A New Study Reveals How Society Thinks About Risk

Many of our daily activities involve some level of risk, be it to our work, our finances or our health. But how is risk perceived in society and how do individuals think about risk? Dr Dirk Wulff and Professor Rui Mata, researchers at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel say, “There is great scientific interest in the phenomenon of risk.” “But disciplines like psychology, sociology, and economics define it in different ways,” explains Dirk Wulff.

A new approach was adopted by the researchers, where they employed a snowball word association method. Participants were asked to name five things they associated with the term risk and then, in turn, five things they associated with these associations. Using this method, researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1205 people, with equal representation of men and women and different age ranges.