55

British Journal of Social Psychology (2003), 42, 5573

2003 The British Psychological Society
www.bps.org.uk

Risk: From perception to social representation

Helene Joffe*
Department of Psychology, University College London, UK

This paper is concerned with how people make meaning of the risks they face. It
explores certain assumptions of the risk perception approaches, which dominate
the area. It argues that despite changes currently taking place in the eld, such models
still focus on static, intrapersonal processes, with many viewing human thinking as
analogous to erroneous information processing. In the place of an individual de cit
focus, the paper proposes a more intersubjective theory of the response to risk.
Social representations theory is evaluated and its validity assessed by highlighting
empirical work on representations of biotechnological and health risks. The review
reveals that the response to risk is a highly social, emotive and symbolic entity.
Therefore a theory and methods appropriate to such qualities are proposed, to
produce a valid psychology of risk.

This paper explores how lay people make meaning of risks, ranging from dangers
posed by genetically modified (GM) food to developing acquired immune deficiency
syndrome (AIDS). It argues that the perception approaches, dominant in the psy-
chology of risk, might usefully be challenged by a social representations approach.
The perception approaches stress the intrapersonal level, often excluding broader
influences, and highlight cognitive issues such as the biases and heuristics used in the
apprehension of risks. In the place of an individualized deficit model of static risk
perceptions, the paper proposes a psychological approach concerned with how the
particular representation of a risk evolves, why it is created and accepted, and the
symbolic factors that feed it. Existing theories of the perception of risk are summarized
to show how the chosen approach avoids their shortcomings. The aim of the paper is
to explain the relevance and utility of social representations theory (SRT) for the risk
sphere, with the hope that this provides food for thought to those working within
other approaches. The validity of SRT is ascertained by reviewing the English-language
social representations literature on risk.

De ning risk
At the outset, the definition of risk utilized in this paper must be clarified. There is no
commonly accepted definition of the term risk, either in science or in lay perception
(Renn, 1998). However, many definitions share the notion of anticipating future,
uncertain outcomes. Since the concern of this paper lies predominantly with lay

*Requests for reprints should be addressed to Helene Joffe, Department of Psychology, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK (e-mail: h.joffe@ucl.ac.uk).
56 Helene Joffe

peoples responses to the health and safety risks they face, it adopts Douglas (1994)
definition of risk as simply danger from future damage and focuses only on negative
risks. Douglas recognizes that the classical, contemporary definition used in the expert
realm is: the probability of an event combined with the magnitude of the losses and
gains that it will entail (p. 40). However, she argues that in contemporary thought, risk
is less likely to include a positive outcome, and, furthermore, from a lay perspective,
the connection to probability theory and rational choice is not paramount. Lay
peoples tendency to bypass probability theory is not explained in terms of their
inability to understand the sums, but in relation to the absence, in the classical
definition, of some of the issues that people care about.
The overarching definition of risk as danger from future damage, at least from the
lay perspective, is antithetical to a strand of the risk literature in which painstaking
differentiation is made between natural and human-made disasters, as well as
between hazards and risks.1 While the division appears irrefutable, from the lay
perspective, it is tenuous. One of the more robust findings in social psychology
indicates that lay thinkers conceptualize misfortunes as if human choices were
involved, whatever their material basis. People engage in such spontaneous causal
thinking particularly in relation to unexpected and more negative events (Weiner,
1985). Therefore, distinctions between different categories in the risk literature are
undermined by peoples tendency to implicate individual decisionssuch as those to
live in a particular place or to fail to implement safety checksin their readings of
misfortunes (see Walster, 1966). The scenarios discussed in this paper are both nega-
tive and unexpected, and are therefore likely to evoke the why question, and also to
have a degree of the human-made element read into them, whatever their material
basis.
Finally, when defining risk, a question arises concerning the need to consider its
existence out there. It might be argued that one cannot talk of lay responses to risks,
since those phenomena that are perceived as risks already embody peoples construc-
tions. In this paper, risks, and the responses to them, are viewed as separate entities,
but there is recognition that phenomena read as risks already contain social construc-
tions. This follows Yardleys (1997) material-discursive position in which a risk is
both a material phenomenon and a socially constructed one. However, it is with the
readings of risks, particularly from the lay perspective, that the paper is concerned.
Understanding the relationship between a potential danger and the reading thereof
depends upon the theoretical position adopted.

Perceiving risk: Optimistic bias and beyond

Since the 1950s, psychologists have been increasingly interested in how lay people
perceive risks. Mainstream, psychological research has focused on the cognitive pro-
cesses that occur when humans are faced with risks. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky
(1982) state that: Cognitive psychology is concerned with internal processes, mental
limitations, and the way in which the processes are shaped by the limitations (p. xii).

1
Natural disasters include earthquakes, hurricanes, and oods. The human-made disasters are those produced
abundantly in contemporary Western society: nuclear and industrial accidents, the greenhouse effect, acid rain and so on.
Hazards tend to be distinguished from risks in that damage comes from an external source. The properties associated
with the natural disaster and hazard categories overlap substantially. Hazards are said to become risks as soon as
anything becomes known about how the danger might be averted; in other words, once human action can be taken in
relation to it.
 Perception of risk 57

In line with this, the area of judgment and decision-making regarding risks tends to
evaluate the probabilities that individuals offer in relation to their chances of becoming
affected by a particular risk. Probabilities offered are often compared with scientific
estimates of probability, and the focus has been upon the existence and source of lay
error (see Kahneman et al., 1982, for a review).
Thriving branches of the Tversky and Kahneman (1974) inspired risk perception area
have remained centrally focused on individual perceptual or cognitive errors. The areas
that examine the tendency towards overconfidence regarding ones own judgments of
risk, and the optimistic bias (OB) tradition, pursue the notions of the fallibility or
faultiness of human information processing. In some sense, the two areas are connected
in their focus on peoples optimism, and the latter tradition will be highlighted.

Scope and ndings of the OB approach

The OB approach has examined responses to a vast array of the health and safety risks
that people confront both daily and in more unexpected circumstances. It is employed
extensively in the burgeoning health risk sphere forming a core element in many social
cognition models that attempt to predict factors that facilitate risk-taking. These
include the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1974), Protection Motivation Theory
(Rogers, 1975) and the Health Action Process Approach (Schwartzer, 1992). The core
of the theory is examined, in brief, as an inroad into some of the limitations of the
cognitive models.2
OB focuses on errors made when people compare their own, as opposed to others,
chances of coming into contact with a host of misfortunes such as car accidents, radon
problems in the home, and HIV. When asked to think about their chances of facing
risks, people imagine, unrealistically, that the future holds few adverse events (Taylor,
1989) and expect these to strike others, rather than themselves (Weinstein, 1982).
Weinsteins and Taylors influential work on OB describes the robust and widespread
nature of the personal sense of invulnerability. Taylor and Brown (1994) go as far
as to assert that, typically, more than 95% of the population may exhibit unrealistic
optimism in relation to a wide range of risks.
Weinstein (1987) attributes OB to information-processing errors: peoples lack of
experience with the problem makes it difficult for them to imagine how it might affect
them; people compare themselves with others who are at particularly high risk in
order to maintain a sense of low personal risk; people overestimate the skills they
possess that would allow them to avoid being affected by the risk. This focus on the
cognitive tricks played by individual minds resonates throughout the risk-perception
literature, with its focus on biases such as those of availability, overconfidence and the
desire for certainty (see Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 2000). Even though there is
considerable debate concerning the ubiquity of the OB phenomenon, it centres on
challenges to aspects of the model rather than to its core assumptions.3 The key tenet,

2
Since the focus of the current paper is on approaches used to map peoples thoughts, rather than their behavioural
intentions concerning potential dangers, models concerning peoples behavioural intentions in risky situations are not
reviewed. These include the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behaviour, which have been employed
extensively for assessing behavioural intentions such as those to practice safer sex (see Sheeran, Abraham, & Orbell,
1999). The author has appraised these models elsewhere (see Joffe, 1996a).
3
Question marks hang over the degree to which OB manifests in the population as a whole (see Myers & Brewin, 1996;
Myers & Renolds, 2000), to whether it exists cross-culturally (see Heine & Lehman, 1995; Kleinhesselink & Rosa, 1991;
Peeters, Cammaert, & Czapinski, 1997; Taylor & Armor, 1996), to its links to the actual risks faced (see Klein &
Radcliffe, 1999) and to whether it is an illusion of control rather than of optimism (McKenna, 1993).
58 Helene Joffe

enshrined in OB and a broad spectrum of risk perception models, that many humans
are basically risk-averse, but unintentionally miscalculate their risks due to cognitive
deficits, such as an inefficient handling of information, remains unquestioned.

Challenging the assumptions of risk perception

This assumption can be challenged along a number of dimensions. Wynne (1982)
coined the now widely used term deficit model to denote how objective scientists are
juxtaposed to irrational lay people in many theories of the human response to risk.
Although the 1990s have heralded modifications in such theorization (see Pidgeon,
Hood, Jones, Turner, & Gibson, 1992), it survives in both psychological theory and
the policy arena. Here the public is seen to be lacking intellectually, when measured
against authoritative science. In relation to nuclear power, for example, its
proponents have demanded that public debates evaluate the hard facts, without
reference to other realms (Wynne, 1982). Yet when lay people think about nuclear
power they do not merely process information concerning the hard facts utilizing
various biases and heuristics. Nuclear power is a highly emotive issue. It carries
symbols of scientific and technological hubris and of environmental destruction. The
emotive, symbol-laden response to nuclear power is as legitimate as the scientific take
on it, rather than a delusional deviation from objective reality.
Furthermore, talk of deficits in handling risk information, to varying degrees,
assumes that the human mind is analogous to a machine. This obscures not only the
symbolic, meaning-making and emotive realms, but also the inter-subjective qualities of
human experience. Each will be highlighted. The cognitivist view of the human being
is a simplification, according to Moscovici (1984a), because society is not a source of
information, but of meaning. People forge questions and seeks answers about issues
that concern them, rather than purely perceiving and processing the information they
receive (Moscovici, 1984b). The notion of a mechanical processing of information also
underplays the emotive element of the response to danger from future damage. In a
recent re-evaluation, Slovic (2000a) states that:
Although risk perception was originally viewed as a form of deliberative, analytic information
processing, over time we have come to recognise how highly dependent it is upon intuitive and
experiential thinking, guided by emotional and aVective processes (p. xxxi).
The 1990s heralded a modification from the almost exclusive cognitive emphasis in the
risk perception field, towards recognition of the importance of affect. While this shift
has yielded useful findings, which will be illustrated, the status given to affect still
speaks to the deficit model.
Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, and Johnson (2000) state that individuals use an
affect4 heuristic to make judgments. In relation to risk perceptions, these are mental
short-cuts by which individuals judge the risks and benefits of a hazard by accessing
the pool of positive and negative feelings that they associate with it. They do this either
consciously or unconsciously. In a related line of argument, emotions are viewed as
entities that limit the search space of the reasoner: They are heuristics that help us
make occasional leaps in life where no rational structures have yet been built to bridge
the ravines of our ignorance (Oatley, 1996, p. 194). By way of example, Oatley
states that falling in love is a heuristic for having a relationship. According to his
4
Affect, according to these authors, includes both feeling states that people experience (e.g. sadness) and qualities
associated with a stimulus (e.g. badness). However, much of the affective work that Slovic (2000a) is associated with
counts as affect the positive or negative valence with which various associations are rated.
 Perception of risk 59

argument, falling in love is a ravine of ignorance for which there will yet be built a
rational structure. It appears that a concern with cognitive theorists gripped by the
emotion turning point still cling to some of their rationalist assumptions: Emotions
bias thinking (Oatley, 1996, p. 194). In relation to the spate of studies borne of such a
shift, Slovic (2000a) states that it is tempting to conclude that these studies demon-
strate that lay peoples perceptions of risk are derived from emotion rather than
reason, and hence should not be respected . . . (p. xxxii).
Even though the emotional turn appears radical, it perpetuates the downgrading of
emotional aspects of lay thinking by privileging rational structures of the mind. The
explicit low status accorded to the emotional underpinnings of perception belies the
apparent openness to moving away from conceptualizing responses to risk as (ideally)
rational information processing.
Not only do cognitive theories of risk perception remain focused on information
processing, but they are unified in their centre of attention being the intrapersonal
level. Cognitive psychologists recognize that until the 1990s the social nature of most
cognition was rather neglected (e.g. Oatley, 1996). Yet theorists such as Slovic, again,
have been at the forefront of rethinking the role of social issues in risk perception. For
Slovic (1997), worldviews or social, cultural and political attitudes, guide peoples
judgments of risks. In Slovic and colleagues empirical work, fatalism, individualism,
egalitarianism and technological enthusiasm are key worldviews used. They dis-
cover that public perceptions of risks are correlated with particular worldviews (e.g.
egalitarians tend to be strongly anti-nuclear). For Slovic and colleagues, worldview, like
affect, is an orientating mechanism, directing how people judge risks.
While this focus has the potential to revolutionize the field, worldview is theorized
as a quasi-dispositional, static state in this research. Yet, the worldview with which
people approach danger is shaped by other people, as well as cultural and institutional
forces. A challenge that Douglas (1994) lays at the foot of risk perception is that it says
almost nothing about inter-subjectivity, consensus-making and social influences on
decisions. The public perception of risk is treated as if it were an aggregated response
of many private individuals. Irwin and Wynne (1996) augment this line of critique
when they state that in the risk perception approaches, the public is implied to be an
aggregate of atomised individuals with no social composition, hence no legitimate
autonomous cultural substance (p. 215).
This reflects a commitment to methodological individualism, on the part of
contemporary cognitive psychologists: the doctrine that social phenomena can be
understood solely with reference to facts about individuals (Bhaskar, 1979). The
natural sciences are emulated, and abstract, universal laws of human behaviour that
transcend individual, social, cultural and temporal boundaries are sought (see Kim,
1999).
The complex array of interpersonal, intergroup and ideological forces at work in risk
perception cannot be linearly mapped. Slovic (2000a) laments that the psychometric
risk approach, in its desire for breadth and quantitative measures, sacrifices depth.
Perhaps the risk-perception models have not moved as far from cognitive algebra
(Spicer & Chamberlain, 1996), or the process of enclosing variables in boxes and
linking them with arrows to designate causality, as had been hoped. Spicer and
Chamberlain (1996) describe this as the pathology of flow-charting, which militates
against careful theory building (see Chamberlain, 2000).
In summary, in the cognitive models the machine-like, rather than meaning-making
qualities, of the individual mind are emphasized. For Moscovici (2000), perception has
60 Helene Joffe

primacy in less social branches of psychology, but representation has primacy in a

social psychology of common sense. While perception is based upon sensorial knowl-
edge, representation is concerned with symbols, social reality and social knowledge.
Closely related to this line of argument, Pidgeon et al. (1992) point out that while the
stimulus to the perception can be relatively objectively characterized in perceptual
psychology, in the psychology of risk the stimulus is already represented by scientists,
when most people come to think about it. One might add that media representations
also intervene. Consequently, a series of representations underpin lay peoples read-
ings of risks. The paper moves to addressing the need for a valid theory of how people
construct risks. Instead of producing a generalized framework for pinpointing the
judgment strategies under way when people respond to risks, the aim is to enter into
the specific complexity of the meanings made of risks by people positioned within
specific social contexts.

Representing risk: The social representations approach

From the 1960s onward, a strand of psychological research, which conceptualizes the
reading of risk very differently from the dominant paradigm, has developed. In the
place of risk perception, the social representation (Moscovici, 1976, 1984a, 1984b,
2001) of risk (Joffe, 1999) places great emphasis upon factors beyond individual
information processing. Rather than conceptualizing lay readings of risk as deficient,
they are viewed as entities that contain the eccentric contents of peoples repositories
of knowledge (Michael, 1996), which both express and protect their identities.
SRT refers both to the process through which representations are elaborated and the
structures of thought that emerge (Duveen, 2000). The theory maps the processes
whereby sociocultural, historical and group-specific forces become sedimented in
inner experiences, how the we becomes contained in the responses of the I. The
mass media play a major role as do interpersonal interactions whereby existing repre-
sentations that circulate in a given culture are communicated between people and
enter their explanations of new events. The social representations that emerge are
relatively consensual understandings of phenomena, particular to specific social
networks.
Although not restricted to the risk sphere, SRT is particularly useful for it, since it is
oriented towards exploration of explanations that arise in the face of new events
(Hewstone & Augoustinos, 1998). Two key research areas are chosen to cast light on
the contribution offered to the risk field by this approach: responses to health threats
and to biotechnology. Alongside examples from work on responses to mental illness,
they are used to demonstrate the role played by forces external to individuals, rather
than intrapersonal processing, in shaping peoples risk-related thinking.

The transformation of science into common sense

A key concern within SRT relates to how knowledge about a phenomenon, such as GM
food, changes as the mass media transform it from the more reified, scientific universe
into lay thinking. Moscovici introduced the concept of social representation as a tool
to explore the transformation of science in the course of its diffusion, and to examine
the common sense that arises in its wake (see Moscovici, 1998). Transformation, by
its very definition, involves making changes to the initial content. In contemporary
society, the mass media play the leading role in transforming expert into lay
 Perception of risk 61

knowledge. The lay persons first contact with a potential danger is often via the
news media, or via other people relaying items presented there. News media do not
merely present a photocopy of expert knowledge of risks. Instead, they simplify and
sensationalize it, and set up debates concerning responsibility and blame, in the hope
of attracting the attention of mass audiences. The process often results in risks being
framed in a manner more akin to moral outrage than to scientific notions of calculable
risk (see Brown, Chapman, & Lupton, 1996; Herzlich & Pierret, 1989).
By concluding that dissemination of scientific ideas involves its saturation with
values, one does not negate that scientific facts already contain a considerable value
dimension (see Latour & Woolgar, 1979). The point is not that a pure scientific
account is transformed into a value-ridden common sense. Rather, as will be demon-
strated, different ways of thinking arise in the different spheres, and these are linked to
processes of meaning-making that emerge between institutions and individuals rather
than intrapersonally.
How is the scientific knowledge that the mass media transform taken up by
lay people? Social psychology disavowed the notion of the direct effects of the
mass media back in the 1950s, and there has been increasing realization that lay
thinkers bring aspects of an already known,5 to their understanding of media
content. Yet the link between the individuals understanding of newly encountered
phenomena and the particular messages to which he/she is exposed has remained
insufficiently operationalized both outside and within social psychology (Wagner,
Valencia, & Elejabarrieta, 1996). SRTs energies are increasingly placed in attempts to
develop the mediamind link, as opposed to the risk perception fields intrapersonal
focus.
The European publics response to biotechnology, studied from a SRT perspective,
forms a stage in the progress of this endeavour. In parallel to the moral intimation with
which risks are imbued in the media realm, the European public (gauged by way of
representative samples of national residents over 15 years old in all European Union
countries) emphasizes the moral dimension in thinking about whether various
biotechnological risks are acceptable to society (Concerted Action Group, 1997).
Although they are deeply ambivalent about biotechnology, Europeans tend to accept
certain risks, such as the medical uses of genetics, and this is dependent upon their
sense of its usefulness 6 and moral correctness. These authors define moral issues
as a collection of anxieties about the unforeseen dangers involved in a range of
technologies that are perceived as unnatural. This very definition points to the
non-perceptual approach to risk adopted in this study. It hypothesizes that anxieties
and the symbolization of biotechnology as unnatural, rather than cognitive strategies
and errors in information processing, occupy centre stage in the process of risk
representation.
Are the moral concerns found in both media and lay representations of risks
linked to a direct transmission process? The representative European findings were
compared with those from a US survey that asked the same key questions. In parallel
to the survey, the press reportage of biotechnology in Europe and the USA was

5
That which is already known includes personal experience, political beliefs, and criticisms held in relation to media and
government sources of information. Those with certain constellations of the already known, such as broadsheet readers,
constitute interpretative communities or interest group (see Corner, 1991; Joffe & Haarhoff, 2001).
6
This resonates with the psychometric traditions nding that those hazards perceived to have high benet are perceived
to have a low risk, and vice versa. This has recently been linked to affect (e.g. things people like are imagined to be less
risky than those they do not; Alhakami & Slovic, 1994).
62 Helene Joffe

content- analysed. Gaskell, Bauer, Durant, and Allum (1999) found that the European
press coverage tended to talk more positively about biotechnology than the US cover-
age. Yet European public opinion was more negative than in the USA. This finding puts
to rest the supposition that public attitudes correspond to what the public reads in the
press. Other factors colour what is read: trust in the authorities that regulate
biotechnology is greater in the USA than in Europe. This may bolster the North
Americans positive relationship to biotechnology while leaving the Europeans with an
elevated sense that they will not be protected from risk. A sense of confidence that
experts can be relied on to act benevolently, rather than intrapersonal, cognitive
factors, may play a determining role in risk apprehension. Furthermore, and with major
implications for the SRT field, the Europeans are found to have a significantly greater
sense of the adulteration, infection and monster-qualities associated with GM food7,
than the North Americans. The importance of this sense of menace, like the issues of
trust and anxiety-based concerns, spotlights the emotive aspects of the response
to risk8.
While the findings presented from the biotechnology study are rather broad in their
focus on whole cultures, rather than on members of specific groups, the cross-cultural
comparison suggests how different cultural currents build specific patterns of lay
thinking. They also show that rather than being passive or erroneous perceivers of
ideas from experts and the mass media, lay people actively forge representations in line
with their concerns, which are often driven by emotions. Anxiety and trust, rather
than cold information-handling processes, may well play pivotal roles in the
apprehension of risk.
Joffe (1996b, 1999) develops this thesis. In line with a psychodynamic extension of
social representations theory, it is posited that individuals faced with potential danger
operate from a position of anxiety that motivates them to represent the danger in a
specific way. The psyche develops from affective roots, with the infant experiencing
anxiety from birth. A key and deep-seated mental process used to alleviate anxiety is
splitting. This unconscious defence mechanism is generally associated with taking
into the self good experiences and feelings, and projecting outward bad experiences
and feelings. The goal of splitting, manifest in representations, is to keep the bad away
from the good in the hope that the good will not be invaded and destroyed. Thus, in
the earliest years of life, individuals protect a positive inner space by holding split
representations of what they experience. A universal life force motivates this protec-
tive process. This mechanism comes to the surface when dangers are represented
throughout life.
In a study of responses to AIDS in Britain and South Africa, Joffe (1996a) shows that
the early pattern that allows individuals to handle anxiety manifests in representations
of people who leak AIDS into the space of the general public. They are fantasized in
terms of a cocktail of sinful activities. Yet the content of the categories moral/good
and sinful/bad, and whether the splitting response is evoked, does not stem from
intrapersonal information processing. Rather, messages that circulate in the social
environment constrain or exacerbate splitting. Initial links made by scientists between
AIDS and that which lies outside of the morally acceptable terrain of western thought

7
Such qualities were only gauged in relation to food biotechnology in this study.
8
Slovic and colleagues work with similar concepts. Slovic, Flynn, and Layman (1991) asked respondents to note the
thoughts or images that came to mind related to underground nuclear-waste repository and found the majority of
the associations to be negative, revealing dread, revulsion and anger.
 Perception of risk 63

(e.g. links to poppers, Haitian voodoo and blood-based rituals with animals) were
picked up, magnified and sensationalized by the Western mass media. The shared
representations that emerged in lay thinking responded to the anxiety raised by
such reports, and their content, projecting this illness away from the space of in-group
and self.
Social representations research has been criticized on a number of different counts
(e.g. see Fife-Shaw, 1997; Joffe, 1997; Potter & Edwards, 1999; Potter & Wetherell,
1998). Regarding its application to the risk field, in particular, it might frustrate those
looking for a predictive theory. Since linear, causal models are dominant in psy-
chology, non-predictive models appear flawed. SRTs deliberate attempt to build a
complex model of common-sense understanding, which contains multiple, reciprocal
influences, appears insufficient. Although the theory leads one to expect that certain
factors will be present in responses to risk, such as associating them with bad others,
aspects of the meaning systems regarding each risk will be unforeseen. The very aim of
empirical work is to discern the specific constellation of meaning that evolves around
each particular risk.

How common sense is built: Anchoring and objectifying

An SRT approach to risk is distinctive in that it proposes that two specific processes
are used when people, be they scientists, journalists or lay people, build represen-
tations of events: anchoring and objectification (Moscovici, 1984b). Common sense
is built by these rather than being an error-prone response to probabilistic scientific
reasoning. These processes not only ensure that the core values and norms of the
society are stamped onto new events, as the AIDS-linked representations demonstrate,
but drive mutations in common sense over time. As a consequence of anchoring, when
a new event must be understood, its integration is accomplished by moulding it in a
way that it appears continuous with existing ideas (Moscovici, 1984b). Therefore,
meaning is made of many newly discerned mass illnesses in line with those known,
whatever their differences, at a material level. This is exemplified in AIDS being
referred to, initially, as a gay plague and its sufferers being avoided like the plague in
line with its anchor to the great plague (Wellings, 1988).
Anchoring is not purely an intrapersonal process of assimilation. Rather, the ideas,
images and language shared within groups steer the direction in which members
come to terms with the unfamiliar. This makes the alien event imaginable. However,
it removes from the new event both its specificity and its potentially threatening
quality.
Since an emphasis in SRT is on how new risks are anchored to known dangers, a
goal of a number of studies is to explore the continuities and discontinuities between
current and past representations of seemingly similar social objects. In taking this
longitudinal view, the field highlights the influence of socio-historical, rather than
internal cognitive processes, on risk-related thinking. Markova and Wilkie (1987)
showed that early social representations of AIDS, in the West, reflected voices from the
mass media, the womens and the gay movement, transforming the representations
about sexually transmitted diseases that had circulated in the syphilis epidemic of the
First World War. Both syphilis and AIDS had been anchored to death, stigma, immoral
behaviour and just punishment. The government-led campaigns accompanying both
had, to varying degrees, emphasized protection of the body, via condom use, and the
defence of dominant value systems via monogamy.
64 Helene Joffe

Despite this anchoring, major differences between the responses to the two
epidemics included: recognition of the sexuality of both genders in the time of AIDS,
rather than dwelling upon male sexuality requiring outlet as occurred in the time of
syphilis; and sexually explicit AIDS campaigns when juxtaposed with the discreet
nature of the discussion of sexuality at the time of syphilis. The womens and gay
movement had shifted the representation of the contemporary illness away from
heterosexual masculinity to wider sexual forces, yet the moralistic and stigmatizing
responses had survived. The longitudinal view of social representations of these ill-
nesses reflects the impact of social processes, such as social influence, on lay thinking.
This demonstrates that meanings of risks contain, in addition to the emotive elements
discussed, political dimensions, rather than purely cognitive elements.
In social representation formation, the process termed objectification works in
tandem with anchoring, transforming the abstract links to past ideas that anchoring
sets up into concrete mental content. Unfamiliar ideas can be made familiar by being
linked to historically familiar episodes and/or to the culturally familiar. While anchor-
ing involves drawing on shared knowledge from the past, objectification involves
drawing on the current experiential world of the particular group member (Wagner,
1998; Wagner et al., 1999). Objectification saturates an unfamiliar object with some-
thing more easy to grasp. The earliest study in the SRT area demonstrates this. When
different milieus (or naturalistically occurring social networks) in France were
faced with the new profession of psychoanalysis, it was initially saturated with the
image of the confession among Catholic French people, and, in keeping with their set
of concerns, they rejected its focus on sexuality (Moscovici, 1976). This made it
imaginable for this groups members in a way that did not threaten their exist-
ing worldview. Other groups, such as the Communist milieu and the bourgeoisie,
assimilated it in terms of different images: Confession and sexual repression played a
less significant role in their experiential world.
The trove of familiarity that is drawn upon to make a new phenomenon more concrete
lies in a social networks images, symbols and metaphors (Wagner, Lahnsteiner, &
Elejebarrieta, 1995). SRT-driven research on people experiencing the threat of mental
illness illustrates this. When rural, French families were interviewed about their role as
hosts of mentally ill lodgers, they drew on images close to their everyday experience:
They talked of decay, souring, going off and curdling to explain the process of becoming
mentally ill (Jodelet, 1991). Their everyday experience offered up a diet of images from
which they could choose to characterize the phenomenon they sought to understand.
The common thread in their responses indicates that the farmers social existence, rather
than intrapersonal reactions, shaped their representations.
The mass media appear to form part of peoples social existence, their experiential
world. While the direct, visceral level is absent, mass media images may operate in a
similar manner to experience. The souring milk metaphor adhered to by the French
rural people may be the equivalent of the monstrous and contagious images of
genetically engineered food held in Europe. In competing for mass audiences, tabloid-
style newspapers transmit menacing images of the biotechnology issues they cover
(Wagner & Kronberger, 2001), and these may act as an experiential resource for
representing such issues in the groups that consume them. The biotechnology study
demonstrates that the mediamind link is complex. In the same way that people prefer
to converse with others of similar opinions, so they may read newspapers likely to
confirm their own beliefs. This confounds the notion of a unidirectional flow of
information from media to mind.
 Perception of risk 65

As noted, cognitive risk traditions do not tend to pay attention to the external
messages that people may draw on. Talking of cognitive traditions in general, Marcus
and Plaut (2001) state that variation in individuals attitudes and schemas in different
immediate social contexts (such as when other people are present or not, or other
people are in positions of authority or not) have been examined. Yet only scant
attention has been paid to meaning systems that are likely to be shared as a result of
people being similarly positioned in the social world. Thus meaning systems have not
been acknowledged to be a significant aspect of the social context. Sociologists have
devoted considerable energy to stressing the distinctive social context in which mean-
ings of risks are currently forged. The risk society (Beck, 1986/1992) or risk climate
(Giddens, 1991) refers to the conditions of contemporary western society in which
people have high levels of awareness of myriad risks, yet a lack of trust in the experts
who might be relied upon for protection from them. Such conditions are potentially
anxiety-provoking, particularly since the nature of the risks created by the momentum
of contemporary innovationgenetic, nuclear, chemical and ecologicalincreasingly
eludes the control of societys protective institutions (Beck, 1986/1992, 1996). If lay
thinking is assumed to be linked to this external world of risks, to be shaped in
the communications that people experience, it would be curious to conceptualize
readings of risks as intrapersonal processes, devoid of interaction with (and within)
this pervasive environment.
This is an environment replete with symbols. The process of objectification overlaps
significantly with that of symbolization, a useful though severely under-represented
concept for risk research9. Symbols provide people with a means to understand
abstract matters. In a study of social representations of Ebola in Britain, Joffe and
Haarhoff (2002) found that Ebola was symbolized in terms of science-fiction imagery.
While none of the newspaper articles that gave the Britons their information on
Ebola referred to science fiction directly, pictures of people in protective clothing
accompanied some articles. Participants in the study may have read these clothes as
space suits and, along with the popular film of the time (Outbreak) that depicted
similar images, this appears to have activated talk about a science-fiction scenario. Such
imagery not only designated Ebolas distance from the present space of the British
respondents, but fed their sense of immunity from it.
The focus on such symbols highlights a very specific role for SRT. It locates
some of its concerns beyond the linguistic expression of individual respondents. This
distinguishes it from those psychological traditions dependent on language for their
inroads into psychic life. While work on the impact of imagery is in its early stages,
Corner, Richardson, and Fenton (1990) argue that images can exert a positioning
power on viewers imagination, which may be resistant to commentaries that chal-
lenge the feelings they produce. They may be readily absorbed in an unmediated
manner because viewers are not generally provoked to reflect on or to deconstruct
them.

The identity-protective motivation that drives social representation

This does not imply that stimuli are perceived in an unmediated fashion. Rather, texts
and images are seen through a lens of existing, often socially shared representations

9
For noteworthy exceptions, see a few recent studies by Slovic and colleagues (Slovic, 2000a).
66 Helene Joffe

which in turn, are underpinned by various motivations. A core motivation10 in relation

to risk apprehension is identity protection, which refers, simultaneously, to the protec-
tion of in-group and self identity. Social representations are entwined with identity in a
number of ways. They emerge precisely in response to danger to the collective identity
of the group, and consequently, a central purpose of representation is to defend
against feeling threatened (Moscovici, 1976). However, the process whereby represen-
tations serve to defend identity is not an intrapersonal one, as certain readings of OB
would see the optimism or sense of invulnerability that manifests in relation to threat
(see Taylor et al., 1992). When risks are encountered, individuals drawoften
not consciouslyon ways of thinking that have always been, and continue to be,
acceptable to the groups with which they identify. When such events are objectified,
groups favour the images, symbols and/or metaphors compatible with in-group values.
So the identity positioning of the representor determines the vision held of a new
threat. Different groups ascribe to different representations of risks in accordance with
the identities that require protection.
SRT emphasizes how thinking that develops in relation to risks is a way of coping,
following Moscovicis (1976) supposition that all thinking is a means of solving psychic
or emotional tensions, a compensation to restore inner stability. Wagner and
Kronberger (2001) juxtapose two types of coping in the face of potential danger.
Material coping includes the activities of scientists, engineers and politicians under-
taken to reduce health hazards and to control ecological risks. This involves technical
actions, political decisions and legislation. However, symbolic coping involves the
appropriation of the novel and unfamiliar in order to make it intelligible and communi-
cable. Social representations reflect the endeavour to cope with threat, at a symbolic
level, and a splitting defence against anxiety is often manifest in them.

Methodological challenges posed

The processes and motivations involved in social representation formation are not
simple to discern empirically. Major methodological challenges are posed by the shift
to identity-based, emotional and symbolic facets of human thinking. Once one assumes
that the factors that forge readings of risk are not necessarily located in the private
knowledge of individuals, self-report data cannot be taken at face value. Individuals
responses to scale items cannot be used as a sole measure, as generally occurs in many
more mainstream models of risk perception. The studies reviewed above demonstrate
that triangulation (see Flick, 1992), in terms of exploring ideas that reside in structures
outside of individual minds (e.g. in the mass media, scientific publications and text-
books), as well as those that emerge from (closed and open-ended) surveys, and
interviews (with individuals and focus groups), has emerged as a key mechanism for
ensuring that both individual thinking and its context are sampled. The goal is to
observe the transformations that occur as knowledge circulates between the different
realms and to discover how particular group members make meaning of risk messages,
and what functions these meanings have for them.
10
Social representation is motivated by other factors too. While not centrally concerned with the ideological function of
representation, it is recognized that at the same time as protecting self and in-group vulnerability to risks, the chosen
social representation maintains the status of certain groups in a society. Of course, in maintaining the dominance of
certain groups, the SR can con ict with the identity protective function: Those people who are members of out-groups
nd themselves at the receiving end of projective material that potentially can spoil their identity (see Joffe, 1995). A
further motivation is that the representation fosters solidarity within groups and facilitates communication between group
members. Kaes (1984) indicates that shared representations provide a nucleus of identication for the group, allowing it
to distinguish itself from its out-groups.
 Perception of risk 67

Like more mainstream risk studies, SRT research still suffers from over-reliance on
consciously accessible data. However, empirical methods for examining the implicit,
symbolic content of thought are being developed. Attention is being paid to images,
and tools such as word-association tasks (e.g. see Wagner et al., 1996), participant
observation and drawings are used. These provide useful counterpoints to self-report
data. The added value of such methods is evident in aspects of Jodelets (1991) study of
mental illness that emphasize the importance of the workings of the response to threat
that have not reached a verbal level but are nevertheless informative of action. Her
participant observation revealed that when mentally ill lodgers stayed with host
families, their eating utensils and clothing were washed separately from those belong-
ing to the hosts. This indicates the existence of a representation of mental illness as
contagious. Yet the interview material was more consistent with modern medicines
understanding of mental illness, which does not refer to contagion. Fears of contagion
were expressed via the keeping apart of the belongings of the lodgers through word-
less thought but not consciously thought about or, at least, mentioned in the inter-
views. The gulf between the meanings that emerge from the participant observation
and interviews points to the importance of utilizing multiple methods. The gulf may
reflect the presence of self-presentation in the interviews, but, as plausibly, it may
indicate that the hosts hold complex, contradictory ideas about mental illness (Bauer &
Gaskell, 1999).
A focus on the non-verbal realm highlights that when self-report data are used alone,
they do not provide a sufficiently valid account of risk-related thinking. Researchers
need to sample conscious and non-conscious material in naturally occurring social
networks if they are to ascertain whether patterns of identity protective representation
exist.

Implications of a social representations approach for the psychology of risk

In itself, SRT represents a critique of models of perception in the risk sphere, where
people are regarded as erroneous perceivers, and their patterns of perception aggre-
gated in order to establish nomothetic laws (see Lamiell, 1998). In place of this, many
SRT-driven studies focus on commonalties across groups of persons in particular, how
they make sense of particular risk issues, and how their meaning structures evolve.
SRTs goal is to discern meaning, rather than to perform cognitive algebra. Identity
processes largely influence the content of these meaning systems. For example, in
terms of meanings of potential dangers, representations may defend the representor
from the anxiety that they evoke. A motivation to protect the inner space underpins
concepts wherein others become linked with danger by absorbing that which is
regarded as morally reprehensible.
In addition to the meaning-based and emotive foci, SRT also injects into risk psy-
chology a concern with methods for grasping the contextual factors that feed the
content of individual belief structures. This differs substantially from the intrapersonal
focus of much psychological risk research. Menacing imagery in the mass media,
for example, feeds objections to many biotechnological risks, despite any positive
accounts conveyed in written form (see Gaskell et al., 1999).
In the place of attempting to track and to understand what the cognitive tradition
labels heuristics and biases in decision-making, SRT studies human thoughts in them-
selves, without reference to an ideal. It is presumed that different pockets of shared
knowledge, in different groups, delimit what each group member sees as rational (see
68 Helene Joffe

Wagner, 1993). By way of contrast to the set of individualist assumptions contained in

the mainstream Anglo-Saxon models of risk psychology, where human thought pro-
cesses are studied as if they arise within, and lie exclusively inside, individual minds,
the social representational approach proposes that human thought is relational at root.
Explanations and judgments are not constructed within individual minds but in the
unceasing babble, the permanent dialogue that people have with each other
(Moscovici, 1984b) and with institutions.
This paper has demonstrated that the link between individual thought and broader
institutional forces, such as those of science and of the mass media, is crucial to an
understanding of the psychology of risk. In making the shift from cognition to the
social transmission of ideas, and to the emotional and symbolic realms, the approach
abandons reliance upon the respected experimental and survey methods. SRTs dual
foci on group-based, and internal, rationality dictates that the contents of both the
social context and individual minds be sampled. Consequently, triangulation, in terms
of drawing material from both the social context and from individual minds, has
emerged as a key aspect of the method of many social representational studies.

Conclusion
The paper has focused on what SRT can contribute to the study of responses to risks.
Its scope has been to emphasize those elements of the readings of risks that have
been dormant (or seen as epi-phenomena) in cognitively-driven risk psychology. The
contributions offered are summarized below.
A key revelation is the lack of focus on the specific meaning made of one or other
risk, in mainstream risk research. Instead of concentrating on intrapersonal cognitive
processes and their limitations, SRT emphasizes the specific, complex content of
common-sense thinking regarding particular risks. The mental illness example demon-
strates that the content of the response to risk is not only complex but often contains
contradictory elements, which are difficult to discern by way of scales and survey
items. SRTs interest is not in whether a response to risk is correct or erroneous. The
concern is not with whether it is false, weak, biased, or in any other way deficient
(Bauer & Gaskell, 1999). Rather, the raison detre of the theory lies in why and how
society creates social representations, and the common sense that evolves from this.
People construct risks through lenses tinged with elements of group attachment and of
the experiences of their in-groups and selves, in terms of both the contemporary
imagery they are exposed to and past misfortunes. These elements do not distort a real
risk. Rather, they are the reality in the minds of those who look upon the risks.
The social representation is a relatively consensual or shared understanding within a
group, which is forged by way of communicative processes, and also facilitates them.
As such, a social representations perspective addresses one of Douglas (1994) key
problems with the risk field: that it fails to take into account intersubjective mobilis-
ations of belief (p. 40). SRT is uniquely positioned to address this. The level of examin-
ation in SRT is the we contained in the thinking of the I. The we aspect is more
developed in the broader social sciences. Yet SRT, in focusing on the mediamind link,
as well as anchoring and objectifying, makes a distinctive contribution to risk theory by
positing how the we enters into and constructs the representations of the I. The link
between group and individual identity, on the one hand, and the representation of risk,
on the other hand, offers a rich area for future investigation.
 Perception of risk 69

A further important aspect of the content of risk-related thought is its link to affect,
and this provides an ongoing area of investigation in the SRT sphere. Emotions are not
absent from the cognitive theories. Taylor et al. (1992) obliquely acknowledge a role
for the emotional dimension, such as heightened anxiety, and the mobilization of OB
as a defence against it. In addition, the dimension of dread in the psychometric work
on risk (see Slovic, 2000b) speaks to a sense underpinned by emotion. However, it is
only in recent years that affect has been given a role in the risk-perception field.
The paper has shown that sectors of the cognitive literature have also recently
become engaged with the symbolic and social aspects of the apprehension of risks.
This results, in part, from awareness of the host of challenges to earlier cognitive
theory. The changes are reflected in the title of a recent review (Schwarz, 2000) of
where the social judgment and attitude field as a whole is heading: Social judgement
and attitudes: warmer, more social, and less conscious. While the content of the
review reflects a less radical shift than the title implies11, these directions are certainly
evident in the field. Yet three key ways in which the new direction in the cognitive
literature still differs radically from the SRT literature can be distinguished.
First, the extant idea that emotions are distorters of cognition differentiates this new
wave of literature in the risk perception field from the SRT approach, which proposes
plural facets of the response to risk rather than distorted, as opposed to non-distorted
ways. Second, when social factors, such as worldview, are taken on board in the more
mainstream literature, they are slotted into a regression equation to predict risk
perception. A rich explanation of the complexity of what people feel and think about
risks may be better theorized without reliance on a reductive typology. Third,
representation is treated as a static element of cognitive organization in the newer
cognitive theories, while within SRT, the concept representation is imputed with
dynamism since it refers as much to the process through which representations are
elaborated (i.e. by way of transformations of material as it is mediated to lay people
from the expert realm, and their anchoring and objectification) as it does to the
structures of knowledge that are established. Slovic and his colleagues have introduced
to the risk field many dimensions for which rich theorization already exists in the
SRT realm.
In challenging mainstream risk psychology with findings that do not take the natural
sciences as their yardstick of good science, the unscientific, the soft, threatens to
invade a tradition that works hard to conform to particular scientific aspirations. This
proposition can be viewed in at least one of two ways. Either one recognizes that ideas
generated outside predictive models are valuable for increasing understanding of
phenomena, but provide less evidentiary weight (see Westen, 1998), or one adopts
the stance that, contrary to beliefs held within and outside the scientific community,
not just one scientific method exists (see Boulding, 1980). Science strives to develop
methods that correspond to different epistemological fields. Within the latter vision,
social and natural scientific approaches are of equal value. The social-representations

11
Schwarz (2000) states that the focus on the computer metaphor in terms of the encoding, storage and retrieval of
information (i.e. information processing) not only fostered concentration on individuals as isolated information processors,
but did not invite attention to subjective experiences and emotional and motivational in uences (p. 150). Despite his
critique of this vision, his notion of where the eld is heading is not radically different. The metaphor he uses to sum up
the shift into these realms is of the human as a motivated tactician. He says, of this new characterization, that this
metaphor does not question the truism that humans are information processors. It merely highlights that information
stands in the service of, and is tuned to meet, the individuals goals and needs (p. 151) (emphasis in original). In this
vision, humans are still essentially information processors, rather than meaning-makers.
70 Helene Joffe

approach pursues its quest for understanding the complexity of human meaning-
making systems by utilizing appropriate, scientifically rigorous methods. Logical
positivism is useful for testing certain circumscribed hypotheses. Yet when the task is
to discern how and what people feel and think when faced with the plethora of risks
presented to them daily, it may be useful to avoid methodolatory: a combination of
method and idolatry, to describe a preoccupation with selecting and defending
methods to the exclusion of the actual substance of the story being told. (Janesick,
1994, p. 215)

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three reviewers, as well as Steve Reicher and David Green for
their excellent suggestions regarding earlier versions of this paper. I also acknowledge the
contribution of the British Academy to this paper.

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Received 2 August 2000; revised version received 9 October 2001