Collisions Between Institutional and Populist Risk Imaginaries: The “Dark Side” of Negative Asymmetric Thinking - Incite at Columbia University

Expert knowledge informs the construction of public problems from gun violence to disease epidemics to climate change, and institutional actors draw on this knowledge to implement public policy to mitigate or repair the related harms.

The expanding role of experts and institutions in managing risks has come at a time of declining public trust in institutions and a legitimacy crisis around expert knowledge. What happens when these tendencies collide?

Previous scholarship has examined how disaster arises through failures of foresight, and how cultural-cognitive biases can prevent actors from seeing disasters coming. Less is known about the mobilization of resistance against risk management policies. This theoretical essay examines a particular category of that resistance: conspiracist discourse that frames risk as emanating primarily from perceived secret agendas of institutions and experts that explicitly claim to be acting in the public interest.

This essay argues that conspiracy thinking can be best understood as rooted in a “populist risk imaginary,” which is rooted in negative asymmetry, a cultural-cognitive bias that foregrounds the possibility of worst-case outcomes. Conspiracy discourse can be understood as the “dark side” of negative asymmetry, which is otherwise used by service-oriented professionals to sharpen their foresight in preempting future dangers.