This insightful paper, “Beyond the knowledge deficit: recent research into lay and expert attitudes to food risks,” provides a crucial overview of psychological and social scientific research into how lay people perceive and react to food risks. It directly addresses the prevalent ‘expert-lay discrepancy,’ where experts—including scientists, food producers, and public health advisors—often view public concern about food safety as excessive or irrational.
The article critically challenges the long-held ‘knowledge deficit’ model, which assumes that public unease stems from a simple lack of scientific knowledge or understanding. While this model suggests that experts are ‘right’ and lay people are ‘wrong’ due to ignorance, much research indicates that this assumption is highly dubious. Instead, the paper strongly suggests that lay risk assessments are far more complex, situationally sensitive, and deeply rooted in personal value systems. Experts typically focus on technical, quantitative risk measurements, whereas consumers often integrate broader issues into their assessments, necessitating a re-evaluation or abandonment of the deficit model.
The review is structured around four key themes that enhance our understanding of public attitudes to food risks:
- Risk Perception: The research highlights that lay people perceive risks multi-dimensionally, considering factors beyond just scientific data, such as uncertainty, dread, catastrophic potential, controllability, equity, and impact on future generations. This multi-dimensional perception is a key explanation for the expert-lay disagreement, replacing the notion of lay ignorance. Furthermore, people often exhibit ‘optimistic bias,’ believing their own health risks are lower than those of others, especially for lifestyle hazards where they feel more personal control. Understanding this bias is crucial for effective risk communication, as people who feel immune may not respond to health advice. Lay people also perceive a complex, interdependent relationship between risks and benefits, which traditional risk-benefit analysis, assuming independence, often fails to capture.
- Risk Communication: While some goals of risk communication, like educating the public on safe food handling, might seem to align with the deficit model, the paper argues that effective risk communication is not merely a one-way transfer of information. It must involve genuine dialogue and rely heavily on source credibility, encompassing both expertise and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness, or honesty, is particularly vital for achieving long-term attitudinal change. The research also reveals a bias towards negative information about hazards, meaning that messages indicating minor risks might be perceived as more credible than “no risk” messages, and negative reports increase perceived risk more than positive reports decrease it.
- Lay Handling of Risk: Social science studies emphasize that food consumption is embedded in everyday contexts involving organizational, social, and cultural practices. Public anxieties about food are often linked to a general unease about the “unnaturalness” of modern food production methods and broader societal trends, such as profit-driven farming. Concerns about genetically modified (GM) foods, for instance, are tied to ideas of ‘meddling’ with nature, lessons from past crises like BSE, and cynicism that new technologies are primarily for profit rather than social benefit. These complex, hard-to-pin-down worries demonstrate that lay responses are not simply due to a lack of information; sometimes they are even a result of information overload and the resulting confusion.
- Public Trust in Institutions and Experts: Trust is identified as a critical yet elusive phenomenon in risk assessment. The paper outlines different configurations of trust: individual, system-oriented (structural), and relational, as well as tacit (unconscious) and reflexive (conscious) trust. A key finding is that structural trust—a general perception of the reliability of the regulated food sector—is often dominant in food safety issues. Ultimately, the sources suggest that information alone does not build trust; rather, it makes trust redundant. For trust to be effectively created and maintained, the food sector must actively strive to improve its trustworthiness by being more socially responsive.
In conclusion, the paper asserts that a comprehensive understanding of expert-lay discrepancies in food risk assessment requires moving beyond the simplistic ‘knowledge deficit’ model. It advocates for an interdisciplinary, psychologically sound, and contextualized approach that incorporates insights from psychology, sociology, and ethnography to effectively address public concerns and improve risk communication.
Reference for this article:
Hansen, J., Holm, L., Frewer, L., Robinson, P., & Sandøe, P. (2003). Beyond the knowledge deficit: recent research into lay and expert attitudes to food risks. Appetite, 41(2), 111–121.
