Rationalization, enchantment, and subjectivation – lessons for risk communication from a New Phenomenology of everyday reasoning

The success of risk communication in democratic societies depends on a good understanding of people’s knowledge and ways of reasoning, which requires a broader perspective of ‘societal risk communication’. This includes all kinds of rationales how people and social institutions communicate, make sense of, and engage with risk and uncertainty to better understand the epistemological challenges for risk communication by experts and social decision-makers. For this purpose, we utilize insights from New Phenomenology and specify three rationales how people and social institutions engage with risk and uncertainty, following earlier work: ‘rational’ evidence-based modes of engaging with risk are accompanied by ‘non-rational’ (e.g. faith, hope) and ‘in-between’ modes (e.g. intuition, trust). In everyday life these idealtype modes rarely occur in pure but modified form. Therefore, we advance Zinn’s original work by introducing a dynamic model of decision-making under risk and uncertainty along the three types drawing on New Phenomenology. There are systematic differences in the embodied and the abstract forms of knowledge people refer to when making sense of risk and uncertainty while the abstract forms differ in their empirical saturation. The dynamized framework helps to understand institutional challenges as well as people’s sense-making, which show tendencies of ‘rationalization’, ‘enchantment’ and ‘subjectivation’.