School of Business and Economics, Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Risk Anal. 2021 Nov;41(11):2003-2015. doi: 10.1111/risa.13729. Epub 2021 Mar 24.
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.
在进行风险判断时，人们依赖可得性和情感作为便捷的启发式。这两种启发式有许多相似之处，但很少有人试图确定它们对风险判断的因果影响。我们进行了一项实验（N=143），其中我们改变了回忆的可得性（考虑一个人的社交网络中较少或更多的人死亡的次数）和某些风险的情感影响（使用图像）。我们发现，回忆的可得性对构建风险判断的影响更大。要求人们更多地思考某个事件的发生，会导致更高的死亡率判断和更高的单个人生价值评估，而不论情感、风险媒体报道和检索时间的变化。然而，情感并没有被忽视。我们的数据表明存在一种因果机制，即事件的检索会导致情感的变化，进而影响风险判断。这些发现增加了对风险判断是如何构建的理解，并有可能通过直接操纵可得性和情感来影响风险沟通。我们讨论了这些发现和其他的影响。
