Cognitive Aversion of Mercury Scaled by Pairwise Comparison Method with Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgement

摘要

The Minamata Convention on Mercury, which entered into force on Aug. 2017, requires mercury to be recovered from society and its final disposal to be accomplished in environmentally safe ways. Because it is very difficult to obtain public acceptance of mercury landfill disposal, this study focuses on emotional perceptions of mercury. The author quantitatively evaluated aversions to mercury and other harmful matters such as radioactive waste or those perceived as hazardous using a pairwise comparison method with Thurstone’s law of comparative judgement (sample size = 1030). The strongest aversion was found for radioactive waste, followed by mercury. Although gender and age usually affect risk perception to any hazard, this study found that gender and age had no significant impact on mercury aversion at the 5 percent significance level. When the participants had strong concerns about well-known hazards (radioactive waste, dioxins, infectious medical waste and cadmium), they had a stronger aversion to mercury than those who were concerned more with other matters like genetically modified foods or ultraviolet light. On the other hand, the participants who had moderate or weak concerns about well-known hazards had even greater mercury aversion than the group with strong concerns. No clear difference in mercury aversion was found regardless of different strengths of concerns regarding waste recycling. Cognitive aversion to mercury is associated with hazard perceptions and not affected by concerns regarding waste recycling.