Life in the risk society

Living with new types of risk means familiar notions of human cognition are radically changing

New and deeply concerning health threats are one of many things we worry about, reflecting a sense that we are living in dangerous era where our lives are increasingly defined by risk. But focusing on health offers a means to understand more clearly how the risks and dangers we face today are of a different quality to those we have faced in the past. With a behavioural science lens we can see the huge implications this has, with some arguing that the uncertainty surrounding this is not only creating a shift in our relationship with knowledge, but is even changing human cognition itself.

The dangers we face

That we are living in a world of increasing risk has been underscored by recent reports of the growing health threat from tiny parasitic animals called ticks which, after mosquitoes, are the biggest vectors of disease in the world. They are far from a harmless irritant as a single tick can potentially result the bacterial infection of Lyme disease.

Of course ticks are not the only health threat: Disease X is the name given by the World Health Organization to an unknown pathogen that could emerge in future and cause a serious international epidemic or pandemic. A recent study suggests influenza is the most likely significant pandemic threat as research shows how it is constantly evolving and mutating.

And currently we are seeing Avian flu, or H5N1, showing concerning signs of spreading across the world; it is now confirmed in 33 cattle herds in eight states in the United States. Currently there is no evidence of human-to-human spread but if mutations were to enable this, avian flu would be a huge concern given the fatality rate is estimated by the World Health Organization at 52%, including young people.

Arguably the risks we live with are different to those we faced in the past: they have an ‘unknown-ness’ in terms of the size and scale of danger that may befall us, the way that they have unpredictable and unmanageable qualities that are challenging some of the core foundations of the way we understand the world.

This is important for policy makers and brand strategists who need to rethink how they engage with people on these risks. We make the case that old approaches to risk management are rapidly eroding as we enter a new period where we can no longer hope to find ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’ to guide us. Instead we are having to think and act in fundamentally different ways than we have in the past, in order to mitigate risk as best we can. In addition to health risks, we can see this applies to a range of other areas such as geopolitical conflict, finance, cost of living, mental health, impact of technology and climate change - all are presenting us with challenges that we have to work out how to navigate.

 A behavioural analysis of this ‘age of danger’ allows us to understand the fundamentally different mindsets that we need to manage our lives: but in doing so we see something far more radical emerging. That is the way our cognition is adapting these different sorts of risks so what we think about and how we think is being reordered.  And this is the shift that needs to be understood if we are to engage people effectively to work together to manage risk.

Risk Society

In April 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced the world's worst nuclear disaster when a reactor exploded, releasing massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. Emergency workers had exposure to massive doses of radiation that not only proved lethal for many but land and food sources were contaminated by the nuclear fallout leading to a huge impact on agriculture and the economy across affected regions.

As Abbas Jong discusses, it was at this time sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote his landmark book, "Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity," setting out the way that modern industrial society is defined by the way it produces, defines, and manages risks. He argues that the ‘risk society’ has come about due to industrialisation, as it created a fundamentally different class of risk to those we are historically used to. During the ‘first modernity’ as Beck calls it, dangers came from the natural world, largely outside of human control – such as earthquakes, floods and famine.  But these were increasingly managed and mitigated by the second wave of modernity and industrialisation. However, with mitigation of these old risks came new and different threats – global financial crisis, terrorism, global warming and air pollution – and these, Beck argues, are much more global, unpredictable and unmanageable, sitting outside of conventional approaches of regulation and control. He sees them as being indeterminate, probabilistic, moving across class, geography and even generations.

Given that these risks often aren't immediately apparent and are better understood in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, the Precautionary Principle applies. This suggests it makes sense in these circumstances to taking pre-emptive measures to mitigate uncertain risks. And the implications are significant as this disrupts conventional concepts of knowledge by advocating for action based on potential harm instead of waiting for scientific certainty. Consequently, it is becoming clear that our approach to risk management is fundamentally altering our relationship with knowledge. It is to this we now turn our behavioural lens.

How our relationship with knowledge is radically changing

In periods of intense change, there is often a great deal of information whilst, in contrast, certainty is hard to come by. Borrowing a phrase from historian Lorraine Daston writing at the start of the COVID pandemic, we are increasingly living in a period of radical novelty and uncertainty, thrown into a state of ‘ground-zero empiricism’. As we struggle to make sense of a rapidly changing environment, we are much more reliant on “chance observations, apparent correlations, and anecdotes that would ordinarily barely merit mention”.

This suggests that in areas of emerging risk, our relationship with knowledge, the facts of a situation, are shifting from an environment which is more static, where we understand the relationship between what we see and what we know to one where we rely on making dynamic judgements based on the specifics of the contexts we find ourselves in.

 It is exactly this sort of challenge that led philosopher David Papineau, to suggest that "knowledge is a stone-age concept, we’re better off without it,". Rather a bold assertion at face value but this is consistent with Lorraine Daston – we are arguably at a point where we can no longer rely on the presence of ‘facts’ that we can refer to in order to guide our behaviour.

Instead, he argues it is belief that should be our focus, reflecting the way we are shifting from seeking absolute certainties to managing probabilities and uncertainties. This means that ‘Risk Society’ signals a fundamental epistemological shift —away from the certainty and absolutism that characterized earlier lives and towards fluid and probabilistic beliefs that reflects the complexity and uncertainty of the modern world.

This has huge implications for how we understand human decision making, the science of which was largely developed in an era of relative stability and predictability. We suggest there is a case for reframing our understanding of human cognition, which historically has been based around the ‘fact’ and our ability, or otherwise, to perceive, learn and adapt to a factual understanding of the world.

But today the epistemological challenge of risk society means we can see ourselves in a new era of cognition, away from one which so often focused on our deficits against a certainty of a ground truth (e.g. biases). We are rapidly having to rely on emergent, unfolding intelligence that allows us to live in a more nuanced and flexible manner with the unpredictable and unmanageable risks that surround us.

Three implications for human cognition

With this in mind, drawing on Abbas’ paper, we focus on three areas of cognition that are increasingly taking centre stage: reflexiveness, agency and ecological rationality.

A: Reflexive individuals: Beck considered people navigated the world in the first modernity as ‘reflective individuals’ who had the benefit of operating within a stable framework of knowledge and norms, with a sense of certainty that comes from the availability of objective knowledge and clear instructions to guide decision-making processes. By contrast, in the second modernity the risks and uncertainties that shape many aspects of life mean the individual is increasingly reflexive.  

This is a shift towards a never-ending state of decision-making, in a constant state of negotiation, constructing and reconstructing what we know, creating and dispensing with wider social and knowledge networks as conditions shift. We are moving away from objective truths and facts and having to adapt to a more fluid, subjective, and contingent engagement with knowledge and action.

To avoid the complexity and uncertainty of ‘risk society’ means that instead of thorough processing of information, we necessarily rely on context-specific intuitive heuristics – what Gerd Gigerenzer calls ‘smart heuristics’. These are the classic ‘satisficing’ options, allowing us to quickly respond to the fast moving changes we come across; examples of this include the recognition heuristic where we rely more on recognizable sources we found reliable in the past, such as a well-known health organization's website versus an unknown blog.  Another is take-the-best heuristic: an example of this is when we decide whether or not to visit a region reported to have cases of a vector-borne disease, we might consider only one or two pieces of information, such as the current level of disease transmission in the area, allowing us to make a quick decision, rather than trying to evaluate all possible risk factors and their combinations.

B: Agency is a new currency: As Beck suggests, because these risks are increasingly sitting outside of traditional institution and structures to regulate and manage them, we have to use our own individual resources. On this basis we are moving from a world where risks are managed by third parties, to one where individual agency is an important new currency. Of course, for some this can offer much greater freedoms than we have had in the past (choosing to respond in a way that suits us and our own individual risk profile) but it also places significant burdens on people. We are increasingly becoming familiar with the need to mediate the risk and uncertainty through our own agentic actions but with risks that are tough to assimilate and understand how best to respond.

While we did see during COVID how there was at times a determined stance to have individual choices (e.g. choosing not to wear a mask), there was a much greater willingness to exercise our agency and choose to collaborate and act as communities.   We can see this in the way people are participating in fungal pathogen citizen science, with people contributing samples to research organizations studying the spread of fungal pathogens in the environment, important for aiding in the early detection of potential outbreaks​​. Or the way engineers and hobbyists collaborated during COVID to improve designs for open-source medical devices, like ventilators and protective masks.

C: Shifting classifications, boundaries and definitions: Another theme where we are seeing significant change is the way we determine boundaries and classifications – what is a cause for concern, what is a new risk, how widespread or serious should something be before we stop going into public places? Given the uncertainty of the world we live in and the limitations of knowledge we have, then we are perpetually crossing the boundaries between the known and the unknown. And with this, it is harder than ever for any one institution to assert their authority, meaning the traditional means of managing this via experts determining these boundaries and classifications for recipients to follow is under constant negotiation.

Implications for policy makers and brand strategists

Having identified the changes in cognition that accompany our ‘risk society’ we can now turn to the implications of this for rethinking how we go about supporting individuals and their communities to manage these in the best way possible.  These are the areas that policy makers and brand strategists need to focus on to support people to manage their lives in this ‘age of danger’.

A: Engage more proactively with the new means of knowledge production: Given the highly dynamic nature of the risk environment, then the ways individuals seek, interpret, and use information will often challenge and established knowledge structures. In today’s environments that have large amounts of competing information truths, individual will seek agency by taking into their own hands steps to validate, contest, and disseminate knowledge.

Which means individuals can be a significant force in shaping societal narratives and understandings. Look at the huge explosion of advice, guidance and challenges to official guidance on social media relating to heath, as an example. Ignoring individuals on social media as they seek to explore these issues does not feel less sensible, nor is potential ‘over-policing’ of these spaces as all too often the discussions simply move to private forums of like-minded people. Understanding how to incubate and encourage a sense of shared space for contested knowledge to be negotiated will be ever more critical.

B: Support more fluid networks of knowledge: In the Risk Society people will be individually negotiating and evaluating, but they are also interested in exploring new forms of social organization emerging. Examples of this include the rise of  crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe which have allowed a much wider range of people to raise funds for projects such as those related to health risks, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and supporting an era of ‘citizen science’. Another example is online patient communities where patients with new and emerging illnesses such as Long COVID are forming support groups and forums to share experiences, advice on symptom management, and advocacy for further research. These forums will benefit from better funding and direction to facilitate positive outcomes for those involved and for the wider communities affected by the issues they cover.

C: Keep vigilant for butterfly effects: The interconnectedness of global systems—whether economic, ecological or technological—means that the actions of individuals and small groups of people can now more than ever have far-reaching impacts. Behaviours in one context can influence structures at a global level, and vice versa. This interconnectedness adds complexity as decisions made in one area are influenced by and can influence distant systems and structures. Examples of this includes personal import restrictions: as people are becoming more cautious about what they bring back home from abroad, they are more careful about avoiding products that might contribute to the rapid spread of invasive species or diseases, such as legal imports like unchecked plant materials that could nevertheless harbour ticks​.

D: Support Experiential learning: The heightened awareness and management of risks is central to the lived experience of individuals in the Risk Society. Often personal experiences will be key for learning – what led to me or a family member becoming ill? How effective was the natural medication we used in mitigating the symptoms we had?  What are the ways in which we can collect and treat things from the natural environment to consume (e.g. rain water in the case of supplies being contaminated)? Personal experience and experimentation appears to be coming to the fore as a means of facilitating new forms of understanding.

This points to the ways individuals look for, understand, and use information means established knowledge structures are longer primarily top-down from experts to recipients.  People on the ground, and the way they propose, contest, and disseminate understanding on the basis of their own personal experience can be shared to inform a wider science.  Examples of this are self-initiated quarantine after disease exposure: this is where individuals choose to self-quarantine and monitor for symptoms of illnesses before seeking medical advice. People need tools and support to manage these activities, being allowed to define for themselves the processes involved – but at the same time have support to make this viable and the opportunity to connect with others in the same situation to share learnings in a dynamic way.

E: Consider the political implications: Of course these activities are not always politically neutral: given individuals and groups will surely at times be challenging established knowledge and institutions means this comes with highly charged political aspects which those institutions may not be well equipped to navigate. And what may have seemed to have been broadly agreed albeit difficult acts (such as extending low traffic neighbourhoods to reduce pollution) can be pulled into political positions and debates in ways perhaps not anticipated.

How can these bodies act in collaboration with people so as not to alienate, whilst still retaining standards of evidence that can safely be translated into policy.  None of these are easy considerations but institutions do need to think through how to adapt to a rapidly changing knowledge / risk landscape where established approaches deployed, successful for decades or even since being founded even longer ago have been successful.

In conclusion

While the concept of the Risk Society illuminates serious shifts in decision-making paradigms, we do need to recognize the origins within Western discourse. Many individuals right across the globe navigate complex risks daily, often without the same resources or recognition.

But the wider point of our analysis, is that our cognitive processes are shaped by shifts such as cultural, environmental and technological contexts. Changes in these can significantly modify how we think and what we think about. While this is not a new finding, it is only perhaps now that our environment is more radically changing can we more easily identify the ways this mechanism is playing out.

This has huge implications for behavioural science as it challenges us to link the big meta-themes of society with cognitive processes if we are to properly make sense of people. It also can perhaps help us to understand why some of the replication crisis is perhaps less a matter of sloppy design but perhaps more to do with the way that broader social and cultural changes may alter the nature of the effects being studied.

And finally, this is also a call to arms for encouraging the asking of questions and seeking of answers from people.  If we can assume that Gen AI can take the place of people actively and dynamically negotiating a changing environment then maybe there is something wrong in our logic.  Perhaps in the past, when would could place greater faith in ‘facts’ that underpinned a world away of relative certainty and absolutism, the use of Gen AI would be a reasonable strategy. But as we are in more dangerous times, occupying a more uncertain and chaotic world then we need people to ask questions and give us answers more than ever as the lifeblood of managing lives in the risk society.