The Perception of Environmental Risks among Ethnically Diverse Groups. Special Issue: Risk and Culture

Examines ethnicity for its association with variability in perceptions of environmental risk. Evidence indicating when ethnic differences in risk perceptions have been observed is reviewed, and 3 hypotheses are offered to explain why ethnicity would be predictive of dissimilarities in judgments for many environmental risks. Possible explanations for an ethnicity effect include differences in prior experiences with or exposure to various hazards, dissimilar general beliefs about risk and uncertainty, and differences on various qualitative dimensions that influence nonexpert assessments of risk.