Risk Theory and ‘Subjective Fear’: The Role of Risk Perception, Assessment, and Management in Refugee Status Determinations

Adjudicators deciding refugee claims often assume that people in danger will take prompt and effective steps to save themselves and will never willingly put themselves at risk. They rely on three articles of faith handed down by generations of judges: those who fear for their lives in their homelands will not delay in leaving; they will ask for protection immediately in the first safe country that they reach; and they will never return for any reason. These assumptions are not based on any evidence, and yet evidence is close at hand. For decades, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and historians have studied how human beings perceive and respond to danger. This article reviews this research and concludes that before adjudicators could even potentially infer from these types of actions that a claimant was not afraid, or is lying, they must consider the psychological and cultural factors influencing the claimant's risk perception, assessment, and management. It concludes that even when all these factors are taken into account, the well-documented variance in human response to danger makes ‘subjective fear’ judgments fundamentally unsound.