Perspectives on the ‘lens of risk’ interview series: Interview with Nick Pidgeon

Abstract

This article is the first in a series which will appear in 2012 in the special issue series Health Care Through the `Lens of Risk'. It provides a quasi-verbatim transcript of an interview with Nick Pidgeon, one of the main contributors to the social science component of The Royal Society Risk Report (1992). The interview contains a fascinating insider account of the debate about risk between engineers and social scientists who produced the report. It also offers some important reflections on the fissure which has opened up between risk sociology and research concerned with global and local system safety.

Keywords:

• risk
• risk analysis
• risk perception
• uncertainty

Notes

 1. Chemical industry accident near Milan in 1976 which caused regional dioxin exposure.

 2. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

 3. The ontology of risk remains ill-defined in the social sciences and more generally. One approach to thinking about the issue raised is to distinguish events such as nuclear accidents which ‘really’ kill from risks which reference prognostic limitations [Bob Heyman's comment].

 4. Many other, sometimes controversial examples can be given, for instance cheese avoidance if skeptics about the dietary fat intake-high ‘bad’ cholesterol-coronary heart disease linkage (Hann and Peckham 2010) are to be believed [Bob Heyman's comment].

 5. Failures arising from the same causal factors and therefore not statistically independent – c.f. the banking fiasco of 2007.

 6. ‘The probability that a particular adverse event occurs during a stated period of time, or results from a particular challenge.’

 7. The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), currently in use for evaluating academic research, known at that time as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

 8. The UK Economic and Social Research Council, the primary state funder of social science research.

 9. As argued above, merely imagining a selected contingency – what might happen – can invoke a `real' risk [Bob Heyman's comment].

10. A good example of culturally supported ‘risk iconography’ (Heyman et al. 2010, pp. 55–56) [Bob Heyman's comment].