Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the white male effect, this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This paper proposes a new explanation: identity-protective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on...

Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described as "the affect...

In this chapter, we report on three psychometric scaling studies, summarized in Table 1. In each study, participants rated a given set of hazards on a range of risk characteristics and indicated the degree of risk reduction and regulation they desired. Based on this data, we explore the...