AndrewS:
Actually, that is an amazingly interesting and complex question and subject.
Most on this website---that generally deals with golf architecture---may not realize what a basic influence that very thing may've ultimately had on golf architecture.
To best answer a question like that one has to go way back and study how the Rules of Golf evolved. I've tried to pin that down some, not with all hazards but with the "sand hazard" (bunker).
One needs to understand that before the turn or the 18th century the rules of golf were not centralized as they later became under the R&A, so there were various sets of rules and definitions that were different---generally from club to club.
But through all that there always were two fundamental rules that everything emanated from that Richard Tufts explained well in his little book "The Principles Behind the Rules of Golf". They were;
1. You put a ball (and "a" ball meant one ball) in play at the tee and you do not touch it until you removed it from the hole.
2. You play the course as you find it.
Obviously the fundamental that you do not touch your ball became something that various questions and procedures needed to address when your ball got into trouble and you could not very easily play it and could not very well proceed. That's when things like hazards became defined and how to proceed from them.
With sand hazards there was a time you could touch the sand as long as you didn't improve your lie. But who was to decide if one's lie was "improved" if he touched the sand, for instance? Amazingly the player was the one who decided that and in the beginnings of golf that worked because the "spirit" in golf was that a gofer did nothing that would take advantage of his opponent in any way through the operation of the rules. (The idea was that you wanted to beat the best your opponent could throw at you without you taking advantage against him of the operation of the rules of golf).
I suppose at some point that beautiful "spirit" began to wane and the rule that a golfer couldn't even touch the sand in a sand hazard was instituted to remove even the question of impropriety!
And at that point, at least with hazards, real definition of where they were and weren't began to come into golf and if one thinks about it eventually that had real implications on architecture itself.
According to a golf philosopher such as Max Behr, at that point golf and architecture became divided into places that were good and places that were evil. The fairgreen (fairway) became good and the hazard features became evil in sort of a moralistic way. And, according to Behr, what better way to make the fairgreen "more good" than to make hazard features "more evil". If you hit a shot to the fairway it was good and if you hit one to a hazard it was bad and the golfer should feel he must pay some pennance. Behr's articles and explanations on hazards and the philosophy of "penalty" was in a way one of a "glass half full/glass half empty" one when it came to how a golfer perceived hazard and the idea of penalty!
And the definitions and distinctions between the two (fairway and hazards) became more precise as time went on.
If one ever wonders why it would be so difficult to build a golf course without sand bunkering today one of the fundamental things to look at is how much the Rules of Golf now deal with sand bunkering. Rules and procedures for how to deal with them are all over the Rules of Golf and certainly the Decisions of Golf. If a course did not have sand bunkering a golfer might feel that something was lacking in a rules context at this point.
It didn't used to be that way. Once upon a time in golf there never were these distinctions and defined areas---wherever a golfer's ball was a basic rule prevaled that he played his ball from where it went and he didn't touch it without giving up the hole.
If you want to understand how hazards came into golf and how the golfer's perception of them evolved look to the evolution of the rules of golf---because that's where it all emanated from.