Who Is Paul Slovic?

He's a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

He is also, arguably, the most famous researcher in the field of Risk perception, a subset of the Risk Analysis field.  Risk perception is about what makes a possible hazard potentially acceptable to people (or not).

Decades ago Slovic interviewed people at length and came up with a two-axis way of representing the acceptability of different types of risk.  The axes were familiarity, and magnitude.  Every risk could be plotted in space around these axes to show how tolerable they were to people.

The least tolerated risk was something unfamiliar (ill-understood) which could badly affect a lot of people in a single event, such as a nuclear power plant accident.  The best tolerated risks were ones that had low impacts on few people in a single event, and that were very common or associated with familiar environments: like traffic accidents.

So while hardly anyone has ever died in a nuclear power accident, and thousands die in road traffic incidents, people worry much more about nuclear power stations than they do about driving their cars.

Slovic's has worked with literally dozens of researchers across other academic fields, including internationally, to show that his basic initial understanding of risk perception applies cross-culturally and with regard to almost everything.

He has had critics, however, notably Mary Douglas who developed a completely different paradigm about individual risk preferences and perception.