Risk perception varies subjectively and shaped modern risk-calculating individualism

Evidence

Whether or not one places trust in future events, the perception and evaluation of risk is a highly subjective matter (Kogan and Wallach 1967; Fischhoff et al. 1981). It differentiates people and promotes a different type of risk-seeking or risk-avoiding, trusting or distrusting, individuality. Among the many sources of modern individualism this may have had considerable importance. The individualism of risk-calculating merchants, learning from experience, attentive to news, making decisions on the basis of a well-judged mix of trust and distrust, replaces the individualism of the hero holding out against all kinds of danger and fit for all manner of unhappy surprises. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1400

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on how observability constraints produced merchant reputation systems (law merchant, Champagne fairs), where risk-calculating trust replaced heroic individualism. — connects to: People frame structural food-safety risks as voluntary lifestyle choices. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 78