Personal paper: Risk language and dialects

Cause of death Risk (in any one year) Any cause 1 in 100 Any cause, age 40 1 in 850 Road accident 1 in 8000 Murder 1 in 100 000 Lightning 1 in 10 000 000 Summary points Better ways are required for presenting risk magnitudes in a digestible form, and a logarithmic scale provides a basis for a common language for describing a wide range of risks Various "dialects" of this language-visual, analogue, and verbal scales-could help with grasping different risk magnitudes Combining the above ideas with the idea of anchoring risk magnitudes to the classification by size of human communities produces a "community risk scale" Factors other than magnitude are important in considering risk, but an appreciation of magnitude is a crucial first step The proposed risk scales need to be tested to see if and how they improve people's ability to understand and communicate about risks A logarithmic scale for risk Risk is not the only area that presents a wide range of size. Furthermore, people's attitude to risk depends on the context - for instance, whether the risk is voluntary or imposed, whether adverse events are concentrated or dispersed over time or place, and whether the risk is framed in a negative or a positive way. 7 8 7 Whether a hazard is seen as "dread" and whether it is regarded as an "unknown" are particularly important factors; hazards which score high on both these aspects generate especially strong concern. 9 15 It would in principle be possible to extend the risk scales shown to allow for differences in severity of adverse events, or to include more sophisticated risk measures such as years of life lost, or to distinguish between different contexts.