Ingvar Lundberg in memoriam (in Swedish)#

SRCD ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW#

Lennart Sjöberg#

Laudatio by Ingvar Lundberg#

Sjöberg's research has been intensively concerned with risks and environmental protection since the 1970’s, first at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, where he was associated with the Psychology Department as a full professor since 1970 and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Conditions, later at the Environmental Protection Agency, Washington DC, Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics where he was the founder of its Center for Risk Research. His recent research has been connected to chemical risks (JRC, Ispra) and nuclear waste (SKB, Sweden). The general thrust of his work has been to understand how experts and the public perceive risks so as to promote conciliation in these very difficult policy issues. In Sweden, success is being achieved in siting a nuclear waste repository for long-term storage – this is a so far a truly unique achievement in the world, solving an extremely important policy problem facing many countries.

Environmental protection is a contentious policy implementation which presumes understanding of how risks are perceived. The results of Sjöberg's research point to ways of greatly enhancing understanding of risk perception and related policy attitudes of both experts and the public. In particular, several dimensions and aspects new to the field were documented, such as the importance of trust in Science (epistemic trust) as distinct from social trust (the only kind of trust traditionally studied), the role of emotions and affect, and the reasons for different risk perception of experts and the public. In this way, greatly improved models of risk perception were made possible (about twice as powerful as traditional approaches such as the Psychometric Model and many times more powerful than Cultural Theory). Risk communication was strongly improved by taking such models into account. In addition, the large number of citations of Sjöberg's work testifies to its scientific impact (about 130 per year at the present, according to the Social Science Citation Index, H-index of 37), no doubt partly because much of his work has been published in leading scientific journals, such as Risk Analysis, Policy Sciences and Journal of Risk Research. He is frequently invited to present his work at symposia and conferences, most recently in Brazil, Finland, France and Italy. Supportive statements by colleagues in Europe and the USA – one of them a Nobel Laureate (David Kahneman) – have been submitted to him. Professor Kahneman (Princeton) wrote that “He has established himself as the leading European researcher into the psychology and measurement of risk in general, and of environmental risks in particular, and as one of the two or three leading scholars in that field in the world.” A highly respected pioneer in the field of risk perception and policy, Professor Paul Slovic (University of Oregon and Decision Research) wrote - in connection with his invited submission for the ENI research award - about his work on nuclear policy nuclear waste

"Professor Sjöberg has conducted numerous important studies of this topic, looking at people's trust and perceived competence in experts, and examining the attitudes and persceptions of stakeholders in nuclear waste siting issusues. In documenting extreme positions held by stakeholders, Professor Sjöberg's research has demonstrated the importance of educating and working with the general population on nuclear issues and not only with activitists."

Furthermore he wrote:

"More generally, Professor Sjöberg's work has informed the theory and measurement of rist perception, creating scales for assessing the views of laypeople and experts with regard to new-age beliefs and skepticism toward modern science and technology. Another important contribution, relevant to the ENI Award, is Professor Sjöberg's research on the perceived risk of tampering with nature. This reasearch demonstrated that beliefs about tampering with nature produce views about technology, health, and the environment that need to be understood and considered by policy makers".

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