Risk and 'The Other'

This book explores personal responses to risk from a social psychological framework.

Hélène Joffé (Author)

9780521669696, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 September 1999

176 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 1 cm, 0.26 kg

From earthquakes to epidemics, AIDS to industrial accidents, the mass media continually bring into our daily lives the awareness of risk. But how do people respond to this increased awareness? How do people cope with living in what has been termed 'the risk society'? This book attempts to explain how, within a given social and cultural context, individuals make sense of impending crisis. In particular it tries to explain the phenomenon of a widespread sense of personal invulnerability when faced with risk: the 'not me' factor. Using a social psychological framework it highlights emotional factors which are a key component of responses to risk but have hitherto been neglected due to the tendency of much work on risk to concentrate almost exclusively on cognitive processing. This book will appeal to an international audience of post-graduates, academics and researchers in the areas of risk, psychology, sociology, medical anthropology and psychoanalytic studies.

Preface
1. Response to risks: an introduction
2. Human responses to risks: 'not me', 'the other is to blame'
3. A study of lay people's response to risk: HIV/AIDS in Britain and South Africa
4. Evaluating two conventional psychological models of the response to risks
5. The source of linking risk and 'the other': splitting objects into 'good' and 'bad'
6. Social representations of risks
7. Emotional life: a new frontier for social theory
8. Changing social representations of risks
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Sociology & anthropology [JH]