Esther Eidinow – Written evidence (RSK0035)

Writing in a personal capacity.

The meanings of ‘risk’, communication of risks, and role of stories in risk management.

This paper responds to the questions concerning effective risk communication raised by the Committee in discussion. I note that the questions asked in the online brief do not focus on this aspect.

Argument: Better comprehension of how individuals, groups and societies understand, communicate and respond to 'risk' improves risk-management approaches. This includes both the term 'risk' and perceptions of risk, which interact with the socio-cultural values and beliefs of the perceiver. Because they engage with the complex cultural structures that shape perception and understanding, stories offer a potentially powerful and effective mode of exploring and understanding risks and thinking through their potential implications. Story-telling is an inherent human modality for exploring both meanings and possibilities. Stories allow for the inclusion and exploration of multiple perspectives and a variety of different outcomes, and can offer a shared basis for decision making.

1. Multiple meanings: Risk can be distinguished from uncertainty when it can be expressed as a number—a probability or frequency—on the basis of empirical evidence. But there are other co-existing interpretations of probability:  these include propensities, which depend on the properties of the object in question, e.g., the design of a die; and, importantly, degrees of belief, ‘subjective probabilities’ (Gigerenzer 2002). As sociological approaches to risk illuminate, we can unpack this latter use of the term ‘risk’ to find at least three separate meanings. For example: ‘risk’ may convey ideas of hazard, loss, damage or threat; it may communicate the process of weighing up gains and losses in decision making; and, finally, a risk calculation may turn on an intuitive evaluation, developing from experience, rather than objective measures.
2. For modern risk studies, perhaps especially approaches to ‘risk-management’, the recognition and examination of the multiple dimensions of this concept continue to prove crucial to a better comprehension of how individuals, groups and societies understand, communicate and respond to risk. Analysis of everyday use of terms including risk show that whereas most attempts to define risk in specialized terminology have taken the term to have a quantitative meaning, numerical meanings are, in fact, rare, and it is nonquantitative meanings that dominate in everyday language (Boholm 2016). Moreover, those meanings are complex and multiple, with ‘widespread use in different senses, which will make any attempt to define them in a single unified manner extremely difficult.’ (and cf. Hansson 2004 who identifies five senses of the noun ‘risk’, including ‘an unwanted event that may or may not occur’; ‘the cause of an unwanted event that may or may not occur’; ‘the probability of an unwanted event that may or may not occur’; ‘the statistical expectation value of an unwanted event that may or may not occur’; and finally ‘the fact that a decision is made under conditions of known probabilities’).
3. Perception: Quite apart from the actual physical dangers of a situation, perceptions of risk interact with the socio-cultural values and beliefs of the perceiver (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Depending on its cultural structures and beliefs, a society will designate certain aspects of life as posing greater danger to its members than others; these then become the foci of anxiety for individuals within that culture. To state the obvious, communities are diverse and cultures of risk-perception will vary. Perceptions of danger—and alongside this, notions of authority, responsibility, misfortune and blame—were generated and shared within and across society, informing the creation and operation of relationships and institutions in a community. The key question is ‘how social agents create and use boundaries to demarcate that which is dangerous’ (Clarke and Short 1993). While this may seem far removed from the physical dangers posed by a pandemic, it can help with thinking about the communication of risk and danger, prompting us to ask how best to interact with the complex of ideas that comprise a person’s perception of risks, and so leading to more effective engagement with individuals and groups, and thus of the management of risk.
4. Stories: Because they engage with the complex cultural structures that shape perception and understanding, stories offer a potentially powerful and effective mode of exploring and understanding risks and thinking through their potential implications. Research on story-telling suggests that using stories to present data can be a more effective way of communicating an idea than using numbers, because it allows that data to be understood in terms of lived experience. This goes beyond empathy: research in the cognitive sciences indicates that our brains and bodies simulate the experiences we read about, which can give us a sense of ‘being there’ (Barsalou 2016). This is part of our inherent cognitive processing of the world around us: we draw on narrative structures to make sense of our environments; in turn, our environments are shaped by the stories that we tell. Some of these narrative structures and their protagonists—e.g., ‘the hero narrative’—appear across different cultures, separated by time and place, but with similar intrinsic meanings for their audiences (Eidinow and Lorenz 2020).
5. Story-telling is an inherent human modality for exploring both meanings and possibilities. It allows for the inclusion and exploration of multiple perspectives and a variety of different outcomes. This makes it a useful tool for exploring complex problems (Eidinow, Marsh and Waugh 2014). These narrative features can be deliberately developed in structured strategy exercises, such as scenario planning. This can allow for the collaborative development of stories that provide a shared basis for decision making across multiple communities (Eidinow and Wilkinson 2008). Stories about possible futures may not only describe possibilities, they can also lead to actions (or indeed, inactions) that realise those possibilities (Eidinow and Ramirez 2016).

References

Barsalou, L. W. 2016. Situated Conceptualization: Theory and Applications’, in Y. Coello and M. H. Fischer, (eds.), Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1: Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment, 11-37. East Sussex.

Clarke, L., and J. F. J. Short. 1993. Social Organization and Risk: Some Current Controversies. Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1): 375–99.

Douglas, M. 1992. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London.

Eidinow, E. and K. Lorenz. 2020. ‘Ancient Myths and Modern SMEs’, Organizational Aesthetics 9(1).

Eidinow, E., N. Marsh, and P. Waugh. 2014. ‘Telling the Stories of Climate Change’, in Innovation: Managing Risk, Not Avoiding It. Evidence and Case Studies. Annual Report of the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Government Office for Science, UK.

Eidinow, E., and R. Ramirez. 2016. ‘The Aesthetics of Story-telling as a Technology of the Plausible’, Futures 84: 43-49.

Gigerenzer, G. 2002. Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty. London.

Hansson S.O. 2004. ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Risk’, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 1;8(1):10-35.

Wilkinson, A., and E. Eidinow. 2008. ‘Evolving Practices in Environmental Scenarios: a New Scenario Typology’, Environmental Research Letters 3(4):45017.

Esther Eidinow, University of Bristol         

27 January 2021