Whereas hierarchists and individualists tend to share many risk perceptions (dismissing, for example, assertions of the dangerousness of guns and the significance of various aserted environmental risks), they diverge on public health risks.  Among these, the National Risk & Culture Survey found, are the dangers of abortion as a medical procedure for women, and the riks of contracting HIV from and HIV-positive surgeon.

Abortion

Controlling for various other influences, the more hierarchical a person becomes the more he or she perceives abortion to be dangerous, and the more individualistic she becomes the more safe she perceives abortion to be.  See Table 1, model 1. This pattern is consistent with the work of Kristin Luker, who depicts the free availability of abortion as symoblically denigrating hierarchical norms, which equate female status with motherhood, and symbolically affirming egalitarian and individualist norms, which afford status to women for occupying professional roles.  Our data suggest that persons, here as elsewhere, conform their perception of how dangerous an activity is to their culturally grounded moral assessment of it.

Luker also suggests that the nature of the abortion controversy operates as a symbolic status conflict particularly among women. Our data suggest the same is so for perceptions of the riskiness of abortion.  It is hierearchical women, in particular, who tend to see abortion as dangerous.  See Table 1, model 2.  Indeed, being female predicts seeing abortion as dangerous only among hierarchs; among persons of other cultural dispositions, there is no difference in male and female attitudes (controlling for other influences). See Table 1, model 4.

HIV Infection

Aaron Wildavsky hypothesized that “group-grid” worldviews would influence perceptions of the risk of HIV infection from nonsexual contact with infected individuals. This prediction was based on what Wildavsky took to be the cultural resonances of homosexuality and HIV. Viewing HIV as akin to a “plague” visited on those who violate societal norms, persons of a hierarchical orientation, Wildavsky argued would “maximiz[e] fear of casual contact with people who have AIDS.” By the same token, because tolerance for homosexuality symbolizes “antiestablishment” tendencies and “reduc[tion] [of] differences among people,” persons of an individualist and egalitarian disposition should be expected to “minimiz[e] the dangers from casual contact with carriers of AIDS” Aaron Wildavsky, Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation, 81 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 1, 15 (1987).

The National Culture & Risk Survey generated supporting data.  One of the risk perceptions measured in the study concerned the danger of contracting HIV from surgery performed by an HIV-positive doctor.  The more hierarchical persons become, the more seriously they take this risk.  Persons who are relatively egalitarian and individualistic do not show the same concern.  See Table 2.