Two Foundational Ideas of Risk-Undesirability and Unexpectedness-With Implications for Risk Science and Its Applications.

Authors

Terje Aven

Published in

Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis. Volume 46. Issue 10. Pages e70366.

Abstract

This paper contends that the concept of risk is fundamentally shaped by two distinct motivating ideas: (1) that something undesirable may occur (dominant in safety, security, and engineering contexts), and (2) that something unexpected may occur (central to many business, strategic, and decision-making domains). Any framework aspiring to generality across diverse application areas must therefore be sufficiently inclusive to accommodate both perspectives. The paper explores the ramifications of this dual conceptualization for foundational aspects of risk science-including core definitions, the scope and boundaries of the discipline-as well as for risk understanding, communication, and management.

PMID:
42755382
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 18 Sep 2026.

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