Risk & trust: It's all different for everyone.
Why were we so polarised during COVID? It came down to a 1000 different things. A go at listing some of these things, and a chat with NewZealandDoc.
Risk is such a crunchy, nebulous thing to discuss. It isn’t black and white; it sits in a shifting grey zone, very much a function of knowledge and perspective. A mother with toddler views risk very differently from a 21-year-old male. A young man may perceive it differently again from a woman his age. A mathematician may see risk differently from a physicist, and both differently from an epidemiologist. Even within epidemiology, someone who has spent a career studying environmental chemicals will view risk differently from someone focused on population acceptance of medical interventions.
Risk is a function of our biology, including our age, parental status, microbiome health and our testosterone levels (which mediate reward-threat evaluation). It is also shaped by the information that surrounds us: the capacity of our media and educational institutions to articulate risk and what it might mean. In that sense, risk is a function of knowledge.
Awareness of risk arises from curiosity. Do we want to understand long-term, crescive, chronic risks, or do we prefer to focus on short-term, acute risks? Our grasp of these depends on our capacity to absorb information and the time we have. Most people are exhausted at the end of the day, caught up in families and communities. That is why we so often trust governments to do the heavy lifting on risk.
Risk is also a function of values and principles, which are themselves connected to all the factors above. A value is something held to be important or desirable, what matters, and values vary across cultures, communities, and individuals. Values guide choices and priorities, and they shift as knowledge, experiences, and perspectives shift. What populations know, and how they come to know it, is central to what they value at a given time.
Principles, by contrast, act as rules or standards of conduct that flow from values. They are intended to guide consistent action. Principles of protection, transparency, and accountability may begin in the family unit and extend to the government, though they can also be neglected or distorted along the way.
Communities often share values and principles. Governments and media are entrusted with helping us navigate risk and uncertainty, ensuring social services and shaping how we view the safety of pollution, toxic chemicals, and medicines. Social groups also help societies navigate controversies, to reach mutually agreed decisions and to prevent polarisation. We rely on these groups to apply shared principles honestly when they problematise issues and propose solutions, so as to navigate the controversies in a way that is trustworthy and flexible as information changes, and to ensure that any decisions or positions are robust over time.
There is also a biology–experience overlap. Flexible, complex reasoning in risk perception during uncertainty involves not only cognition but also emotional resilience and health. Neuroscience points to the value of hemispheric integration crosstalk across the hemispheres, the ‘left hemisphere strives to reduce uncertainty while the right hemisphere strives to resolve inconsistency’ rather than dominance of either the heuristics-tended left hemisphere or the more technical right.
There’s another thing - our capacity to understand and articulate risk is based on our capacity to be willing to navigate situations where we could be professionally or socially rejected - ostracised. Sometimes we choose not to be curious - we can be wilfully blind where we can implicitly elect not to see an injustice or a violence, in order to avert other certain forms of threats or dangers. If we make a decision, do we lose our place in the family order, do we become ‘unprofessional’.
When it comes to perception of big risks, there is a well-established literature on the fear response. The fight/flight/freeze defense cascade via the amygdala pathway. Childhood adversity or trauma sensitises the amygdala, making fear responses more easily triggered. Testosterone can down-weigh threats while oestrogen can heighten vigilance in caregiving contexts. Fear directly alters risk perceptions, and once fear is engaged, logical evaluations of probability or cost–benefit become secondary.
Are we scared for ourselves, for our children? What is risk to me from my own perspective? It’s social, political, biological and cultural.
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
What separates me from another’s suffering is not my virtue, but contingency, chance, and grace. But healthy emotions including normal human compassion were hacked, during COVID-19, while independent scientific evaluation was stifled.
This week I had a fabulous chat with Emanuel E. Garcia of the Substack chatting about my own ‘life’ and ‘risk’ journey - and COVID-19, and how I came to be where I am now.
COVID-19 - NO REQUIREMENT FOR HIPKINS TO PUBLICLY FRONT UP
Following the Royal Commission’s August 13, 2025 decision that key decision-makers would no longer appear publicly, I’m relieved that larger and larger groups believe that Ardern, Hipkins et al should appear publicly to defend their decision-making during COVID-19.
Curea Poll: NZHerald, NewstalkZB.
The mandates were enacted through legislation. Laws should be fair and just.
The public should be able to hear from the key people who controlled the development of policy and laws and locked in mandates during COVID-19.
DID MINISTERS REVIEW THE SCIENCE ON RISK BEFORE ROLLING OUT MANDATES?
When Covid-19 commenced, my perspective was foregrounded by patterns observed in the regulation of pesticides: The absence of scientists who were funded to study the risk of that pesticide (the technology); guidelines which were often narrowly formed or outdated which reflected globally harmonised perspectives (which included requirements to assess the toxicity of the full formulation, including contaminant risk), industry privileges via commercial in confidence agreements (which kept the industry science secret), the failure of officials to conduct independent risk assessment (because they deferred to industry science), failing to consider risk by age or gender, and consistent ignorance of the weight of evidence in the scientific literature (from basic mechanistic studies, to case control, cohort and controlled trials).
Therefore, I understood the ‘game’ that could be played by key strategists:
Risk would be based on what all the big global actors agreed upon (e.g. risk was infectivity and the ‘covid cases’ not hospitalisation and death, risk would be judged on what the PCR’s derived). Risk could be under- and mis-represented.
The scientific literature would be outside the scope (no evaluations of mechanistic data, case and the epidemiological literature).
Different risks could be downplayed, risk of infection versus risk of hospitalisation and death, risk by age, gender and multimorbidity.
Science used by government would not ‘keep up’ with the evidence in the literature.
Trusting publics would be used to governments being ‘truthful’.
One of the most important things I believed that I could do during the COVID-19 years was to identify where risk-benefit evaluations were held before rolling out mandates.
I aimed to shed light on whether officials were considering risk over time, based on seasonality, age, gender and multimorbid status, and whether, with each rollout of the mandates, whether any of the people charged with production of the Orders in Council, the secondary legislation that encoded the mandates in law - predominantly Chris Hipkins and Ayesha Verrall - whether these very powerful people undertook risk and cost-benefit assessments prior to enacting legislation to understand whether the mandates were worth it by age, stage and multimorbidity risk. Whether the risk benefit profile stacked up.
I made repeated OIA requests to understand: Did Hipkins, Verrall, and the officials and scientists tasked with evaluating risk, ever consider the risk to population sub-groups based on the risk of hospitalisation and death following infection with COVID-19, versus the risk from injection from the COVID-19 BNT162b2 mRNA gene therapy and what did the scientific literature say?
This risk-benefit work by population sub-group was never undertaken.
This is the basis of public health. Yet it was ignored. There could be no informed consent.
As a population - we would all view risk differently. But we were faced with a political infrastructure, governments, media, academia and the dominant NGOs that would message together in lock-step, and that would fail to concern themselves with risk-benefit evaluation of population sub-groups, - an infrastructure that castigated and shamed the people who did ask these very questions.
The mandate rollouts simply followed the Feb-April 2021 decision and policy pathway to inject the entire population.
My work describing how institutional power functioned over this time, has been outlined in numerous discussion papers, which were also published on Substack, in a conference paper and in the Brownstone Institute. I’m proud to have supplied information which was included in the People’s Position paper.
(Although I was undertaking this work throughout COVID-19 and supplied these papers as evidence to the Royal Commission on COVID-19, I have not been invited to present personally to the Commissioners.)
My submission to the Royal Commission revolved around my concern that the precedent established by the government’s response to COVID-19 would be enhanced through the networked risk that is enabled by digital convergence (to understand how this is being quietly fast-tracked in 2025, please read Bonnie Flaw’s articles).
The COVID-19 precedent & the domestic & global hazard of networked risk & digital convergence. Venn diagram:
Networked Risk. The challenge for New Zealand's C19 Royal Commissioners.
If you want to read further on risk
- I asked ChatGPT a question:
Our understanding to articulate risk is based on personal characteristics based around capacity - social - capacity to be rejected socially, likelihood that important peers will reject us - what makes a person more robust and resilient - also may be connected to obedience? Risk from e.g. but not limited to: pollution/paedophilia/technology etc. Who are the 6 major thinkers in this area in the last 100 years that traverse the social/personal characteristics please?
Ulrich Beck (1944–2015). Key Idea: Risk Society (1986) Relevance: He showed how risk perception is shaped socially and politically, not just technically, and how individuals must navigate risks with limited trust in institutions.
Mary Douglas (1921–2007). Key Idea: Cultural Theory of Risk (Risk & Culture with Aaron Wildavsky, 1982). Relevance: She argued risk is filtered through cultural values and social structures (e.g. hierarchy, individualism). Risk acceptance or rejection is bound to social belonging and fear of exclusion.
Erving Goffman (1922–1982). Key Idea: Stigma (1963), Presentation of Self (1956). Relevance: Not a “risk theorist” per se, but his analysis of how people manage identity in face of stigma and social rejection links directly to social capacity and vulnerability. His work helps explain why some risks are hidden, denied, or borne silently (e.g. abuse, illness).
Stanley Milgram (1933–1984). Key Idea: Obedience to Authority (1963). Relevance: His experiments revealed how obedience can override personal risk assessment, showing the powerful social mechanisms behind acceptance of harmful practices (technologies, violence, exploitation).
Aaron Antonovsky (1923–1994). Key Idea: Salutogenesis (1979, 1987). Relevance: Focused on why some people remain resilient under stress and adversity. He introduced the Sense of Coherence (comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness) as key to personal robustness in facing risks.
Sheila Jasanoff (1944– ). Key Ideas: Co-production of science and social order; Technologies of humility (2003). Relevance: societies make sense of risk not just through science but through culture, law, and institutions. Argues that technology risks (biotech, climate change, surveillance, AI) require humility about uncertainty, recognition of affected communities, and openness to plural values. Jasanoff foregrounds democratic accountability, who gets to decide what counts as an acceptable risk?
Beck and Jasanoff are in the bookshelf. A few sociologists in that mix! :)