Stuart Jillian O'Rourke, Windschitl Paul D, Bossard Elaine, Bruchmann Kathryn, Smith Andrew R, Rose Jason P, Suls Jerry
Department of Psychology, Virginia Military Institute, 319 Letcher Avenue, Lexington, VA, 24450, USA.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, G60 Psychological and Brain Sciences Building, Iowa City, IA, 52242-1407, USA.
J Behav Med. 2023 Dec;46(6):912-929. doi: 10.1007/s10865-023-00439-1. Epub 2023 Aug 9.
Assessing perceived vulnerability to a health threat is essential to understanding how people conceptualize their risk, and to predicting how likely they are to engage in protective behaviors. However, there is limited consensus about which of many measures of perceived vulnerability predict behavior best. We tested whether the ability of different measures to predict protective intentions varies as a function of the type of information people learn about their risk. Online participants (N = 909) read information about a novel respiratory disease before answering measures of perceived vulnerability and vaccination intentions. Type-of-risk information was varied across three between-participant groups. Participants learned either: (1) only information about their comparative standing on the primary risk factors (comparative-only), (2) their comparative standing as well as the base-rate of the disease in the population (+ base-rate), or (3) their comparative standing as well as more specific estimates of their absolute risk (+ absolute-chart). Experiential and affective measures of perceived vulnerability predicted protective intentions well regardless of how participants learned about their risk, while the predictive ability of deliberative numeric and comparative measures varied based on the type of risk information provided. These results broaden the generalizability of key prior findings (i.e., some prior findings about which measures predict best may apply no matter how people learn about their risk), but the results also reveal boundary conditions and critical points of distinction for determining how to best assess perceived vulnerability.
评估对健康威胁的感知易感性对于理解人们如何构思自身风险以及预测他们采取保护行为的可能性至关重要。然而，对于众多感知易感性测量方法中哪种能最好地预测行为，人们的共识有限。我们测试了不同测量方法预测保护意图的能力是否会因人们了解自身风险的信息类型而有所不同。在线参与者（N = 909）在回答感知易感性和疫苗接种意图的测量问题之前，阅读了关于一种新型呼吸道疾病的信息。风险信息类型在三个组间进行了变化。参与者分别了解到：（1）仅关于他们在主要风险因素上的相对地位的信息（仅比较信息），（2）他们的相对地位以及该疾病在人群中的基础发病率（+基础发病率），或（3）他们的相对地位以及对其绝对风险的更具体估计（+绝对图表）。无论参与者如何了解自身风险，感知易感性的体验性和情感性测量都能很好地预测保护意图，而深思熟虑的数字和比较性测量的预测能力则因所提供的风险信息类型而异。这些结果拓宽了先前关键发现的普遍性（即一些关于哪种测量方法预测效果最佳的先前发现可能无论人们如何了解自身风险都适用），但结果也揭示了确定如何最佳评估感知易感性的边界条件和关键区别点。
