Reading | Is the world in front of you dangerous or safe?

"Acceptance of Risk: Perspective of Social Science"

Mary Douglas

Xiong Chang translation

East China Normal University Press published in June 2022

Our life is full of various risks, but we still know very little about "risks". Some risks are widely recognized and valued, while other risks are ignored. Anthropologist Mary Douglas went deep into the society, and picked up a common sense of risk from people's daily dialogue, preventive measures adopted, and an excuse for fabrication. Through the differences in different social perceptions and attribution risks, it explains how morality and political factors have shaped risks and achieve social integration. She criticized the economics, science and psychology at the time, and believed that the technical neutrality of advocating modern risk recognition actually shaken the existence of risks as a way of understanding and handling dangerous things.

>> Selected reading in the text:

Natural causes

The boundaries between natural reasons and human reasons are always delineated in the social process of allocation of responsibilities. This boundary is always in controversy. The waves are ups and downs and unstable, reflecting the current cultural prejudice. Chief Judge Rose Elizabeth Berd recently protested that in the face of allowing land owners to "just let go of nature's self -flow", "we should abandon the difference between human conditions and natural conditions ... Because because This rule contains unfairness. It is based on this rule that a company with land in Marbury refused to bear the responsibility of sharing with landslide damage to all natural disasters (Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1981). "Just as God's actions are combined with the concept of human beings, the same is true of these differences between intention, accidents and events." Burton, Kitz and White have always believed that "dangerous, from the definition point of view, it is a human phenomenon." The same is true of Fescohoff and others, but it is much easier to say that it is much easier to consider it into the follow -up analysis.

Even if the danger is defined as "unable to deal with things", this is still in the actor mode. However, this definitions connect the two physical reasons and physical consequences with the ability of the rational subject. This is closer to the theory of perception, because it allows to produce dangerous quality from expectations of response methods. Moreover, perception theory is necessary for the acceptability of thinking risks.

Self -exemption

The experience of the National Product Safety Commission shows that consumers are willing to save a little more in price and do not want to spend a little more money to improve security. The sense of familiarity seems to give farmers, smokers, and pedestrians and drivers who live on the Hongpan Plain; those who live near the nuclear power plant are more worried about the danger of radiation than others; engineers and mechanic often treat themselves to themselves The technology is too confident. Among some high -risk occupations, income enhances people's self -confidence and familiarity. However, familiarity often works in another way.

In daily life, the most common danger is often ignored. At the other end of the probability ruler, the most rare and low -probability danger is always diluted. Looking at these tendencies together, the individual seems to cut off his perception of the risk that is likely to occur, which makes the world in front of him look more secure than reality. At the same time, the individual also cuts off his low probability risk of low probability risk. Interest, the distant danger disappears. For species with good survival adaptation, ignoring low probability events seems to be a very reasonable strategy. Types of all low -probability disasters will not only distract the attention, but even cause danger to lose focus. From the perspective of species survival, if self -exemption consciousness can keep people calm and courage to try in danger, and not be unbalanced due to signs of failure, then this consciousness is also adaptable. This is undoubtedly a interesting difference between human psychology and animal psychology. Perhaps some issues of social behavior evolution can be decomposed into two testable propositions -social sources of confidence, and the clever impact of excessive self -confidence on human beings.

It's time to formally test human beings. It seems that they are not good at rational thinking, and their memory is weak and unstable.

Memory research

Memory research is highly dependent on language, but human memory and cognition exist largely in words. It is worth noting that most of the experiments corresponding to human amnesia in the animal laboratory have ended in failure; Nadal believes that this may be because human memory may Essence Human beings reflected in the dangerous part rooted in our animal nature. This is one of the reasons why psychological knowledge related to human risk perception is still in the initial stage. In addition, human memory research also shows that we cannot study human cognition by studying the weakness of memory. Like Elizabeth Lovets's book "Memory" (1980), it talks more about why we forget, not how we remember. The latter seems obviously arbitrary.

As far as human memory is concerned, the storage and retrieval of things depends on people's control of attention, and attention depends on social signals and social pressure. Therefore Code.

Psychologists suggest that those who know what risks are on what is focused on better communication with the general public.However, those wise suggestions, such as risk education in this example, have not achieved inspiring results.The more isolated a person, the more fragile and scattered his social network, the more he will not be reviewed by the public, and the more the risk standards he can accept can be set by himself.However, as long as there is a community, the acceptable standards of risks must go through debate and be established in society.This activity constitutes the foundation of defining communities.

A community will use its common and accumulated experience to determine which predictable losses are most likely to occur, which possible losses are the most harmful, and which damage can be prevented.The community has also built the world model of actors, as well as the value scale of whether different results are serious or insignificant.

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Author: Mary Douglas

Edit: Zhou Yiqian

Editor in charge: Zhu Zilong

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