Despite 50 Years of Knowledge of Actual Versus Perceived Risk, Public Fear Persists of Contaminated Foods.
Irrational overreactions to the food we eat are commonplace these days, despite food scientists’ and regulators’ best efforts at communicating actual risk associated with consuming foods to
be significantly low. This is because we can detect toxins in foods to the parts per billion, which has advanced significantly since we were only able to detect to contaminants to the parts per million.
Despite the infinitesimally small risk still associated with food production and consumption, consumers still fear adulteration of the foods they eat.
This is largely because consumers are painfully inept at processing numbers. Despite the base-rate statistics of the actual risk of contamination, consumers systematically attribute much
higher risk than is actually the case.
The Dioxin Affair was not simply identifying and containing the alleged harm to human health posed from toxins in what was later found to be mainly in animal feed; rather, the perceived food safety risk turned into an all-out political and social crisis. It resulted in the resignation of both of Belgium’s Ministers of Health and Agriculture. The perceived ineptitude of the government to protect the public from food risk also resulted a historic loss for the incumbent governing party in Belgium.
Human brains may not have evolved fast enough to catch up to the modern-day risk landscape, or in actuality how well regulated it is, and so the continued public fear and pushback stems from the inability to close the discrepancy between real and perceived risk.
Soc Behav Res Pract Open J. 2019; 4(2): 26-27. doi: 10.17140/SBRPOJ-4-118
