Perspectives on the ‘lens of risk’ interview series: Interviews with Judith Green and Peter Taylor-Gooby

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Notes

1. The editorial ‘Is it time for the sociology of health to abandon “risk”?' referred to in the Introduction to this article (Green, 2009).

2. (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983).

3. The Royal Society (1992, p. 2) Risk monograph defined risk as ‘the probability that a particular adverse event occurs during a stated period of time, or results from a particular challenge'.

4. Taylor-Gooby makes a related point in the following interview about the artificiality of the widely cited experimental investigations of decision-making in conditions of uncertainty undertaken by Kahneman, Tversky and colleagues.

5. The interview with Nick Pidgeon in this special issue series (Heyman and Brown, 2012).

6. The SCARR website, at http://www.kent.ac.uk/scarr/, contains over 100 downloadable papers and research report.

7. See discussion of the work of Kahneman and Tversky and others later in the interview.

8. The game is played between two players. One has resources and can offer any division they choose to the other. If the other does not accept, all resources are forfeited by both parties. But if they accept, each gets the resources as proposed. The assumption is that a rational actor would propose the smallest possible amount to the co-player and she would accept since that is better than nothing. In practice, people will not accept below a threshold, indicating that choices are driven by values about reciprocity and respect for others as well as by rational individualism.

9. As of 2012, for example, UK banks are having to pay billions of pounds in compensation to members of the public who are now deemed to have been mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI).

10. See Lunt and Livingstone (2007).