How do People Judge Risk? Availability may Upstage Affect in the Construction of Risk Judgments

When making risk judgments, people rely on availability and affect as convenient heuristics. The two heuristics share many similarities and yet there have been no or few attempts to ascertain their causal impact on risk judgments. We present an experiment (N = 143) where we varied availability-by-recall (thinking of less or more occurrences of someone from one’s social network dying) and the affective impact of certain risks (using images). We found that availability-by-recall had a stronger impact in constructing risk judgments. Asking people to think of more occurrences led to higher judgments of mortality and higher values placed on a single life, irrespective of changes in affect, risk media coverage, and retrieval time. Affect, however, was not disregarded. Our data suggest a causal mechanism where the retrieval of occurrences leads to changes in affect, which in turn, impact risk judgments. These findings increase understanding of how risk judgments are constructed with the potential to impact risk communication through direct manipulations of availability and affect. We discuss these and other implications of our findings.

在作出风险判断时，人们往往依赖可用性和情感作为便捷的启发式方法。这两种启发式方法虽存在诸多相似之处，但仍鲜有研究尝试明确其对于风险判断的因果影响。本研究呈现了一项实验（N = 143），其中我们通过改变可用性-回忆（思考来自个人社交网络中某人死亡次数的多少）以及特定风险的情感影响（使用图像）来探究其作用。研究发现，可用性-回忆在构建风险判断方面具有更强的作用。促使人们思考更多死亡事件的发生，导致了更高的死亡率判断以及对单个人生命价值的更高评价，无论情感变化、风险媒体覆盖范围以及检索时间的变动。然而，情感因素并未被忽视。我们的数据表明，事件检索导致情感变化，进而影响风险判断的因果机制。这些发现加深了对风险判断构建过程的理解，并有望通过直接操纵可用性和情感来影响风险沟通。我们讨论了这些以及其他发现的意义。