The Social Amplification of Risk Framework: A Normative Perspective on Trust?

Public trust is being lamented as the central victim of our new, digital information environment, a notion that is depicted in labeling our society as "posttruth" or "posttrust." Within this article, we aim to call this deficit view of public trust into question and kindle a more positive outlook in future research. For this, we utilize the Social Amplification of Risk Framework to discuss trust as an inherent aspect of social interactions and to question the frameworks' normative approach to public trust and risk perception. Utilizing a literature review of prior studies that investigated trust within the structure of SARF and a case study on the impacts of Fukushima on public trust in nuclear energy, we would like to argue that the current normative "trust deficit model" should be overcome and future risk research should increasingly focus on the opportunities of the digital informational environment for risk communication.

Managing the social amplification of risk: a simulation of interacting actors

A central problem in managing risk is dealing with social processes that either exaggerate or understate it. A longstanding approach to understanding such processes has been the social amplification of risk framework. But this implies that some true level of risk becomes distorted in social actors' perceptions. Many risk events are characterised by such uncertainties, disagreements and changes in scientific knowledge that it becomes unreasonable to speak of a true level of risk. The most we can often say in such cases is that different groups believe each other to be either amplifying or attenuating a risk. This inherent subjectivity raises the question as to whether risk managers can expect any particular kinds of outcome to emerge. This question is the basis for a case study of zoonotic disease outbreaks using systems dynamics as a modelling medium. The model shows that processes suggested in the social amplification of risk framework produce polarised risk responses among different actors, but that the subjectivity magnifies this polarisation considerably. As this subjectivity takes more complex forms it leaves problematic residues at the end of a disease outbreak, such as an indefinite drop in economic activity and an indefinite increase in anxiety.

Anticipating or Accommodating to Public Concern? Risk Amplification and the Politics of Precaution Reexamined

Regulatory use of the precautionary principle (PP) tends to be broadly characterized either as a responsible approach for safeguarding against health and environmental risks in the face of scientific uncertainties, or as "state mismanagement" driven by undue political bias and public anxiety. However, the "anticipatory" basis upon which governments variably draw a political warrant for adopting precautionary measures often remains ambiguous. Particularly, questions arise concerning whether the PP is employed preemptively by political elites from the "top down," or follows from more conventional democratic pressures exerted by citizens and other stakeholders from the "bottom up." This article elucidates the role and impact of citizen involvement in the precautionary politics shaping policy discourse surrounding the U.K. government's "precautionary approach" to mobile telecommunications technology and health. A case study is presented that critically reexamines the basis upon which U.K. government action has been portrayed as an instance of anticipatory policy making. Findings demonstrate that the use of the PP should not be interpreted in the preemptive terms communicated by U.K. government officials alone, but also in relation to the wider social context of risk amplification and images of public concern formed adaptively in antagonistic precautionary discourse between citizens, politicians, industry, and the media, which surrounded cycles of government policy making. The article discusses the sociocultural conditions and political dynamics underpinning public influence on government anticipation and responsiveness exemplified in this case, and concludes with research and policy implications for how society subsequently comes to terms with the emergence and precautionary governance of new technologies under conflict.

Social Media Sentiment about COVID-19 Vaccination Predicts Vaccine Acceptance among Peruvian Social Media Users the Next Day

Drawing upon theories of risk and decision making, we present a theoretical framework for how the emotional attributes of social media content influence risk behaviors. We apply our framework to understanding how COVID-19 vaccination Twitter posts influence acceptance of the vaccine in Peru, the country with the highest relative number of COVID-19 excess deaths. By employing computational methods, topic modeling, and vector autoregressive time series analysis, we show that the prominence of expressed emotions about COVID-19 vaccination in social media content is associated with the daily percentage of Peruvian social media survey respondents who are vaccine-accepting over 231 days. Our findings show that net (positive) sentiment and trust emotions expressed in tweets about COVID-19 are positively associated with vaccine acceptance among survey respondents one day after the post occurs. This study demonstrates that the emotional attributes of social media content, besides veracity or informational attributes, may influence vaccine acceptance for better or worse based on its valence.

The Relationship Between Social Interaction and Anxiety Regarding COVID-19 in Japanese Older Adults

While previous studies suggest that women have higher anxiety than men regarding COVID-19, underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This study tries to explain the mechanisms by gender difference in social interaction based on a theory of social amplification of risk framework (SARF). We surveyed older adults in Japan regarding their anxiety regarding COVID-19, as well as the frequencies of their direct and indirect social interaction in July 2020 (N = 1,587, aged 78-99 years). To explore the way in which gender and anxiety regarding COVID-19 were mediated by these two types of social interactions, MODEL4 of SPSS's Process MACRO was applied to the data. We found that older women interacted more directly and indirectly with others than did older men. And, direct social interaction was negatively and related, but indirect social interaction was positively related to older adults' anxiety regarding COVID-19. Furthermore, direct social interaction was related to older women's low anxiety regarding COVID-19, whereas indirect social interaction was related to older women's high anxiety regarding COVID-19. The findings of our study suggest that the degree of anxiety regarding COVID-19 among older women may be dependent upon the types of social interaction they have with others.