Risk perception - Observations and inferences

4 important questions on Risk perception - Observations and inferences

Studies that ask sufficiently clear questions to compare lay perceptions with expert analyses find a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. What are these?

  • Lay strength: people know roughly how often they have observed events, so much so that keeping a mental tally seems automatic and unconscious

Psychologists have two reasons for how people assess frequencies:

  • People remember events, then review these separate moments when they need a frequency estimate
  • People have a single memory for each kind of event, which gets stronger each time they see it, and they infer its frequency from the strength of that memory

What causes the patterns in figure 12?

  • Reliance on availability: people see more large risks happening than small ones, the media plays a big role in this.
  • Simulation heuristic: judging an event as likely if it is easy to imagine it happening
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What causes the anchoring bias?

  • Anchoring and adjustment: people start with a salient number, then think of reasons to adjust it, until they reach a value that seems right
  • Representatives heuristic: people judge an event as likely to the extent that it represents the salient features of the process that might produce it.
  • people fail to represent the quality of the evidence that they have
  • sample size

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

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