How to improve risk perception evaluation in food safety: a psychometric approach

Food consumers often query or ignore the risk assessments of scientists, the food industry and public bodies. This is widely acknowledged. It has been suggested that this ‘expert-lay discrepancy' is a relatively straightforward upshot of the fact that lay people lack the knowledge and technical understanding of experts. However, much published research on risk in psychology and sociology runs counter to this ‘knowledge deficit' model. In many cases, at least, lay risk assessments are not well explained as the product of ignorance, because they are in fact complex, situationally sensitive expressions of a person's value system.There is obviously a pressing need today to understand expert-lay discrepancies in the assessment of food risks. We need to know how consumers perceive and assess risks; why they respond to communication and advice relating to those risks in the way they do; what factors affect their willingness to trust public institutions responsible for regulating the food industry and issuing guidance on food matters; and what determines their handling of specific food hazards.Psychometric and psychological studies of risk perception offer an invaluable corrective to excessive and simplistic reliance on the deficit model. By emphasising the multi-dimensionality of lay risk perception, they have improved the understanding of expert-lay discrepancy. More generally, the demonstration that risks and benefits are not perceived independently of each other is a crucial finding of psychological research, and we now know that risk-benefit analyses that treat risk and benefits as independent factors should be handled with caution by those aiming to interpret or influence popular opinion.Our paper is an attempt to analyse consumers' behaviour when facing a potential risky action such as consuming GM food. The hypothesis tested states that consumers take into account both costs (accident) and benefits (rewards) of uncertain outcomes and then minimize risk instead of trying to totally avoid it. A sample of about 400 students, repeated twice (in 2001 and then in 2008), enrolled in different Italian colleges was directly interviewed on an hypothetical genetically modified tomato market. A mixture distributions was used first for inferring on what variables influence the decision to take part on the "new market" proposed and, second, to estimate the Willingness To Pay (WTP) distribution for those willing to buy the GM product proposed. Results show that the probability to buy the GM product proposed is: directly related to the GMOs degree of knowledge; inversely related to risk perception; inversely related to the personal risk attitude. In conclusion, first results seem to confirm that factors from psychological and sociological perspective can improve the so called “knowledge deficit model”. An interdisciplinary and psychologically sound approach to risk and consumer behaviour could be the correct way to achieve progress in these fields.