Human Development and the Architecture of Everyday Worry: Latent Worry Profiles in the World Risk Poll

Whether public concern about risk rises or falls with national development has been debated for three decades, but the debate has compared countries hazard by hazard, asking how much people worry rather than how worry is organized. We provide a person‐centered analysis of everyday worry at global scale, applying latent class analysis to the six‐hazard worry battery of the Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll and linking profiles to the Human Development Index (HDI) in 140 countries (; 2023 wave), with the 2021 wave (; 119 countries) as an independent replication. Four worry profiles replicate almost exactly across waves, including a configurationally distinct secure‐basics profile (15% of respondents) combining low worry about food and water with high worry about crime, severe weather, and traffic. Profile prevalence is consistent with the ordered sequence predicted by a need‐priority account of worry allocation: pervasive worry falls from 33% to 13% between low‐ and very‐high‐HDI countries, low worry nearly doubles, and the secure‐basics profile holds steady across low‐ and medium‐HDI countries before declining at higher development. Traffic accidents are the most intense worry in every tier below very high HDI. These gradients persist after adjustment for self‐reported recent harm and demographic composition and are only partly accounted for by the objective hazard environment, though the cross‐sectional design cannot separate development from macroregional clustering. Development is associated with the composition of worry, not only its overall level; risk communication may be better matched to a country's worry architecture than to a single global template.