Risk Judgments Research Articles

Liking and perceived safety across judgments of distinct instances of a category of activity

Prior research on the affect heuristic demonstrated that the more a person likes an object or activity, the safer and more valuable it is judged to be. That relation was found when judging stimuli at the categorical level (e.g., nuclear power, airplane travel, heart surgery). Yet risk judgments and decisions usually pertain to specific instances of an object or activity rather than their categorical representations. We examined whether the relation between liking and perceived safety holds across multiple judgments of specific instances of an activity distinguished by contextual information. In four studies (N = 372), participants with domain-specific experience (backcountry skiers) completed multicue risk judgments under high uncertainty (judging the avalanche risk in backcountry skiing scenarios) and reported their degree of liking the scenarios. We demonstrate that the positive relation between liking and perceived safety holds across multiple judgments of specific instances of the activity. Furthermore, the liking-perceived safety relation (i.e., judging liked slopes to be safe, judging disliked slopes to be unsafe) held among backcountry skiers who like the activity and consider it safe at the categorical level. We discuss these findings from the perspective that contextual valence and perceived risk can dynamically diverge from categorical valence and perceived risk when perceiving specific instances of that category. These findings have implications for research on attitudes toward risk in extreme sports and other high-risk activities. Although it has been proposed that participants in extreme sports like risk and the thrill it provides, we found that backcountry skiers exhibit a healthy positive relation between liking and perceived safety when judging specific instances of skiing in avalanche terrain.

The Effects of Tone at the Top and Professional Skepticism on Fraud Risk Judgment Among Internal Auditors in Indonesia

Failure of the internal auditors (IAs) to appropriately apply fraud risk judgment could result in audit failure in revealing fraud and scandals. It leads to significant harmful consequences to the IAs’ profession. In carrying out their duties, IAs sometimes have to face top management pressure. Tone at the top becomes essential in creating an ideal working environment for the IAs. Moreover, the lack of professional skepticism has been one factor causing an auditor’s failure to achieve the optimal result in detecting fraud. The findings from 202 respondents revealed that the IAs who have high professional skepticism are more effective in making fraud risk judgments. However, the direct influence of the tone at the top on fraud risk judgment is not statistically supported. This new finding may help professional regulatory bodies and the internal auditing function consider the profile and its necessary environment to elevate fraud risk judgment to regain public trust in the profession.

Perception of Risk in Intimate Partner Violence Is Influenced by Risk Scales, Perpetrator and Victim Gender, and Mental Illness Diagnosis: A Risk Communication Study With Laypeople

Despite considerable research on the predictive accuracy of risk scales, there is limited research exploring other factors that influence perceptions of risk. We recruited participants (N = 1,955) from Amazon's Mechanical Turk to read a vignette about a fictional intimate partner violence offender, varying risk level on a fictional scale (low or high), perpetrator gender (cis male, cis female, or transgender female), victim gender (cis male or cis female), and mental health diagnosis (none, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or anxiety disorder). The strongest effect was for the risk scale, with offenders perceived as highest risk when the scale reported “high risk” as opposed to “low risk.” The other main effects were also statistically significant. Cases were perceived as riskier when the perpetrator was cis male or the victim was cis female. Regarding mental health diagnosis, the highest risk ratings were provided in the schizophrenia condition. There was also a significant interaction among risk level, perpetrator gender, and diagnosis. The extent to which participants relied on gendered stereotypes about the relationship between mental illness and violence when providing risk judgments should be examined in future research. Overall, these findings enhance our understanding of characteristics that are secondary to risk level but are likely to influence case management decisions in cases of intimate partner violence.

Do Animated Line Graphs Increase Risk Inferences?

This article shows that animated display of time-varying data (e.g., stock or commodity prices) enhances risk judgments. We outline a process whereby animated display enhances the visual salience of transitions in a trajectory (i.e., successive changes in data values), which leads to transitions being utilized more to form cognitive inferences about risk. In turn, this leads to inflated risk judgments. The studies reported in this article provide converging evidence via eye tracking (Study 1), serial mediation analyses (Studies 2 and 3), and experimental manipulations of transition salience (graph type; Study 3) and utilization of transitions (global trend; Study 4 and investment goals; Study 5) and, in the process, outline boundary conditions. The studies also demonstrate the effect of animated display on consequential investment decisions and behavior. This article adds to the literature on salience effects by disambiguating the role of inference making in how salience of stimuli causes biases in judgments. Broader implications for visual information processing, data visualization, financial decision making, and public policy are discussed.

Risk and protective factors for intuitive and rational judgment of cybersecurity risks in a large sample of K-12 students and teachers

K-12 students and teachers are a vulnerable population for cybersecurity risks. Identifying both risk factors and protective factors associated with intuitive and rational judgment of cybersecurity risks would help them develop strategies to tackle cyber risks. A total of 2703 K-12 students and teachers from 45 GenCyber Summer Camps participated in the survey study at the beginning of the camps, and a total of 1021 K-12 students and teachers participated in the follow-up survey at the end of the camps. The Cybersecurity Judgment Questionnaire was developed and administered to assess intuitive and rational judgments of cybersecurity risks. Two major findings of the study include: (1) three significant risk factors associated with both intuitive and rational cybersecurity judgment were Age Group, Region, and Prior GenCyber Camp Experience. That is, younger students, the campers from the West region, and participants attending the camps before tended to have a lower level of cybersecurity judgment; and (2) two significant protective factors were Cyber Use Length and Current GenCyber Camp Experience, i.e., the experiences of both using computers, Internet, cellphones and participating in the current camps having significant advantages in judging cybersecurity risks intuitively and rationally. Thus, it is critical to use both the push strategy to minimize the risk factors and the pull strategy to maximize the protective factors. It is concluded with a summary of limitations and future studies, i.e., replicating the findings in regular K-12 schools, examining more risk and protective factors, conducting longitudinal studies, and studying underlying mechanisms.

How do People Judge Risk? Availability may Upstage Affect in the Construction of Risk Judgments.

When making risk judgments, people rely on availability and affect as convenient heuristics. The two heuristics share many similarities and yet there have been no or few attempts to ascertain their causal impact on risk judgments. We present an experiment (N = 143) where we varied availability‐by‐recall (thinking of less or more occurrences of someone from one's social network dying) and the affective impact of certain risks (using images). We found that availability‐by‐recall had a stronger impact in constructing risk judgments. Asking people to think of more occurrences led to higher judgments of mortality and higher values placed on a single life, irrespective of changes in affect, risk media coverage, and retrieval time. Affect, however, was not disregarded. Our data suggest a causal mechanism where the retrieval of occurrences leads to changes in affect, which in turn, impact risk judgments. These findings increase understanding of how risk judgments are constructed with the potential to impact risk communication through direct manipulations of availability and affect. We discuss these and other implications of our findings.

How the COVID-19 pandemic influences judgments of risk and benefit: the role of negative emotions

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and its worldwide spread has an unprecedented impact on many people's daily life. As an external crisis event that is not going to end any time soon, will COVID-19 affect people’s risk judgment towards other risk items in daily life? The present study addresses this gap by examining the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on judgments of risk and benefit, and further exploring the underlying mechanisms. Three hundred and forty-nine participants were recruited and divided into two groups based on whether they were severely affected or mildly affected by COVID-19. The results showed that the severely affected group (vs. the mildly affected group) gave higher judgments of risk and lower judgments of benefit towards risk items such as “air travel” and “nuclear power plant,” and these effects were mediated by the COVID-19-induced negative emotions (fear and anxiety). This study suggests that the adverse effects brought from one external crisis event (e.g., the current COVID-19 pandemic) will spill over and interfere with the judgment of the decision-maker on other routine matters through negative emotions.

Radiation therapy for uveal melanoma: a review of treatment methods available in 2021.

Radiation therapy has become the standard of care for the treatment of uveal melanoma. We intend to outline the current radiation therapy methods that are employed to treat uveal melanoma. We will outline their relative benefits over one another. We will also provide some background about radiation therapy in general to accustom the ophthalmologists likely reading this review. Four main options exist for radiation therapy of uveal melanoma. Because the eye is a small space, and because melanomas are relatively radioresistant, oncologists treating uveal melanoma must deliver highly focused doses in high amounts to a small space. Therapies incorporating external beams include proton beam therapy and stereotactic radiosurgery. Stereotactic radiosurgery comes in two forms, gamma knife therapy and cyberknife therapy. Radiation may also be placed directly on the eye surgically via plaque brachytherapy. All methods have been used effectively to treat uveal melanoma. Each particular radiotherapy technique employed to treat uveal melanoma has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. The ocular oncologist can choose amongst these therapies based upon his or her clinical judgment of the relative risks and benefits. Availability of the therapy and cost to the patient remain significant factors in the ocular oncologist's choice.

Acceptance of energy technologies in context: Comparing laypeople's risk perceptions across eight infrastructure technologies in Germany

In Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU), CO2 captured from industrial processes replaces fossil feedstock used to produce of a variety of products, e.g., plastic products, fuels, or minerals. The roll-out of CCU will depend on the public's acceptance and risk perception. Whereas past studies exclusively focused on CCU risk perception, this study (n = 266) compared CCU to seven other infrastructure technologies (fossil, nuclear, renewable energies) to put the perceived CCU risks into perspective.The risk perception for CCU was higher than it was for renewables, but lower compared to conventional energy technologies. User factors had limited influence on the risk perception: the perceived risks of CCU were not affected by people's general risk orientation. Instead, risk judgments were guided by the risk evaluations of renewable and conventional energy technologies, indicating that CCU was “neither fish nor fowl” for laypeople. This lack of familiarity with CCU highlights the need for communication concepts which clarify the role of CCU for climate and resource protection.

Impact of ambient sound on risk perception in humans: neuroeconomic investigations

Research in the field of multisensory perception shows that what we hear can influence what we see in a wide range of perceptual tasks. It is however unknown whether this extends to the visual perception of risk, despite the importance of the question in many applied domains where properly assessing risk is crucial, starting with financial trading. To fill this knowledge gap, we ran interviews with professional traders and conducted three laboratory studies using judgments of financial asset risk as a testbed. We provide evidence that the presence of ambient sound impacts risk perception, possibly due to the combination of facilitatory and synesthetic effects of general relevance to the perception of risk in many species as well as humans. We discuss the implications of our findings for various applied domains (e.g., financial, medical, and military decision-making), and raise new questions for future research.

The Safe pilot study: A prospective naturalistic study with repeated measures design to test the psychosis - violence link in and after discharge from forensic facilities

The research evidence is very strong for high recidivism rates of violence after discharge from forensic facilities. Big data research has found that a substantial proportion of the forensic population with relapse into violence has a psychosis diagnosis and a criminal record. However, more research on the association between psychotic symptoms and violence may inform and enhance risk assessment, prevention, and treatment. We conducted a prospective naturalistic study with a repeated measures design in a sample of 22 psychotic patients during follow-up after discharge from forensic mental health facilities. We had three aims: to test the predictive validity of three psychotic symptom scales for violence, to analyze main and interaction effects between psychotic symptoms and previous criminal conviction, and to explore the feasibility and potential benefit of the repeated measures design for prospective follow-up research. Interpreted within the limitation of the small sample size, the results were promising for all scales, particularly for adjusted effects without interaction. Two scales remained significant when their interaction with criminal conviction was adjusted. This indicates that risk judgment of psychotic patients with criminal conviction can be improved by adding measurement of fluctuations in psychotic symptoms. The repeated measures design was instrumental in this research.

Assessment of Suicidal Intent in Self-directed Violence and Subsequent Care Received Among Military Veterans: A National Study of Gender Differences.

The Veterans Health Administration's system for documenting self-directed violence (SDV) requires that clinicians make a determination of the suicidal intent of the behavior (ie, "undetermined" intent vs. "suicide attempt") which contributes to the enhanced care offered. Past studies suggest clinicians' judgment of suicide risk is impacted by patient demographics regardless of clinical presentation. As women are less likely to die by suicide than men, women's SDV may be taken less seriously; they may be more likely to have their SDV classified as "undetermined" than men, which may impact the care received. This study examines whether women veterans' SDV is disproportionately classified as "undetermined" suicidal intent versus "suicide attempt" as compared with men veterans, and how one's classification and gender modifies the care received. This was an observational, retrospective study of data from Veterans Health Administration administrative databases. We included all veterans with documented nonfatal "undetermined" SDV events and "suicide attempts" between 2013 and 2018 (N=55,878). Objectives were evaluated using mixed-effects logistic regression models. Women veterans were disproportionately more likely than men veterans to have SDV classified as "undetermined" (odds ratio=1.17; 95% confidence interval, 1.08-1.27). Veterans who received an "undetermined" classification were significantly less likely to receive enhanced care. However, this relationship was not moderated by gender. Gender may impact clinicians' determinations of intent of SDV, but more research is needed on the extent of classification biases and to understand causes. Further, classification of intent is critical, as there is a strong relationship between classification and enhanced care.

Taking "the boss" into the real world: Field interrater reliability of the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability: Adolescent Version.

There is emerging evidence that the performance of risk assessment instruments is weaker when used for clinical decision‐making than for research purposes. For instance, research has found lower agreement between evaluators when the risk assessments are conducted during routine practice. We examined the field interrater reliability of the Short‐Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability: Adolescent Version (START:AV). Clinicians in a Dutch secure youth care facility completed START:AV assessments as part of the treatment routine. Consistent with previous literature, interrater reliability of the items and total scores was lower than previously reported in non‐field studies. Nevertheless, moderate to good interrater reliability was found for final risk judgments on most adverse outcomes. Field studies provide insights into the actual performance of structured risk assessment in real‐world settings, exposing factors that affect reliability. This information is relevant for those who wish to implement structured risk assessment with a level of reliability that is defensible considering the high stakes.

Is it Worth the Regret? Deciding to Engage in Employee Voice

The current study integrated emotion, specifically anticipated regret, into the decision process for employee voice. As a cognitively mediated emotion, anticipated regret is unique from previously studied voice factors (i.e., motivators and inhibitors) that influence risk judgments and voice decisions. Two studies utilizing an experimental moderated mediation design was used to examine the indirect influence of risk on voice intent through both anticipated voice and silence regret. In both studies, high-risk voice situations led to higher anticipated voice regret, lower anticipated silence regret, and decreased intent to voice compared with low-risk situations. Anticipated regret for engaging in voice was found to mediate the relationship between risk and voice intent in both studies, and also exhibited a significantly stronger indirect effect. This indicates that employees differentially weigh the two types of anticipated regret, especially for situations with greater risk. These findings were consistent across two voice scenarios and two samples, illustrating its robustness to different workplace contexts. Importantly, our study indicates that judgments of risk influence an employee’s anticipated emotions, leading to regret-averse behavior. In contrast to previous research, this study demonstrated that emotion-based factors do not always lead to rash or irrational decision-making. Instead, anticipated regret was integrated into the traditional, utility-based voice calculation and allowed individuals to augment their voice decisions by anticipating and acting upon their desired emotional outcomes. By jointly considering traditional voice factors and anticipated emotions, we provide a novel pathway for organizations to understand employee voice and silence.

Factors Affecting Kinetics and Gel Composition of Alkali–Silica Reaction in Alkali-Activated Slag Mortars

Alkali activation of metallurgical slags produces low-carbon cementitious binders for sustainable concrete production. However, the potential deleterious reaction of internal alkalis in alkali-activated slag (AAS) with siliceous aggregates is a serious durability concern. In this work, the alkali–silica reaction (ASR) in alkali-activated ground granulated blast furnace slag mortars with various activator dosages and types, aggregate reactivity, as well as incorporation of pulverized fly ash or silica fume is studied. The ASR-induced length expansion and microstructural damage in AAS mortars are studied by a modified accelerated mortar bar test and scanning electron microscopy with X-ray energy-dispersive spectroscopy. The results show that the kinetics of ASR-induced damage, as well as the gel composition and spatial distribution, in AAS mortars is highly dependent on the alkali dosage, activator type, and aggregate reactivity. The ASR-induced length expansion is approximately proportional to the volumetric fraction of dissolved glassy aggregates. However, AAS mortars show noticeable autogenous shrinkage at the initial stage of immersion, making the conventional judgment of ASR risks using length expansion as the sole indicator invalid. The dissolution kinetics of aggregate, which is influenced by the level of alkalinity and availability of reactive silica, seems to be the rate-limiting reaction of ASR-induced damage in AAS mortars under accelerated testing conditions.

Publicness and micro-level risk behaviour: experimental evidence on stereotypical discounting behaviour

ABSTRACT Anti-public stereotypes suggest that public agents are more likely to shun risk and tolerate delay vis-à-vis private agents. Based on context dependency of administrative behaviour, this study reports experimental evidence from 22,800 choice tasks exploring the effects of publicness as a mental frame for individual risk judgement. Decision makers are not automatically triggered to deviate from predicted economic discounting behaviour when switching from a public to a private sector context. However, public sector employees in this sample systematically overestimate risks and tolerate delay in rewards compared with the general population, tentatively linking public sector affiliation with biases in risk behaviour.

Research on Intelligent Perception and Cognitive Computing of Information Security System Based on Computer Big Data

Since the 21st century, the development of network technology has entered a new stage, and mankind has gradually entered the era of big data with information explosion. Computer big data technology has changed people’s lifestyles. People can obtain information and materials without going out to provide convenience for people’s lives. But it is affected in many ways, but we will also encounter some difficulties in the process of using it. Informatization has had a profound impact on many areas of human social life. Especially in the context of global informationization, the information security (IS) problems encountered by China at this stage are more prominent and obvious than ever before. IS issues have also become a hot topic for many scholars to pay attention to and study. Informatization has gradually penetrated into every aspect of daily production work. However, the flow of enterprise informatization has made the public suffer from IS problems while improving office efficiency. This paper analyzes the shortcomings of current enterprise IS situation awareness; studies the construction of enterprise IS situation awareness system through big data technology, artificial intelligence algorithm, and threat intelligence technology; and puts forward the enterprise level IS situation awareness system model, situation awareness system, architecture, and specific implementation method. After analyzing the system design and deployment, the threats to corporate IS can be discovered in a more timely manner, and based on risk judgment and threat tracking, the company’s detection capabilities against security threats and security attacks can be improved, and effective security incident handling can be provided. Supported by technical means, the security situational awareness system will bring different protection and prevention to our enterprise.

Editorial – Managing Risk in Uncertain Times

In February 2021 Jon Hilton (AIM ST4 doctor) published a tweet asking about how the Acute Medicine community can best address potential applicant’s fears of dealing with clinical risk. ​(1)​ Appraising and managing risk is at the core of acute medical clinical practice; we treat patients in the first crucial 24 hours of their hospital journey, when the clinical status is changeable, and the clinical trajectory not yet established. We make judgement calls about medical treatment, but also about whether a patient can be safely discharged home, and this often causes anxiety amongst less experienced clinicians: how do you make that call? Dealing with risk can be tricky to teach. It is a skill that stands on two legs: one leg is data and the other is clinical experience. As the pandemic intensified, Acute Medicine’s role as front door risk managers became more important than ever before. We displayed massive amounts of creativity and initiative to develop pathways and processes to ensure patients were followed up at home. But we were still operating with many unknown variables and did not yet have the experience nor the data required to make the crucial risk calculations and judgement calls that forms the heart of our working practice. Long before we began to recognise patterns in our patients in their diseases, and before we began to create a new language to describe and communicate what we were seeing – the ‘happy hypoxic’ and the ‘day-10 wobble’ – we operated in a form of darkness, making the best decisions we could. One year and two COVID-19 peaks later, we are better able to make nuanced decisions about patient risk, and reach collaborative plans with our patients, as the international COVD-19 academic library grows and elaborates. In this issue Azijli et al ​(2)​ present the findings of the COVERED trial, which establishes a validated model that predicts poor outcomes in patients in the Emergency Department. This model is a tool that can help power our risk perception and clinical decision-making on the medical take. Deciding whether to thrombolyse an acute pulmonary embolism is another exercise in risk management. Weighing the risk of death from obstructive shock against death from haemorrhage, whilst remaining mindful of the longterm cardiopulmonary sequel of an untreated high-risk PE. Apsey et al ​(3)​ followed up patients with massive and sub-massive emboli who received emergency thrombolytic therapy and favour an acute thrombolysis strategy in their conclusion. This is a small study, but provides some substrate for reflection: how do we perceive the risks of thrombolysis in out own institutions, and how does the effect our patient care? It is not uncommon for physicians to be given a troponin results that they did not want nor request, but must now square away with their assessment and evaluation of a patient. Most of us shrink away from the descriptor ‘troponin-positive chest pain’ as a not-quite diagnosis, but when we have ruled out acute myocardial infarction, what conditions remain under this umbrella term? Hansen et al ​(4)​ describe the common conditions that lead to elevated troponin levels, and – crucially – tell us about these patients’ outcomes. Their paper shows us that patients with a high troponin, without an acute MI, have a very high mortality. This brings us back to risk: how do we keep these patients safe? The pandemic has brought dramatic changes into our clinical and personal lives. Our trainee doctors have undergone rapid redeployments to new work environments. They often moved from low-risk to high-risk COVID-19 environments with very little notice. Some of them became very sick with COVID-19. They have had expensive and mandatory examinations cancelled. Many have been left with uncertain futures, not knowing if they will be able to progress with their training programmes as anticipated. Aziminia et al ​(5)​ have captured their voice in this issue, and make suggestions toward helping trainees navigate this incredibly uncertain period in their medical careers.

A Novel Financial Risk Identification Algorithm for Online Fintech Platform

The issues we study are risk identification, credit granting, pre-loan and post-loan lending risks in consumer lending and trust loans. How to effectively evaluate and identify the potential default risk of borrowers and calculate the probability of default of borrowers before granting loans is a fundamental part of credit risk management in modern financial institutions. This paper focuses on the statistical analysis of historical loan data from banks and other financial institutions with the help of the idea of non-equilibrium data classification, and the use of the random forest algorithm to establish a loan default prediction model. Then a fixed threshold screening in the form of a black and white list is used. The limitation of the current method is that it cannot meet the lending needs of large-scale transaction classes and cannot be judged quickly. When the number of decision trees in a random forest is large, the space and time required for training are large. In addition, it is insensitive to data and has low accuracy. The experiments found that the machine learning-based financial lending risk prediction method can solve the problem better, and the experimental results phenotyped that the neural network and random forest algorithm outperformed the decision tree and logistic regression classification algorithm in prediction performance. In addition, by using the random forest algorithm to rank the importance of features, the features that have a greater impact on whether the final default can be obtained, so that the lending risk judgment in the financial sector can be more effective.

Money laundering risk judgement and decision-making: influences of customer due diligence process and bank employees' expertise

This study examines the influence of customer due diligence (CDD) process and bank employees' expertise on their judgement and decision making when assessing money laundering risk. The authors utilised an experimental approach where a case-based questionnaire was gathered from 122 employees in three major banks in Malaysia. Results indicated a significant relationship between the extent of the CDD process with bank employees' judgement and decision-making in assessing money laundering risk. This relationship is moderated by employees expertise, which indicates that it is crucial for the right employees with suitable qualifications to be employed as CDD process can be done better with enhanced articulation and informed judgement. The findings could provide useful insights into the judgement capabilities of bank employees with reference to the rigorousness of the CDD process and their expertise in assessing risk.