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9 - The dynamics of risk amplification and attenuation in context: a French case study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Nick Pidgeon
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Roger E. Kasperson
Affiliation:
Stockholm Environment Institute
Paul Slovic
Affiliation:
Decision Reserach, Oregon
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Summary

The social amplification of risk framework (Kasperson, Renn, Slovic et al. 1988) seeks to forge links between the technical assessment of risk and psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives on risk perception and risk related behavior. We present a case study illustrating and elaborating the central hypothesis of the social amplification of risk framework (SARF), in which hazards interact with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes in ways that may amplify or attenuate public responses to the risk or risk event.

While an important body of research drawing on SARF has been published in the years since the seminal paper by Kasperson et al., attempts to connect the framework to risk issues in their local context are few. With the case of the “spontaneous fires” observed in the French village of Moirans-en-Montagne in 1995–96, we examine the process of both amplification and attenuation in a community context.

Furthermore, most of the existing body of research rests upon situations where the risk issues and conflicts around them are already exacerbated, and the positions of the actors involved are already polarized. In most reports, risk objects or situations are often already well defined and summarized by catchwords (such as BSE, AIDS, radwaste, tobacco, and so on) that can give the impression that the risk object pre-exists both the conditions that bring it into being, and the analysis. In this study, we demonstrate that responses to the risk event actually define the risk itself: the construction of the event, psychologically and socially shared in interaction and in collective sense making, itself shapes the danger.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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