Abstract
Heat waves can cause death, illness, and discomfort, and are expected to become more frequent as a result of climate change. Yet, United Kingdom residents have positive feelings about hot summers that may undermine their willingness to protect themselves against heat. We randomly assigned United Kingdom participants to 1 of 3 intervention strategies intended to promote heat protection, or to a control group. The first strategy aimed to build on the availability heuristic by asking participants to remember high summer temperatures, but it elicited thoughts of pleasantly hot summer weather. The second strategy aimed to build on the affect heuristic by evoking negative affect about summer temperatures, but it evoked thoughts of unpleasantly cold summer weather. The third strategy combined these 2 approaches and succeeded in evoking thoughts of unpleasantly hot summer weather. Across 2 experiments, the third (combined) strategy increased participants’ expressed intentions to protect against heat compared with the control group, while performing at least as well as the 2 component strategies. We discuss implications for developing interventions about other “pleasant hazards.”
Highlights
Promoting protection against a threat that evokes positive affect: The case of heat waves in the UK
We relied on behavioral decision research to promote heat protection intentions
Experiment 2 partly replicated the findings from Experiments 1, with the overall pattern of findings suggesting that reducing positive affect about heat can improve UK residents’ intentions to protect against heat
Summary
Promoting protection against a threat that evokes positive affect: The case of heat waves in the UK. UK residents with risk factors for adverse health effects saw heat protection recommendations as unnecessary because they did not see themselves as being at-risk (Abrahamson, Wolf, Lorenzoni, Fenn, Kovats, Wilkinson, Adger, & Raine, 2009; Wolf, Adger, Lorenzoni, Abrahamson, & Raine, 2010). Behavioral decision research posits that people use heuristics to make judgments about the riskiness of events and the need for protection (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Slovic et al, 2004). The first aimed to invoke the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), by increasing the salience of experiences with hot weather. The second strategy aimed to build on the affect heuristic (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004), and was designed to increase negative feelings about hot weather. Separately and jointly, the usefulness of invoking these heuristics for promoting heat protection behaviors
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