Risk Perceptions

Risk perception refers to people's subjective judgment about the likelihood of negative occurrences such as injury, illness, disease, and death. In the field of health communication, heightened risk perception is considered an important antecedent to health-related behavior. The public's risk perception also plays an important role in setting regulators' and legislators' policy agendas. For example, if people perceive secondhand smoke to be a serious health risk, they will favor stricter indoor and outdoor smoking regulations. For these reasons, understanding risk perception is critical for developing effective health and risk communication strategies.

A dominant line of risk perception research assumes that people perceive risks based on how much knowledge and uncertainty they have about them. This assumption is based on the rational choice model of decision making, which proposes that people evaluate the possibility of potential outcomes after they carefully calculate costs and benefits. Experts certainly tend to evaluate risk in this rational way, using scientific information and objective assessment. However, lay people usually do not, and instead they tend to evaluate risks by using cognitive shortcuts or simple heuristics.

For example, when people are more aware of certain risks, they tend to believe that these risks occur more frequently than they actually do. This [Page 1190]tendency is known as the availability heuristic, and it has been demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Consider some examples from health contexts: If an individual has any friends or family members who died as a result of smoking, this individual is more likely than other people to perceive smoking as posing a fatal risk. Also, people who have been heavily exposed to media coverage of a pandemic flu may perceive it to be more prevalent and risky than those who have not.

During the H1N1 flu outbreak in Mexico City in April 2009, differing levels of risk perception are observed: One woman (left) takes a casual approach to protection, while the other (right) covers herself in a hat, long sleeves, full face mask, and gloves. People who have been heavily exposed to media coverage of a pandemic flu may perceive it to be more prevalent and risky than those who have not.

Other ways of misperceiving the frequency and magnitude of risks can occur due to individual characteristics. For example, many people believe that risks pose a less serious threat to themselves than they do to other people. Neil Weinstein identified this heuristic and named it as the optimistic bias or biased optimism. For example, smokers who have a strong optimistic bias are likely to believe that smoking behaviors pose risks to others but not to themselves.

People also perceive and evaluate risks based not only on how they think about them but also how they feel about them. Most people do not view cancer simply as a diseased area that grows out of malignant tumors that destroy surrounding tissues in the body. Instead, their perceptions of it are accompanied by feelings of dread, fear, and anticipated pain. This tendency is called the “affect heuristic,” which was proposed and researched by Paul Slovic and his associates. The affect heuristic explains that people use their emotions as heuristic cues. If a risk evokes in a more intense sense of dread, people are likely to perceive it as more threatening and more prevalent.

...