ANALYZING THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL LEARNING FROM NEGATIVE EVENTS: CASE OF FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS

The public learn from not only in-school education but also the social events. In particular, the negative social events or disasters such catastrophic earthquakes or Tsunami, gave the people the chance to learn the something important. However, there are very few empirical studies to examine the process of social learning from negative social accident and events.

Our study aims to analyze how negative social events, i.e., Fukushima nuclear accident in our case, influence the people’s knowledge and trust toward nuclear. For this work, we collect the survey data covering 1,500 samples in Korea. We first analyze what to the extent the nuclear accident from Japan bring out the change in knowledge and trust and then find out the independent variables to influence such change. We believe that our study will show the mechanism and process for social learning in realistic situation.