Journal
PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 17, Issue 3, Pages 631-651Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/17456916211026896
Keywords
description-experience gap; information sampling; probability weighting; risk behavior; risk communication; risk perception
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The modern world is filled with risks that can be learned through consulting symbolic and descriptive material or through personal experience. The fluidity of risks and cognitive impact of individuals play important roles in how risks are learned and responded to.
The modern world holds countless risks for humanity, both large-scale and intimately personal-from cyberwarfare, pandemics, and climate change to sexually transmitted diseases and drug use and abuse. Many risks have prompted institutional, regulatory, and technological countermeasures, the success of which depends to some extent on how individuals learn about the risks in question. We distinguish between two powerful but imperfect teachers of risk. First, people may learn by consulting symbolic and descriptive material, such as warnings, statistics, and images. More often than not, however, a risk's fluidity defies precise description. Second, people may learn about risks through personal experience. Responses to risk can differ systematically depending on whether people learn through one mode, both, or neither. One reason for these differences-and by no means the only reason-is the discrepancy in the cognitive impact that rare events (typically the risk event) and common events (typically the nonoccurrence of the risk event) have on the decision maker. We propose a description-experience framework that highlights not only the impact of each mode of learning but also the effects of their interplay on individuals' and collectives' responses to risk. We outline numerous research questions and themes suggested by this framework.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available