Cross-Cultural Risk Perception demonstrates the richness and wealth of theoretical insights and practical information that risk perception studies can offer to policy makers, risk experts, and interested parties. The book begins with an extended introduction summarizing the state of the art in risk perception research and core issues of cross-cultural comparisons. The main body of the book consists of four cross-cultural studies on public attitudes towards risk in different countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Bulgaria, Romania, Japan, and China. The last chapter critically discusses the main findings from these studies and proposes a framework for understanding and investigating cross-cultural risk perception. Finally, implications for communication, regulation and management are outlined. The two editors, sociologist Ortwin Renn (Center of Technology Assessment, Germany) and psychologist Bernd Rohrmann (University of Melbourne, Australia), have been engaged in risk research for the last three decades. They both have written extensively on this subject and provided new empirical and theoretical insights into the growing body of international risk perception research.

In this study, respondents from the P.R.C., U.S.A., Germany, and Poland were found to differ in risk preference, as measured by buying prices for risky financial options. Chinese repondents were significantly less risk-averse in their pricing than Americans when risk preference was assessed in the traditional expected-utility framework. However these apparent differences in risk preference were associated primarily with cultural differences in the perception of the risk of financial options rather than with cultural differences in attitude towards perceived risk. In all cultures, and equal proportion(the majority) of respondents was willing to pay more for options perceived as less risky, i.e., were perceived-risk averse. These results are most natually explained within a risk-return conceptualization of risky choice. They have practical implications for cross-cultural negotiation and commerce by suggesting the locus of cultural differences in risky choice that may allow for the creation of joint gains.

In this article, we describe a multistudy project designed to explain observed cross-national differences in risk taking between respondents from the People's Republic of China and the United States. Using this example, we develop the following recommendations forcross-cultural investigations. First, like all psychological research, cross-cultural studies should be model based. Investigators should commit themselves to a model of the behavior under study that explicitly specifies possible causal constructs or variables hypothesized to influence the behavior, as well as the relationship between those variables, and allows for individual, group, or cultural differences in the value of these variables or in the relationship between them. This moves the focus from asimple demonstration of cross-national differences toward a prediction ofthe behavior, including its cross-national variation. Ideally, the causal construct hypothesized and shown to differ between cultures should be demonstrated to serve as a moderator or a mediator between culture and observed behavioral differences. Second, investigators should look for converging evidence for hypothesized cultural effects on behavior by looking at multiple dependent variables and using multiple methodological approaches. Thus, the data collection that will allow for the establishment ofconclusive causal connections between acultural variable and some target behavior can be compared with the creation of amosaic.

The present study was designed to assess cross-cultural differences in the perception of financial risks. Students at large universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and the U.S., as well as a group of Taiwanese security analysts rated the riskiness of a set of monetary lotteries. Risk judgments differed with the nationality of the respondents, but not as a function of their occupation (students vs. security analysts). The risk judgments of each individual were modeled by the Conjoint Expected Risk (CER) model (1), which uses a weighted sum of component aspects of a risky prospect to predict its perceived overall riskiness. The CER model provided an excellent fit of the risk judgments of respondents from the four different countries, capturing both cross-cultural similarities in risk judgments (i.e., the functional form by which probability and outcome information was combined) as well as differences (i.e., differences in the weights given to different probability and outcome components). Cross -cultural differences in perceived risk were captured by differences in three of the six parameters of the CER model. Consistent with cultural differences in country uncertainty avoidance (2), CER model parameters of respondents from the two Western countries differed from those of respondents from the two countries with Chinese cultural roots: The risk judgments of respondents from Hong Kong and Taiwan were more sensitive to the magnitude of potential losses and less mitigated by the probability of positive outcomes.