Brief History of Risk: Despite increasing life expectancy and high levels of welfare, health care, and public safety in most post-industrial countries, the public discourse often revolves around perceived threats

A brief history of risk. Ying Li, Thomas Hills, Ralph Hertwig. Cognition, Volume 203, October 2020, 104344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104344

Abstract: Despite increasing life expectancy and high levels of welfare, health care, and public safety in most post-industrial countries, the public discourse often revolves around perceived threats. Terrorism, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes are just a few of the risks that dominate media coverage. Is this public discourse on risk disconnected from reality? To examine this issue, we analyzed the dynamics of the risk discourse in two natural language text corpora. Specifically, we tracked latent semantic patterns over a period of 150 years to address four questions: First, we examined how the frequency of the word risk has changed over historical time. Is the construct of risk playing an ever-increasing role in the public discourse, as the sociological notion of a ‘risk society’ suggests? Second, we investigated how the sentiments for the words co-occurring with risk have changed. Are the connotations of risk becoming increasingly ominous? Third, how has the meaning of risk changed relative to close associates such as danger and hazard? Is risk more subject to semantic change? Finally, we decompose the construct of risk into the specific topics with which it has been associated and track those topics over historical time. This brief history of the semantics of risk reveals new and surprising insights—a fourfold increase in frequency, increasingly negative sentiment, a semantic drift toward forecasting and prevention, and a shift away from war toward chronic disease—reflecting the conceptual evolution of risk in the archeological records of public discourse.

Keywords: RiskDangerPublic discourseContent analysisTopic modelNgram Corpus

5. Discussion

Risk is a complex multidimensional construct. It takes a variety of forms in public discourse and has, accordingly, been investigated in various ways. Each approach focuses on some aspects of the discourse at the expense of others. One common approach has been to analyze media coverage of risk as a leading source of information for the general public and experts alike (see, e.g., Combs & Slovic, 1979, and various references in Young et al., 2008). Our approach consisted in a large-scale analysis of historical text corpora. Such corpora are attractive because they collate a vast array of perspectives on an extensive historical time window: in the case of the Google Book Ngrams Corpus, over 8 million books and 150 years. What did we learn about the risk-related discourse in English-speaking countries?

First, we found—consistent with Beck's (1992) diagnosis of post-industrialist Western societies as risk societies facing a wide variety of unique and human-made risks and with Giddens's (2013) idea that society is increasingly preoccupied with the future and its safety—that the word risk has become much more prevalent (Fig. 1A). There is evidence of an approximately fourfold increase in its usage since the 1950s. Beck also stressed that risks in the post-modern world are increasingly unknowable and unpredictable due to scientific and technological innovations having unanticipated consequences. It is possible that this process has contributed to our second major observation, namely, that the sentiments associated with risk have become much more negative, starting around 1900 and confirming Pinker's (2011) observation that humans have become increasingly preoccupied with the negative aspects of risk. Interestingly, the same does not apply to its close semantic relatives (Fig. 1C). What is also puzzling is that this change in sentiments is happening at a time when the semantics of risk have become increasingly associated with notions of quantification, reduction, and prevention—findings that also challenge the idea that the increase in negative sentiments has been caused by the unknowability of risks. In addition, we found that the risk categories to some extent reflect real-world changes in the prevalence and magnitude of the respective risks (see Fig. 4 and our analyses of nuclear proliferation and AIDS-related deaths). Finally, we also found a shift from macro-risks, such as war and battle, to more individual-specific, chronic risks such as disease (Holzmann & Jørgenson, 2000) as well as shift toward more variability in risk topics. The strong focus on modern diseases suggests that the public discourse is generally oriented toward the most prevalent causes of death and harm. This is noteworthy, as several authors have argued that people tend to be afraid of the wrong things (see Glassner, 2018; Renn, 2014; Schröder, 2018).

Many of these patterns observed are remarkable in part because they are monotonic: the notable increase in the frequency and negativity of the risk construct, and the increase in number of topics it encompasses. These changes are perhaps related to one another. One potential underlying mechanism is the social amplification of risk (Jagiello & Hills, 2018; Kasperson et al., 1988; Moussaïd, Brighton, & Gaissmaier, 2015): as information is transferred from one individual to another, people tend to share the more negative aspects of a risk at the expense of potential gains. In Jagiello and Hills (2018), an individual exposed to a balanced argument on nuclear power shared that information with another individual. As information was communicated from one individual to the next, the focus shifted increasingly to the downsides of nuclear power and away from its benefits. This pattern is consistent with the substantial evidence that negative information has more influence on decision making than positive information (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998; Rozin & Royzman, 2001). A second, related factor is that this effect may be further amplified by increasing communication over the period of our analysis. As Herbert Simon (1971) noted, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (pp. 40–41). With the unprecedented amounts of information now available, all other things being equal, the absolute amount of negative information has increased. In this environment, information that is better at being received, remembered, and reproduced has a selective advantage (Hills, 2019). This mechanism may apply particularly to information on prominent risks, which may self-reinforce more rapidly via intensified social communication (Jagiello & Hills, 2018).

What can be concluded from our results about the state of the public discourse on risk? First and foremost, our analysis can offer only a glimpse of this complex and multi-dimensional construct. Yet, we found results that were both disconcerting and reassuring. Primarily, the increasing prevalence of the word risk is an indicator of its growing significance, which is in itself a double-edged sword. Classifying something as a potential risk is likely to burden it with negative sentiments. Yet, branding something a risk also appears to imply the chance of changing our fortune in relation to it. Importantly, the text corpus analyses suggest that risk categories track real threats over the 20th and 21st century, shifting from violent death to chronic disease and major risks for morbidity and mortality in the modern day. In this sense, the risk discourse reflects changes in threats as well as changes in the potential to mitigate them.