Compare methods

	Risk Perception Survey (Psychometric Paradigm)	Cultural Theory of Risk (Grid-Group Worldview Measurement)
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	1987	1982
Originator	Baruch Fischhoff & Paul Slovic; Paul Slovic	Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky; Karl Dake
Type	Survey-and-factor measurement of perceived risk	Worldview-scale measurement of risk selection
Seminal source	Slovic, P. (1987). Perception of Risk. Science, 236(4799), 280-285.	Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1982). Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520044913
Aliases	Psychometric Paradigm, Perceived Risk Survey, Dread-Unknown Risk Mapping, Slovic Risk Perception Method	Grid-Group Cultural Theory, Cultural Worldviews of Risk, Dake Cultural Bias Scales, Douglas-Wildavsky Risk Theory
Related	3	3
Summary	The risk perception survey, or psychometric paradigm, measures how laypeople intuitively judge the riskiness of hazards by having respondents rate many activities and technologies on a battery of qualitative risk characteristics. Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and colleagues introduced the approach in their 1978 study 'How Safe Is Safe Enough?', and Slovic's 1987 Science synthesis 'Perception of Risk' established it as the dominant empirical framework for studying risk attitudes. The central finding is that perceived risk is highly predictable from a handful of qualities — above all how dreaded and how unknown a hazard feels — rather than from expert estimates of expected fatalities. Factor analysis of the characteristic ratings collapses the many attributes into a low-dimensional cognitive map, typically a 'dread' and an 'unknown risk' axis, in which each hazard occupies a position. Where a hazard falls in this space predicts public concern, desired regulation, and acceptance far better than its statistical death toll. The method gave environmental and technological controversy a measurable psychological structure and remains foundational to risk communication.	The cultural theory of risk holds that what people fear is selected by their way of life rather than by objective danger, and it measures this by scaling respondents' cultural worldviews and relating them to the hazards they choose to worry about. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky advanced the theory in their 1982 book Risk and Culture, arguing that environmental and technological dangers are picked out to defend particular social arrangements. Karl Dake operationalized it in 1991, building survey scales for the grid-group worldviews — hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism — and showing that these 'orienting dispositions' predict risk concerns better than knowledge or personality. The framework explains, for instance, why egalitarians dread environmental and technological risks that they read as products of inequitable, irresponsible institutions, while individualists downplay them. As a method it combines worldview measurement with risk-rating data, testing whether cultural bias structures the perception of danger. It complements the psychometric paradigm by explaining who fears what and why.