Investigating the operation of the affect heuristic: is it an associative construct?

Abstract

Affect is of central importance in risk perception and risky decision-making, and the affect heuristic is a very influential construct developed in relation to this. We examined whether this heuristic operates at an associative level of processing as, despite much theorising, empirical evidence on this issue is lacking. We compared affective heuristic task performance with performance on established implicit association tasks. Participants (n = 151) completed explicit attitude and risk measures, and five experimental tasks (three Go/No-Go Association Tasks (GNAT), a priming task and a time-pressured affect heuristic task). A modified ‘risk-benefit’ GNAT provided a speeded analogue of the affect heuristic task which was equivalent to the evaluative GNAT in terms of response mode and cognitive effort. Affect heuristic task performance was not associated with implicit task performance. The evaluative GNAT did not correlate with the risk-benefit GNAT (speeded affect heuristic task). However, affect heuristic task performance was strongly associated with, and significantly predicted by, explicit affective attitude and explicit risk measures suggesting that this heuristic may primarily reflect deliberative rather than associative processing. Findings contradict the (much cited) notion that this important psychological construct operates at an associative level. However, the conclusions that can be drawn from this study are limited by the implicit attitude measures used here. In future research, it would be desirable to use different measures of implicit associations, e.g. the Single-Category Implicit Association task, to further interrogate the processes operating within the affect heuristic.