What environmental and technological risk communication research and health risk research can learn from each other

Abstract

The study of risk perception and communication has emerged in several disciplines and fields, and there has not been strong convergence between them, especially in Europe and specifically in Britain. The lack of connection between, for example, the fields of health risk and environmental and technological risk, and still more with respect to fears of crime or old age poverty or privacy violation, has meant that theories have not been shown to be adequate, and practical prescriptions for conflict containment and communication have not been made robust. This article examines the roots of the fragmentation, examining the particular case of the relationship between health and environmental/technological risk studies, considering why the flow of ideas and methods has been so limited, and much of it in a rather surprising direction. The paper concludes by offering some principles that could inform a strategy for more integrated research on risk perception and communication.

Keywords:

• risk communication
• health risk research
• environmental communication
• technological communication

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Baruch Fischhoff and Simon Wessely for invaluable comments on an earlier draft. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. Naturally, they bear no responsibility for our errors, nor should they be accused of agreeing with our arguments. In writing this article the first author was supported by a grant provided by Pfizer Global Research and Development.

Notes

1. In this paper, our concern is almost entirely with the literature on collective public health risk communication, and not with individual advice from physician to patient: the individual relationship with a professional, invoked at a point of individual dependence or even need, raises quite different questions of risk perception, communication and trust from those at issue in the collective health and environmental contexts, and therefore we do not press our arguments for integration and cross‐field learning in this area of specifically medical, as opposed to health risk communication.