| Abstract: | The present study is a cross-cultural comparison of risk perception. A psychometric approach has been followed in order to examine quantitative risk judgments of different hazards and the ratings of these same hazards on various risk-characteristic scales. A list of hazards was used that is comparable with other samples (American, Hungarian, Norwegian), but a certain number of hazards of an entirely different kind were added (e.g. social tensions, shortages of consumer goods) because these are important today for Polish society. In spite of the different list of hazards, the basic factor structure of risk perception turned out to be essentially the same as the structure found in other studies. There was considerable agreement in risk perceptions in the Polish and American samples. We also discovered a number of idiosyncratic qualities of risk perception in Poland, generally indicating the importance of the availability heuristic. |
