Risk and 'The Other'

This book forges a social psychological framework for understanding the human response to risks ranging from nuclear wars to industrial accidents, from earthquakes to epidemics. Its key concern is to highlight and to explain the widespread sense of personal invulnerability to danger. The social scientific study of people's responses to risk tends to focus on either their narrow cognitive or their broad socio-cultural roots. The approach in this book slots into the gap between these poles. It elucidates how individuals, steeped in various societies, cultures and groups, make sense of impending crises. Since the response to risk is essentially a response to a menacing, threatening event, emotional factors form a key component of this response. Interestingly, such factors are severely underrepresented in this area since it has been overattentive to the cognitive processing of risk.

From earthquakes to epidemics, AIDS to industrial accidents, the mass media continually bring into our daily lives the awareness of risk. But how do people respond to this increased awareness? How do people cope with living in what has been termed 'the risk society'? This book attempts to explain how, within a given social and cultural context, individuals make sense of impending crisis. In particular it tries to explain the phenomenon of a widespread sense of personal invulnerability when faced with risk: the 'not me' factor. Using a social psychological framework it highlights emotional factors which are a key component of responses to risk but have hitherto been neglected due to the tendency of much work on risk to concentrate almost exclusively on cognitive processing. This book will appeal to an international audience of post-graduates, academics and researchers in the areas of risk, psychology, sociology, medical anthropology and psychoanalytic studies.

Preface; 1. Response to risks: an introduction; 2. Human responses to risks: 'not me', 'the other is to blame'; 3. A study of lay people's response to risk: HIV/AIDS in Britain and South Africa; 4. Evaluating two conventional psychological models of the response to risks; 5. The source of linking risk and 'the other': splitting objects into 'good' and 'bad'; 6. Social representations of risks; 7. Emotional life: a new frontier for social theory; 8. Changing social representations of risks; References; Index.

From earthquakes to epidemics, AIDS to war, the mass media bring into our lives the awareness of risk. But how do people respond to it? Using a social psychological framework, this book explores the phenomenon of a widespread sense of personal invulnerability when faced with risk: the 'not me' factor.