Save and efficient functionality of infrastructure is a vital requirement for economic growth and societal welfare. One key challenge for engineers is to optimally balance the investment in infrastructure, economic and societal benefits, as well as the environmental compatibility that it may generate. Such considerations involve the responsible evaluation and weighing of risks, typically carried out by collaborative research teams. Another key challenge pertains to the communication and understanding of risks and the acceptance of risks in society. Psychological research has stressed the importance of risk communication and identified cognitive and affective factors as individual predictors of risk perception and acceptance. Recent studies point to the complexities of social processes involved in the acceptance of risks including the role of social trust. Because aligning technical, economic and environmental reasonability with societal acceptance is crucial for authorities and decision-makers, understanding the social dynamics of risk acceptance is most essential.

This Mini Symposium is exploring pathways for building a thorough understanding of risk in the context of civil infrastructures. Contributions may address (i) the perception and balance of threats, hazard and risk associated with natural excitations and man-made influences of our infrastructure and with its performance and safety, (ii) the derivation of adequate risk indicators (iii) the communication of risks involving the consequences of low performance or failure, specifically in education, public and social media, (iv) expectations on the safety and performance of infrastructure involving the role of social relationships, networks and cultural contexts, (v) methods to illustrate and visualize risk for common understanding among the society etc. We specifically invite contributions from psychology, social and educational sciences, ecology and environmental sciences or with strong links into those disciplines. We further aim at presenting both theoretical and empirical contributions based on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods including interviews, experiments, cross-sectional or longitudinal correlational analyses, as well as social network analyses.