Social Amplification of Risk Framework

Origins of SARF

In their important 1988 article in the journal Risk Analysis, Roger Kasperson and colleagues make the observation that some hazards that experts believe to be low in risk can nonetheless very quickly become the subject of controversy and sociopolitical activity alongside rising concern among the public. They term this phenomenon risk amplification, with examples including rising concerns about nuclear power and radioactive waste storage in the 1970s, the controversy over genetically modified food in the 1990s, the response to mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephal-opathy, BSE) in a number of countries; various radiological and chemical contamination events; and even responses to the so-called Y2K millennium computer bug. An opposite phenomenon is also highlighted, which these researchers term risk attenuation. Here hazards that experts believe to be very significant provoke little or no obvious public response or outcry. Examples of the latter include attitudes toward smoking in the 1950s and 1960s, to radon gas in the home, or until very recently to the threat of global climate change. The name, of course, stresses amplification of concerns, but it is important to bear in mind that the framework is an attempt to account for the occurrence of both intensification and attenuation in public concern and controversy.

The starting point for the framework is that for “risk events” to have any impact in the world, they must be communicated by somebody to others. A risk event need not have led to any actual harm to “qualify,” so one can include, alongside actual accidents, more minor incidents, media reports, or even secondary or scientific accounts of a possible problem with a risk issue. Risk communication is seen as a process through which these risk events become portrayed and represented in terms of varied risk signals (images, signs, or symbols). These symbols in turn are changed and shaped by a range of psychological, social, organizational, and cultural phenomena. Our experience of environmental or technological risk, for example, is a projection [Page 801]into an uncertain future. As such, it is not only an imagined experience of physical harm but also the result of the ways groups and individuals learn to create their own interpretations of risk events.

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