Limits of Knowledge and the Limited Importance of Trust

Sjöberg, Lennart

doi:10.1111/0272-4332.211101

Cited by 205 publications

(138 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Some studies have reported strong relationships between related concepts (e.g., trust and perceived risk) (Flynn et al 1992. Findings here, however, were consistent with research reporting relatively weak relationships (e.g., Needham and Vaske 2008;Sjöberg 2000bSjöberg , 2001Viklund 2003). Given that most of the variance in these concepts remains unexplained by trust, other attributes such as knowledge, control, and newness may also contribute to respondents' perceptions (e.g., Fischhoff et al 1978, Sjöberg 2000a).…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 80%

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Fire social science research from the Pacific Southwest research station: studies supported by national fire plan funds

Chavez¹,

Absher²,

Winter³

2008

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Section: Theoretical Implicationssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…People may trust a managing agency, but feel that potential risks (e.g., the ability to contain a prescribed burn) are beyond agency control (Sjöberg 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire social science research from the Pacific Southwest research station: studies supported by national fire plan funds

Chavez¹,

Absher²,

Winter³

2008

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“…In the context of health risk assessment, Johnson and Slovic (1995) look at the problem of conveying uncertainties and the consequences for risk perception and trust. Sjoberg (2001) reports that trust and risk perception bear only a weak relationship because people believe that there are limits to what even experts can know. In almost all these cases, the risks under consideration are physical health or workplace risks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Updating Subjective Risks in the Presence of Conflicting Information: An Application to Climate Change

Cameron

2005

J Risk Uncertainty

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Willingness to support public programs for risk management often depends on individual subjective risk perceptions in the face of uncertain science. As part of a larger study concerning climate change, we explore individual updated subjective risks as a function of individual priors, the nature of external information, and individual attributes. We examine several rival hypotheses about how subjective risks change in the face of new information (Bayesian updating, alarmist learning, and ambiguity aversion). The source and nature of external information, as well as its collective ambiguity, can have varying effects across the population, in terms of both expectations and uncertainty. In this paper, we use a particular example of a public policy problem--climate change risks. We focus on estimating the weights that individuals place on the opinions of government scientists and environmental groups as they update their subjective beliefs about the nature of this problem. We test four rival hypotheses about how people update their beliefs in the face of new and sometimes conflicting information. These hypotheses include (1) 2 strict Bayesian updating, (2) alarmist learning, (3) ambiguity aversion, and (4) cross-sectional homogeneity/heterogeneity in the updating process.For the climate change example, this research can be viewed as a precursor to understanding how willingness to pay to prevent climate change will evolve over time. 4 How do people combine alternative information about future climate prospects, in terms of both expectation and uncertainty, based on evidence or conclusions that they pick up from different sources? Individuals will have different views about the credibility of these different sources, and sources deemed more-credible can be expected to have a greater influence.In this paper, we focus on estimating the weights that individuals place on the opinions of government scientists and environmental groups in forming their opinions about future climate conditions in the absence of mitigation. The task is thus narrowly delineated. 5 The quasi-experimental exercise we examine here is a stylized version of what goes on in the real world, but it is sufficient to explore richer models than have previously been examined for the process whereby individuals update their priors in response to external information. Our key results are demonstrated for a convenience sample, so further research is clearly warranted.Nevertheless, the present data produce some very clear findings concerning our four main hypotheses: people do not use strict Bayesian updating, they are not, on average, alarmist learners, but there is considerable ambiguity aversion and systematic heterogeneity in the manner in which different people respond to multiple alternative sources of climate information.Section 1 provides a very simple model in the context of the climate change example and elaborates upon the four hypotheses. Section 2 describes the relevant portions of a survey instrument that was administered to a convenienc...

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“…Una primera perspectiva, basada en la imagen corriente de la ciencia, explica las actitudes públi-cas a partir del modelo de déficit cognitivo, para lo que se ha servido de una ciencia abstracta y descontextualizada, y ha presupuesto una imagen normativa de cultura científica asociada a la imagen de individuo científicamente informado (Wolpert, 1992); el nivel de conocimiento del vocabulario y método cientí-fico permite entender, al establecer una correlación, el nivel de legitimación de las políticas científicas. Mientras tanto, el rol analítico de la perspectiva contextual, desde ángulos diferentes, analiza los contextos en el que interaccionan la ciencia y el público, y las experiencias individuales y colectivas acumuladas, y concluye que las variables de mayor alcance explicativo son aquellos factores relativos a las dimensiones sociales e institucionales de la ciencia, así como la disposición institucional a integrar conocimientos y alternativas en el proceso de innovación y/o regulación (Frewer et alia, 2003;Lassen y Jamison, 2006;Sjöberg, 2001Sjöberg, , 2002.…”

Section: La Paradoja De La Industrializaciónunclassified

Los estudios sobre percepción social de la ciencia

Eizaguirre

2011

Acciones investig. soc.

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Resumen: Este artículo identifica y analiza las principales orientaciones sobre el estudio de las percepciones sociales de la ciencia. La exposición se articula en base a la dicotomía que representan el enfoque abstracto y el enfoque contextual. Desde el contexto interdisciplinario de los estudios de ciencia, en este trabajo trato de comprender los supuestos sobre ciencia y sociedad que presuponen ambas perspectivas, sus marcos de trabajo, principales cuestiones e hipó-tesis manejadas, así como las claves del debate actual.Palabras clave: actitudes públicas, modelo de déficit, ciencia, experteza, confianza, reflexividad de las instituciones.

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Limits of Knowledge and the Limited Importance of Trust

Cited by 205 publications

References 21 publications

Fire social science research from the Pacific Southwest research station: studies supported by national fire plan funds

Fire social science research from the Pacific Southwest research station: studies supported by national fire plan funds

Updating Subjective Risks in the Presence of Conflicting Information: An Application to Climate Change

Los estudios sobre percepción social de la ciencia

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