What Is Risk Perception?

Risk perception is a subjective judgment made by people on the characteristics and severity of a particular risk, and is an important indicator for measuring public psychological panic. A basic cognitive process can be abstracted into three parts: perception, cognitive processing, thinking and application, that is, the experience obtained by individuals based on intuitive judgment and subjective feelings, and recording, screening, and condensing into knowledge and experience based on environmental stimulation and information Memory to make a judgment of subjective risk, and use this as a basis for judging attitudes and behavioral decisions to evade, change, and accept risk.

There are many factors for risk perception, including individual characteristics, expectations, risk communication, the degree of controllability of the risk, the nature of the risk, the knowledge structure, the motivation for achievement, and the degree of event risk. In the analysis of influencing factors of risk perception for specific disaster risks, individual characteristics, risk communication, the nature of the risk, and the knowledge structure are generally the main influencing factors.

Application Research of Risk Perception

Public risk perception has become an important area of research dating back to Start's research in the 1960s, and has developed rapidly under the leadership of well-known psychologists such as Slovich and Sheberger. Most of the initial research on risk perception was carried out by psychologists, and the perspectives of the research also focused on the essential characteristics of the public's risk perception process and methods. Since the 1980s, due to a series of crisis events such as climate change, frequent natural disasters, and environmental problems, the field of risk perception has attracted the attention of many subject experts. Academia has seen multiple perspectives on natural disasters, environmental pollution, and dangerous behaviors. Risk perception research.

In terms of the public's overall risk perception of natural disasters, Axelrod uses the psychometric paradigm to determine the structural characteristics of the public's perception of risks caused by natural disasters. The study found that public perception of natural disaster risks is different from other man-made environmental risks. Respondents believed that natural disasters pose a moderate degree of risk to the environment, and the characteristics of risk perception of natural disasters are not beneficial to humans, completely unavoidable, have less impact on humans and other species, and are easier to understand.

The domestic research on risk perception started late, and the case study work is relatively small. Recently, due to the frequent occurrence of natural disasters in China, scholars have begun to pay attention to the public's perception of disaster risks and their adaptive behavior in the face of disasters, and a number of studies on disaster risk perception have emerged.

In the field of public health events, Shi Kan has established a psychological behavior prediction model for Chinese people's risk perception in the SARS epidemic. The results show that with the increase of the epidemic, people are paying more attention to the information of cure and disease. Negative epidemic information, especially information closely related to itself, is more likely to cause high-risk evaluations of the public,

Cause irrational tension or panic. Positive information such as cure information and government precautions can lower the level of individual risk awareness, enable the public to maintain rational coping behaviors, and improve mental health. In the field of earthquake disasters, Su Guiwu and Su Shi conducted research on earthquake risk perception in two earthquake-prone areas in Deyang, Sichuan, Kashgar, and Urumqi, Xinjiang. The study found that the influencing factors of earthquake disaster risk perception included gender, education level, income level, Family structure, house structure, and danger of residential areas, etc., the public's level of risk perception significantly affects its response behavior and attitude during and after the earthquake.

In the study of the influencing factors of disaster risk perception, Zhong Jingyong found that the trust effect of the project has a significant impact on the public's psychological awareness of disasters based on survey data from the public in the Dongting Lake area and the Yellow River along Kaifeng in Yueyang. Nearly 80% of the public acknowledged that due to the protection of flood prevention projects, their fear of floods decreased and their confidence in disaster control increased. Such risk perception has a negative impact on disaster mitigation behaviors, such as a decline in public self-defense awareness, and a positive impact on willingness to share part of the investment in the project. By conducting questionnaire surveys in different areas of the Yangtze River Basin, Su Shi calculated and compared the public's attitudes towards social disaster mitigation capabilities and flood risk perception status, and found that the public's perception of flood risk was low, especially in the downstream areas. The degree of judgment and worry are low, and the disaster experience has an impact on the public's risk judgment. ^[2]

Risk perception research trends

As an important part of risk management, risk perception research has become a hot issue in the fields of sociology, psychology, and disaster science. Analyzing the development history and current status of risk perception in the field of disaster research, we can find that the development of disaster risk perception has the following developments: trend.

(1) Improvement and standardization of research methods. With the rapid development of risk perception research, a variety of research tools and methods have been widely used in disaster risk perception research. However, due to the complexity of the disaster risk perception process, different research methods lack a certain standard when applied, and researchers are explaining The research tools and processes were not detailed enough, which affected the repeatability and reliability of the research experiments. In the future, disaster risk perception research will develop several normative and repeatable research models for different disaster phenomena. The researchers provide more comprehensive and detailed method descriptions in the research so that other researchers can better understand. Make comparisons between research results.

(2) Multi-view joint. At present, the research on risk perception has gradually expanded from focusing on the cognitive characteristics of the public and experts to analyzing the risk perception characteristics of individuals and their societies. There are many influencing factors of human cognitive process, and the factors of social and cultural background cannot be ignored. Therefore, future research on disaster risk perception will tend to comprehensively analyze the public's perception of disaster risk from multiple perspectives of society, individuals, culture, and economy, integrate multiple research methods at the individual level and social level, and look for individual perception and society The interaction mechanism of factors establishes a research paradigm that is more in line with the laws of psychology, sociology, and disaster science.

(3) Expansion of research fields. At present, researches on risk perception at home and abroad are mostly concentrated in the field of psychology. Scholars at home and abroad have mostly focused on the research of the basic theory of risk perception and the design of research methods. At the same time, most existing studies focus on the public's perception of risk, while few studies analyze the relationship between risk perception and risk adaptation behavior. As risk perception research continues to be deeply integrated with disaster events, the scope of disaster risk perception research will focus on more specific areas such as global climate change and specific disaster events, and further explore the impact of risk perception on risk adaptation behavior, so that Disaster risk perception research has more practical significance for the formulation of risk management policies. ^[2]