Perception of dioxin and other risks in Japan: Replication and extension

Previous research has shown that the common understanding of risk may be ex pressed by factor-analytic models that represent how fatal are risks and ho w voluntarily one assumes such threats. We investigated whether a similar r epresentation would model Japanese participants' risk perception. Moreover, because Japanese news casts concentrated their coverage exclusively on dio xin during the period of this research, we expected that those who were exp osed to such newscasts would more frequently develop greater environmental awareness. We also examined whether this "news-exposed group's" knowledge a bout dioxin was consistent with the known facts regarding dioxin. Analysis showed that the two factors adequately modeled the Japanese sample's risk r epresentation (N = 473) and that the news-exposed group (n = 188) did exhib it higher environmental awareness. Implications for risk research are discu ssed.