Unmarked Risk and the Mundanity of Danger
Dr. Wayne H. Brekhus

August 2, 2018

Journalists, the general public, government officials, and researchers alike are often compelled by the spectacular, the charismatic, and the unusual, while taking for granted the unremarkable. Attending to the extraordinary over the mundane is a widespread cultural cognitive phenomenon./p>

In this talk, Professor Brekhus highlights the analytic distinction between the culturally and socially marked (remarkable) and the unmarked (unremarkable), arguing that organizations and individuals often devote disproportionate attention to the marked, even as the unmarked defines most of reality. The unintended cumulative effect of focusing heavily on marked outliers rather than the unremarkable, is to equate the marked with the important and the unmarked with the unimportant. Problems that arise from overvaluing the remarkable, and undervaluing the unremarkable, include that we generalize from extreme cases that are unrepresentative, we minimize the importance of ongoing ordinary problems and dangers, and we undertheorize the more mundane, but still consequential, aspects of human behavior. This is a broad cultural problem that has implications for national security decision-making. Sophisticated new technologies, massively destructive biological warfare, dramatic worst-case scenarios, and threats of impending cyber-doom grab headlines and attentional focus, while more probable, boring (yet still very consequential) threats are sometimes undervalued.

Wayne H. Brekhus (Ph.D. Rutgers University) researches and develops sociological theory in cultural cognition, social identities, and the sociocognitive dimensions of markedness and unmarkedness. He has published on the attentional asymmetry between the socially marked and the unmarked in such outlets as Sociological Theory, Sociological Forum, and Reseaux: Communication, Technologie, Societé. His most recent books include Sociologia dell’inavvertito (Sociology of the Inadvertent) [translated into Italian by Lorenzo Sabetta] at Castelvecchi Press, Italy, 2018, and Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality at Polity Press, UK, 2015.

Unmarked Risk and the Mundanity of Danger

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) sponsored this talk entitled “Unmarked Risk and the Mundanity of Danger” by Dr. Wayne H. Brekhus on May 2, 2018.