The Formation Mechanism Of Public Risk Cognition From The Perspective Of Practical Construction

On March,2013, Chinese authority released the worldwide first case of human-infected H7N9, adding to the special time that tenth anniversary of SARS and the occurrence of "Huangpu dead pigs floating event", which has made H7N9 rapidly got the top 3 of the hottest topics of Sina Weibo and other social media. However, there exists a contradiction between such an over-reaction of the public and the real risk condition. Starting from this contradiction, this paper, following the internal principles of the modern risk, adopted the practical construction theory as its analytical frame, combining with the theories of Philosophy of Science and Technology, Communication and Sociology, and tried to explore the deep reasons of the risk cognition bias of the public through teasing the H7N9 itself, and further, concluded some possible problem-solving paths.Most materials of this research came from WHO, National Health and Family Planning Commission of PRC, the local healthy sectors and the columns of H7N9 of some famous web portals, such as Peoples Network, Tencent.com, Sohu.com and so on. Through the presentation of the H7N9 developing process, this paper discovered four agencies, including H7N9 virus, government and health sectors, mass media and the public. In this analysis, both the objective factor and the human beings factor have been considered. H7N9 virus has "three puzzles", including the origination, the spreading method and the treatment, which have generated the second risk through the reproduction of mass media. As that just few people can get the direct experience of the virus, most of their risk information came from the authority or social media. What’s more, the expert group who are both the judge and the defendant of the risk, confronted the hesitation from the public. All of these have intensified the collision of the different agencies and made it impossible that one agency defines the risk vision independently.In the last section, this paper has concluded the different cognitive characteristics of different phases of H7N9 event by a diachronic survey. On this basis, this paper proposed a possible path. This path is a kind of negotiating mechanism promoted by the information disclosure from the new media, which takes democracy as its prerequisite and the improvement of scientific literacy of the agency as its guarantee. In such a mechanism, part of the errors of risk cognition can be eliminated by the introduction of the information flow by a self-organized method, thus, reducing the resistance of the scientification of risk cognition.