Responsibility as a dimension of risk perception: the potential of empirical study

Текст статьи.

Abstract

In this paper, we make an attempt to find within the “psychometric paradigm” methodology references to the social distribution of risk phenomena – particularly the existence of risk producers and consumers. We claim that the social aspect of this “paradigm” can be made more explicit by using the notion of responsibility. We propose a modified version of this methodology by including several questions concerning the responsibility of some actor for preventing risk. A pilot study using this methodology was conducted. Our results help us to formulate a hypothesis that responsibility can be viewed as a separate dimension of risk perception.