Abstract
Recent research has documented that affect plays a crucial role in risk perception. When no information about numerical risk estimates is available (e.g., probability of loss or magnitude of consequences), people may rely on positive and negative affect toward perceived risk. However, determinants of affective reactions to risks are poorly understood. In a series of three experiments, we addressed the question of whether and to what degree mental imagery eliciting negative affect and stress influences risk perception. In each experiment, participants were instructed to visualize consequences of risk taking and to rate riskiness. In Experiment 1, participants who imagined negative risk consequences reported more negative affect and perceived risk as higher compared to the control condition. In Experiment 2, we found that this effect was driven by affect elicited by mental imagery rather than its vividness and intensity. In this study, imagining positive risk consequences led to lower perceived risk than visualizing negative risk consequences. Finally, we tested the hypothesis that negative affect related to higher perceived risk was caused by negative feelings of stress. In Experiment 3, we introduced risk-irrelevant stress to show that participants in the stress condition rated perceived risk as higher in comparison to the control condition. This experiment showed that higher ratings of perceived risk were influenced by psychological stress. Taken together, our results demonstrate that affect-laden mental imagery dramatically changes risk perception through negative affect (i.e., psychological stress).
Highlights
Almost every day people face dilemmas, in which they have to decide about accepting or rejecting risk
We found that imagining negative risk consequences increased both negative affect, a = 0.78, p = 0.015, and risk perception, c = 0.64, p = 0.005
We found that there were no differences between the experimental and control conditions in recalling risky situations which suggests that differences in risk perception were due to mental imagery, and not task involvement
Summary
Almost every day people face dilemmas, in which they have to decide about accepting or rejecting risk. Loewenstein et al (2001, 270) postulated in their riskas-feelings model that “responses to risky situations (including decision making) result in part from direct (i.e., not cortically mediated) emotional influences, including feelings such as worry, fear, dread, or anxiety.”. A more direct empirical test of the risk-as-feelings hypothesis and its assumption that mental visualizations play an important role in risk perception and risk acceptance has recently been provided by Traczyk et al (2015) These authors showed in a series of experiments that imagining negative consequences of risk elicits negative affect and feelings of stress, which in turn decrease people’s willingness to engage in a risky behavior. Experiment 3 revealed that even incidental stress might have an impact on risk perception
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