Cultural theory of risk

Theory and evidence

Risk and blame, group and grid

Two features of Douglas's work inform the basic structure of Cultural Theory. The first of these is a general account of the social function of individual perceptions of societal dangers. Individuals, Douglas maintained, tend to associate societal harms—from sickness to famine to natural catastrophes—with conduct that transgresses societal norms. This tendency, she argued, plays an indispensable role in promoting certain social structures, both by imbuing a society's members with aversions to subversive behavior and by focusing resentment and blame on those who defy such institutions.

The second important feature of Douglas's work is a particular account of the forms that competing structures of social organization assume. Douglas maintained that cultural ways of life and affiliated outlooks can be characterized (within and across all societies at all times) along two dimensions, which she called “group” and “grid”. A “high group” way of life exhibits a high degree of collective control, whereas a “low group” one exhibits a much lower one and a resulting emphasis on individual self-sufficiency. A “high grid” way of life is characterized by conspicuous and durable forms of stratification in roles and authority, whereas a “low grid” one reflects a more egalitarian ordering.

Although developed in Douglas's earlier work, these two strands of her thought were first consciously woven together to form the fabric of a theory of risk perception in her and Wildavsky's 1982 book, Risk and Culture : An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Focusing largely on political conflict over air pollution and nuclear power in the United States, Risk and Culture attributed political conflict over environmental and technological risks to a struggle between adherents of competing ways of life associated with the group–grid scheme: an egalitarian, collectivist (“low grid”, “high group”) one, which gravitates toward fear of environmental disaster as a justification for restricting commercial behavior productive of inequality; and individualistic ("low group") and hierarchical ("high grid") ones, which resist claims of environmental risk in order to shield private orderings from interference, and to defend established commercial and governmental elites from subversive rebuke.

Later works in Cultural Theory systematized this argument. In these accounts, group–grid gives rise to either four or five discrete ways of life, each of which is associated with a view of nature (as robust, as fragile, as capricious, and so forth) that is congenial to its advancement in competition with the others.

Survey studies

A variety of scholars have presented survey data in support of Cultural Theory. The first of these was Karl Dake, a graduate student of Wildavsky, who correlated perceptions of various societal risks—environmental disaster, external aggression, internal disorder, market breakdown—with subjects’ scores on attitudinal scales that he believed reflected the “cultural worldviews” associated with the ways of life in Douglas's group–grid scheme. Later researchers have refined Dake's measures and have applied them to a wide variety of environmental and technological risks. Such studies furnish an indirect form of proof by showing that risk perceptions are distributed across persons in patterns better explained by culture than by other asserted influences.

Case studies

Other scholars have presented more interpretive empirical support for Cultural Theory. Developed in case-study form, their work shows how particular risk-regulation and related controversies can plausibly be understood within a group-grid framework.