Thinking About Risk: Moving Beyond "Leaving It to the Experts"

This book introduces basic discussions about risk from a psychological perspective, using risk communication as a keyword.

The motivation for writing this book was a long, handwritten request for a manuscript that I received by mail from an editor at Chikuma Shobo. Since receiving a handwritten letter is such a rare experience, I accepted immediately.

I decide on the structure of everything I write, including academic papers, before I start writing. Therefore, I spent a lot of time discussing the structure. In an academic paper, one tends to start with definitions, such as "What is risk communication?" Instead, I am truly grateful to the editor who gave me careful advice on things like whether a certain chapter structure would work better.

I kept two points in mind while writing. The first, which I proposed and received approval for from the editor, was to avoid including recent cases like COVID-19 as much as possible. If I were to use recent examples, they might be easy to understand now, but there is a high possibility that the details will be forgotten in a few years. Instead, even if the stories were old, I actively introduced cases where similar things are likely to happen in the future. For example, many cases of pollution and drug-induced health disasters require a long time for the certification of aftereffects and for court trials. Similar things can happen even with events occurring in real-time.

Secondly, since 2016, I had written an intermittent series of about five essays on crisis management for Iwanami Shoten's magazine "Kagaku" (Science), as well as two separate essays related to COVID-19. Therefore, the thing I was most careful about was ensuring the content did not overlap with those works.

However, I couldn't strictly follow my own rules mentioned above; bits of COVID-19 talk appear here and there, and there is some slight overlap with "Kagaku." Regarding this point, I can only hope that readers will be forgiving.

I have received an evaluation from a friend who is incapable of flattery, saying that this is the best book currently available in this field, so I would definitely like to encourage everyone to purchase it.

Just between us, I have included subtle "ikezu" (wicked or sarcastic) expressions here and there that I acquired during my approximately 20 years of living in Kyoto. I would be even happier if you could add the discovery of these expressions through careful reading to your enjoyment of the book.

Thinking About Risk: Moving Beyond "Leaving It to the Experts"

Toshiko Kikkawa

Chikuma Shinsho

240 pages, 946 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of the magazine's publication.