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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Efendic E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9292208 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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

Efendić Emir E

Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis 20210324 11

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 imp ...[more]

PMID: 33761146

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Project description:How humans visually select where to grasp objects is determined by the physical object properties (e.g., size, shape, weight), the degrees of freedom of the arm and hand, as well as the task to be performed. We recently demonstrated that human grasps are near-optimal with respect to a weighted combination of different cost functions that make grasps uncomfortable, unstable, or impossible, e.g., due to unnatural grasp apertures or large torques. Here, we ask whether humans can consciously access these rules. We test if humans can explicitly judge grasp quality derived from rules regarding grasp size, orientation, torque, and visibility. More specifically, we test if grasp quality can be inferred (i) by using visual cues and motor imagery alone, (ii) from watching grasps executed by others, and (iii) through performing grasps, i.e., receiving visual, proprioceptive and haptic feedback. Stimuli were novel objects made of 10 cubes of brass and wood (side length 2.5 cm) in various configurations. On each object, one near-optimal and one sub-optimal grasp were selected based on one cost function (e.g., torque), while the other constraints (grasp size, orientation, and visibility) were kept approximately constant or counterbalanced. Participants were visually cued to the location of the selected grasps on each object and verbally reported which of the two grasps was best. Across three experiments, participants were required to either (i) passively view the static objects and imagine executing the two competing grasps, (ii) passively view videos of other participants grasping the objects, or (iii) actively grasp the objects themselves. Our results show that, for a majority of tested objects, participants could already judge grasp optimality from simply viewing the objects and imagining to grasp them, but were significantly better in the video and grasping session. These findings suggest that humans can determine grasp quality even without performing the grasp-perhaps through motor imagery-and can further refine their understanding of how to correctly grasp an object through sensorimotor feedback but also by passively viewing others grasp objects.

Dataset Information

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

Publications

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

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