by healthy pluralism in foundational assumptions and analytical frameworks. As such, there is a pressing need to synthesize this fragmented knowledge, reflect on the major theoretical debates, and speculate on future research trajectories. This chapter is a partial attempt to do so. We first provide a schematic outline of the evolution of Beck and Giddens’ “risk society,” before connecting this relatively abstract account with more empirically grounded analyses of lay discourses about risk, technology and innovation. We then turn to consider whether a “risk framing” can act to close-down the characterisation of environmental problems in ways that are both reductive and exclusionary to public engagement. Switching focus to the psychology of risk, we draw a contrast between the theoretical commitments of decision scientists and evolutionary psychologists, and discuss how this shapes their contrasting approaches to experimental design and how they interpret empirical data. On the question of realism and generalizability, we argue that external validity is not a problem restricted to laboratory findings, and that claims about the broader relevance of empirical findings turn on the specifics of the research design and on the cogency of the theoretical arguments used to justify any generalisation. We then suggest that the study of decision making under uncertainty has become rather disconnected from the rest of cognitive psychology, arguing that the notion that conscious thought may play a substantive role in shaping how people reason about risk appears to have dropped out of the thinking of the decision sciences. We turn to critique the commonly rehearsed argument that decision-theoretic approaches to inference and choice are only applicable to a relatively restricted subset of decision contexts (the “small worlds” argument). We conclude by reflecting on the paradox that a (skewed) interpretation of the findings of the decision sciences has travelled so easily into some institutional risk management and governance practices (the “cognitive miser”), despite long standing concerns about its external validity