Diverse Conceptions of Emotions in Risk Regulation

In the movie Legally Blonde, a civil procedure professor tells her first-year students on their first day of class at Harvard Law School that Aristotle stated, “The law is reason free from passion.” Since Aristotle, there has been much written about whether passion and reason are complements or substitutes. In Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation, Professor Dan M. Kahan analyzes two important and related questions: First, what roles do emotions play in risk perceptions? Second, what is the regulatory significance of these roles? Professor Kahan describes three models of how individuals can perceive risk—namely, as rational weighers, irrational weighers, or cultural evaluators. For rational weighers, emotions play no role in risk cognition but can show up as consequential by-products of information processing. This is a normative as opposed to descriptive model, based upon the consequentialist expected utility theory of neoclassical economics. For irrational weighers, emotions play a heuristic role in risk cognition due to bounds on computational abilities, information, and time. Emotions are distortions that underlie cogni-