Research in the area of risk perception has shown that people consistently underestimate common risks and overestimate rare ones. This tendency could have an undesirable effect on behavior in potentially hazardous situations. An imaging method was employed for the purpose of changing the perceived risk of a group of potential hazards. The hazards were coffee maker, lawn mower, pesticide, bicycle, power saw, toaster, asbestos, and swimming pool. Subjects sketched cartoons or scenarios of themselves having an accident involving each of a subgroup of the hazards. Subjects rated the risk of each hazard to themselves and estimated injury frequencies for the general population both before and after they sketched the accident scenario. They also rated the hazards on a variety of dimensions such as severity, plausibility, familiarity, imageability, etc. The results indicate that certain characteristics of the hazard determine how likely the risk perception is to change when accident scenarios are made cognitively available.