Hi Rob,
Back in the 1960's there was a rather infamous series of experiments called "breaching experiments". What these experiments did was to"breach" social conventions and see how people reacted to them. According to one story I was told, Garfinkle (not of Simon & fame), was required to stop the experiments in his graduate class after one of his students had her head bashed in by her boyfriend while she was performing one on him. In this case, the experiment was not breaching a social rule but, rather, challenging individual perceptions by acting like a 2 year old always asking "why?".
In order to answer your question, I'm going to have to get into some rather esoteric stuff, so apologies in advance....
Basically, we can say that there are several different "orders" of risk. The range I am using goes from risk to the individual up to risk to the species. So, we have risk to the planet, risk to the species, risk to the general group (e.g. Western Civilization), risk to the specific group (i.e. the US or Canada), risk to "our" faction within the specific group, risk to our personal group (kinship group, "friends", co-workers, etc), risk to our immediate personal group, risk to ourselves that is consciously recognized and risk to ourselves that is sub-consciously perceived. BTW, for those of you who are Heinlein fans, yes, this does parallel his discussion of developing a science of morality in Starship Troopers (book, not movie).
I'm pretty sure that everyone is familiar with all of these levels of risk except the last one, and that is he one that, I believe, is the biggest impediment to organizational change. In order to explain how this operates, I'm going to have to get into the neurophysiology of schemas.
Basically, and I'm taking this from Daniel Levitin's This is your brain on music (at Amazon) which is a fantastic introduction to the area, a "schema" is shorthand for how our brains process sensory information and "make sense" of it. At present, we know a fair bit about these even if it is extremely technical. Anyway, the way it operates is that sensory information comes in through one or more of our senses, gets filtered through a series of parallel processing modules in the brain, and then comes into our "sensorium" (you know, the little "me" that sits behind our eyes and is the "real me"), often triggering actions along the way.
Now the brain is made up of neurons which we used to think were connected together and transmitted electrical pulses which were information. We now know, post 1973, that this was a very simple, and incorrect, model. We do have electrical impulses running along the neurons (that's what is picked up by EEGs), but the neurons are not physically connected. What we have instead is a chemical connection between neurons. Basically what happens is an electrical impulse runs along a neuron and tells the "end" of the neuron to release a certain chemical - these are jointly called neurotransmitters, and most people have heard of the big ones like dopamine and serotonin (there are actually hundreds of them).
Now, in addition to acting as ways to transmit a command to send an impulse along another neuron, neurotransmitters also appear to regulate many of our perceptions and emotions. For example, the latest versions of anti-depressants are called SSRIs which stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. In order for us not to be depressed, we actually have to have a certain amount of free floating (technically extracellular) serotonin in our brains, and SSRIs get this by stopping serotonin from being reabsorbed by the ends of neurons.
Okay, another point about how the brain operates: whenever you get really heavy activity along certain neural connections, the neurons tend to be coated in a substance called myelin or myelin sheathing. Myelin acts like a turbocharger on an engine to speed up the impulses that move along a neuron. Loss of myelin slows down impulses and may lead to the dissolution of neural connections - MS is a form of disease that attacks myelin sheathing. Now, neural connections that get "myelinated" (i.e. sheathed in myelin) are about 3 times faster than non-myelinated connections. In order to get a connection myelinaed, you need to use that connection - this is what "training" does so, when you are teaching someone to, say, shoot a rifle, you are actually encouraging their brains to form neural connections that are myelinated.
Here I'm moving out from the totally accepted (it's still just starting to get reported in the literature). Myelinating or demyelinating neural networks changes the balance of neurotransmitters being released in the brain. In many cases, these neural networks also are tied into the amygdala which is sometimes called the "emotional brain" so, in addition to having a lot of influence on the release and reuptake of neurotransmitters, they also tie into a section of the brain that is like a neurotransmitter master switch. Attempting to demyelinate neural networks, i.e. to get rid of one schema and replace it by another, can actually set off all sorts of weird triggers for neuroransmitter production, causing wild mood swings, knee-jerk reactions, etc.
From my own fieldwork, it seems to take about 3 months in a very calm setting to demyelinate one network and myelinate a replacement. That three month mark, BTW, is when the changes in neural networks start to become balanced enough that the individual is able to hold them in their sensorium - St. John of the Cross described this as the Dark Night of the Soul, and his description certainly jived with a lot of the descriptions I got from my fieldwork.
So, to wrap it up, sub-consciously perceived risk is a risk to a neural network that is "protected" by emotional boundaries (i.e. the threat / reward of neurotransmitters) and is the basis for a schema.
I hope I didn't loose too many people and that any cognitive neuroscientists reading it don't freak too badly at the simplistic way I am presenting it .
Marc
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