Scenarios Debriefing
The study you just completed examines reasoning and decision making. In
particular, it focuses on risk perception. If you look up risk perception on the web-based
encyclopedia, Wikipedia, you would find that risk perception involves people’s subjective
judgments about risks. It commonly refers to views of financial propositions, saftety
threats, health hazards, and environmental damage. A big question concerns how people
think about harm and benefit and how they use this to guide their decisions.
Who pioneered risk perception research? Two huge people are Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic
sciences for his pioneering psychometric work with the late Amos Tversky. One of their
early studies looked at gambling. They were interested in how people evaluate monetary
gains and loss probabilities. They found that people often use heuristics, or shortcuts, to
evaluate information. For example,

People tend to make judgements based on what comes to mind most
clearly. This is called the availability heuristic.

When people make monetary win-loss decisions, losses loom larger than
gains. They tend to be risk averse regarding gains (preferring a certain
gain over a large-gain/no-gain risk) but risk-seeking regarding losses
(preferring to keep what they have rathar than a taking a sure, but smaller,
loss). This is called the gain-loss asymmetry.

In addition, framing heuristics affect people’s choices. Contexual
information guides the way that people think through and solve problems.
In short, heuristics often provide useful shortcuts for thinking, but such shortcuts can
sometimes lead to inaccurate judgments and systematic biases.
A lot of research focuses on how people take mental shortcuts that do not jive with
basic probability. Work by Paul Slovic and others shows that both analytic and
experiential factors influence risk perceptions and decision making. According to Slovic:
The “analytic system” uses algorithms and normative rules, such as probability
calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It is relatively slow, effortful, and
requires conscious control. The “experiential system” is intuitive, fast, mostly
automatic, and not very accessible to conscious awareness. The experiential
system enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution and
remains today the most natural and most common way to respond to risk. It relies
on images and associations, linked by experience to emotion and affect (a feeling
that something is good or bad). This system represents risk as a feeling that tells us
whether it is safe to walk down this dark street or drink this strange-smelling water.
Proponents of formal risk analysis tend to view affective responses to risk as
irrational. Current wisdom disputes this view. The rational and the experiential
systems operate in parallel and each seems to depend on the other for guidance.
Studies suggest that analysis-based and experience-based decision making each have
advantages, biases, and limitations. When used together, they may balance each other
and promote particularly adaptive problem solving.
How can integrated decision making, or affective rationality, inform novel
approaches to risk management? One approach involves using affective rationality to
promote accurate risk assessment. Purely emotional processes reflect an affect heuristic
that can introduce biased assessments in some circumstances. For example, risks and
benefits tend to be positively correlated in the world, suggesting that many situations
have both harm and benefit potential. However, people’s judgments of a situation’s risk
and benefit are generally negatively correlated, reflecting dicotomous viewpoints. This
may reflect the fact that people often associate negative emotions with risky situations
and positive emotions with beneficial situations.
So how can we promote more balanced assessments of risky situations? One
approach may be to integrate systematic empirical analysis with experiential affective
information. Such an approach appears critical in some situations like helping cancer
patients to make treatment decisions. On the one hand, decisions can be driven by the
emotional intensity of the situation. On the other hand, it is hard to integrate statistical
data to make informed choices. Statistical information about health risks and benefits
may have little meaning or utility (i.e., systematic biases persist) unless the information
makes an affective connection in the patient. The research can help us to understand
basic risk perception processes and to facilitate practial applications, such as health
counseling and adovocacy.
The Scenarios Study
The current study explores the impact of analytic and experiential contextual
frames on risk perception. The guiding hypothesis is that affective rationality, or
systematic empiricism guided by an affective context, facilitates adaptive choices and
decreases biased risk perception. This perspective suggests that participants may best
be able to assess risk and perceive safety needs when they can use both
analytic/statistical information as well as experiential/affective processes.
The study includes four different versions of the scenarios. They provide different
contextual frames for the target vignette.
 The No-Frame version includes target vignettes without a contextual frame.
 The Analytic-Frame version includes the target vingnettes along with statistical risk
information.
 The Experiential-Frame version includes the target vingnettes along with vivid,
affect-laden scenarios with implied antecedents.
 The Analytic+Experiential-Frame version includes both the statistical information
and the affect-laden scenarios.
All participants make ratings reflecting risk and protective tendencies. In addition,
everyone completes some exploratory questionnaires. The main prediction is that the risk
perception ratings will differ in relation to the contextual frame. In particular, participants
who use both analytic/statistical data and experiential/affective information may make the
most adaptive choices and show the least biased risk perceptions. They may also more
clearly perceive the need for safty precautions in highly risky situations.
Please note that we will be collecting data from other students during the coming
week and a half, and so you should not discuss the study with others during this time.
Thank you for participating!