Affect Heuristic with “Good-Bad” Criterion and Linguistic Representation in Risk Judgments

Abstract

Rational and normative risk judgments are made based on information on a risk object’s advantages and disadvantages, although many studies show that everyday heuristic risk judgment tends to be made based on limited information. I focused on the fact that affective heuristic (Slovic et al., 2004), one of the heuristic risk judgments, was affective judgment under “good-bad” criterion due to a trade-off in the perception of dangers and benefits, and showed by a social survey that female undergraduates in Japan and Eastern and Western Europe used the affect heuristic for various risk objects. In other words, an analysis of survey results on risk types perceived by female undergraduates inOsaka, London, Ljubljana, and Budapest showed that risk objects such as automobile driving, airplane travel, nuclear power plant, extremist group, and tobacco smoking were perceived as high-risk and low-return (Type 2) or low-risk and high-return (Type 3) [Study 1]. According to a tobacco smoking linguistic representation mail survey among university graduates of 24 to 71 years old in Japan, nonsmokers had relatively many adjectival and verbal linguistic representatives for tobacco smoking. This shows that affective risk judgment with a “good-bad” criterion was made by persons who perceived the risk object useless and the risk was taken involuntarily. [Study 2].