Emotions Within the Bounds of Pure Reason: Emotionality and Rationality in the Acceptance of Technological Risks

Abstract

There seems to exist a sharp divergence between the laws governing the perception, assessment and acceptance of technological risks by laymen and by scientific and technological experts. Whereas the standards of the latter roughly correspond to a socially extended Bayesian decision theory that takes into account essentially (negative) utility and probability and assesses risks from a risk-neutral perspective, the assessment of technological risks by non-experts is oriented by adverseness to risk as well as by contextual factors including catastrophe potential, voluntariness, naturalness and perceived ability to control. A widespread view among scientists and engineers is that these factors are of little relevance to their acceptability and mostly express purely "emotional" reactions unrelated to the facts. I argue that this criticism overlooks that emotions are not necessarily irrational and that the very concept of risk is inseparable from values inaccessible to a purely cognitive approach. Furthermore, even a Bayesian approach is bound to integrate a number (though not all) of the “qualitative risk factors” described by the psychology and should be included into a comprehensive calculation of risks.