Cultural Theory of risk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Feb 11
  

  nnpetro
  • Whereas other theories of risk perception stress economic and cognitive influences, Cultural Theory asserts that structures of social organization endow individuals with perceptions that reinforce those structures in competition against alternative ones.
  • Individuals, Douglas maintained, tend to associate societal harms—from sickness to famine to natural catastrophes—with conduct that transgresses societal norms. This
  • plays an indispensable role in promoting certain social structures
  • the forms that competing structures of social organization assume.
  • can be characterized (within and across all societies at all times) along two dimensions, which she called “group” and “grid.
  • “high group” way of life exhibits a high degree of collective control
  • “high grid” way of life is characterized by conspicuous and durable forms of stratification in roles and authority,
  • these two strands of her thought were first consciously woven together to form the fabric of a theory of risk perception in her and Wildavsky’s 1982 book, Risk and Culture 
  • Risk and Culture attributed political conflict over environmental and technological risks to a struggle between adherents of competing ways of life associated with the group-grid scheme
  • Later works in Cultural Theory systematized this argument. In these accounts, group-grid gives rise to either four or five discrete ways of life, each of which is associated with a view of nature (as robust, as fragile, as capricious, and so forth) that is congenial to its advancement in competition with the others.^[5][6]
  • risk perceptions are distributed across persons in patterns better explained by culture than by other asserted influences.
  • Cultural Theory is an alternative to
  • rational choice economics,
  • Douglas and Wildavsky criticized this position in Risk and Culture, arguing that it ignores the role of cultural ways of life in determining what states of affairs individuals see as worthy of taking risks to attain.
  • second prominent theory, which is grounded in social psychology and behavioral economics, asserts that individuals’ risk perceptions are pervasively shaped, and often distorted, by heuristics and biases.^[14] Douglas maintained that this “psychometric” approach naively attempted to “depoliticize” risk conflicts by attributing to cognitive influences beliefs that reflect individuals’ commitments to competing cultural structures
  • some scholars, including Paul Slovic, a pioneer in the development of the psychometric theory, have sought to connect the psychometric and cultural theories. This position, known as the cultural cognition of risk, asserts that the dynamics featured in the psychometric paradigm are the mechanisms through which group-grid worldviews shape risk perception.^[16] Anticipating such a program, Douglas herself once suggested that “[i]f we were invited to make a coalition between group-grid theory and psychometrics, it would be like going to heaven.”

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• 03 Feb 09
  

  Todd Suomela

  The Cultural Theory of risk, often referred to simply as Cultural Theory, consists of a conceptual framework and an associated body of empirical studies that seek to explain societal conflict over risk. Whereas other theories of risk perception stress economic and cognitive influences, Cultural Theory asserts that structures of social organization endow individuals with perceptions that reinforce those structures in competition against alternative ones. Originating in the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky,

  cultural-theory risk perception psychology organization groups wikipedia

• 25 May 07
  

  Adam Bohannon

  anthropology culture douglas ksuanth theory

  • The Cultural Theory of risk, often referred to simply as Cultural Theory (with capital letters), is a theory developed in anthropology and political science to explain risk perception. Cultural Theory aims to understand why different people and social groups fear different risks.
  • Cultural Theory arose out of the work of Mary Douglas, an anthropologist studying traditional African religion. She observed that different societies feared different sorts of threats, and that these differences correlated with differences in their social structure. She proposed a functionalist explanation: social structures (which she called "ways of life") generate attitudes toward the world (which she called "cultural biases") that serve to uphold the social structure.

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