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When making decisions involving risk, people may learn about the risk from descriptions or from experience. The description-experience gap refers to the difference in decision patterns driven by this discrepancy in learning format. Across two experiments, we investigated whether learning from description versus experience differentially affects the direction and the magnitude of a context effect in risky decision making. In Study 1 and 2, a computerized game called the Decisions about Risk Task (DART) was used to measure people’s risk-taking tendencies toward hazard stimuli that exploded probabilistically. The rate at which a context hazard caused harm was manipulated, while the rate at which a focal hazard caused harm was held constant. The format by which this information was learned was also manipulated; it was learned primarily by experience or by description. The results revealed that participants’ behavior toward the focal hazard varied depending on what they had learned about the context hazard. Specifically, there were contrast effects in which participants were more likely to choose a risky behavior toward the focal hazard when the harm rate posed by the context hazard was high rather than low. Critically, these contrast effects were of similar strength irrespective of whether the risk information was learned from experience or description. Participants’ verbal assessments of risk likelihood also showed contrast effects, irrespective of learning format. Although risk information about a context hazard in DART does nothing to affect the objective expected value of risky versus safe behaviors toward focal hazards, it did affect participants’ perceptions and behaviors—regardless of whether the information was learned from description or experience. Our findings suggest that context has a broad-based role in how people assess and make decisions about hazards.

The biasing influence of anchors on numerical estimates is well established, but the relationship between knowledge level and the susceptibility to anchoring effects is less clear. In two studies, we addressed the potential mitigating effects of having knowledge in a domain on vulnerability to anchoring effects in that domain. Of critical interest was a distinction between two forms of knowledge—metric and mapping knowledge. In Study 1, participants who had studied question-relevant information—that is, high-knowledge participants—were less influenced by anchors than were participants who had studied irrelevant information. The results from knowledge measures suggested that the reduction in anchoring was tied to increases in metric rather than mapping knowledge. In Study 2, participants studied information specifically designed to influence different types of knowledge. As we predicted, increases in metric knowledge—and not mapping knowledge—led to reduced anchoring effects. Implications for debiasing anchoring effects are discussed.

People often use tools for tasks, and sometimes there is uncertainty about whether a given task can be completed with a given tool. This project explored whether, when, and how people’s optimism about successfully completing a task with a given tool is affected by the contextual salience of a better or worse tool. In six studies, participants were faced with novel tasks. For each task, they were assigned a tool but also exposed to a comparison tool that was better or worse in utility (or sometimes similar in utility). In some studies, the tool comparisons were essentially social comparisons, because the tool was assigned to another person. In other studies, the tool comparisons were merely counterfactual rather than social. The studies revealed contrast effects on optimism, and the effect worked in both directions. That is, worse comparison tools boosted optimism and better tools depressed optimism. The contrast effects were observed regardless of the general type of comparison (e.g., social, counterfactual). The comparisons also influenced discrete decisions about which task to attempt (for a prize), which is an important finding for ruling out superficial scaling explanations for the contrast effects. It appears that people fail to exclude irrelevant tool-comparison information from consideration when assessing their likelihood of success on a task, resulting in biased optimism and decisions.

Abstract Risk perception is an important construct in many health behavior theories. Smoking risk perceptions are thoughts and feelings about the harms associated with cigarette smoking. Wide variation in the terminology, definition, and assessment of this construct makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the associations of risk perceptions with smoking behaviors. To understand optimal methods of assessing adults’ cigarette smoking risk perceptions (among both smokers and nonsmokers), we reviewed best practices from the tobacco control literature, and where gaps were identified, we looked more broadly to the research on risk perceptions in other health domains. Based on this review, we suggest assessments of risk perceptions (1) about multiple smoking-related health harms, (2) about harms over a specific timeframe, and (3) for the person affected by the harm. For the measurement of perceived likelihood in particular (ie, the perceived chance of harm from smoking based largely on deliberative thought), we suggest including (4) unconditional and conditional items (stipulating smoking behavior) and (5) absolute and comparative items and including (6) comparisons to specific populations through (7) direct and indirect assessments. We also suggest including (8) experiential (ostensibly automatic, somatic perceptions of vulnerability to a harm) and affective (emotional reactions to a potential harm) risk perception items. We also offer suggestions for (9) response options and (10) the assessment of risk perception at multiple time points. Researchers can use this resource to inform the selection, use, and future development of smoking risk perception measures. Implications Incorporating the measurement suggestions for cigarette smoking risk perceptions that are presented will help researchers select items most appropriate for their research questions and will contribute to greater consistency in the assessment of smoking risk perceptions among adults.

Assessing perceived vulnerability to a health threat is essential to understanding how people conceptualize their risk, and to predicting how likely they are to engage in protective behaviors. However, there is limited consensus about which of many measures of perceived vulnerability predict behavior best. We tested whether the ability of different measures to predict protective intentions varies as a function of the type of information people learn about their risk. Online participants (N = 909) read information about a novel respiratory disease before answering measures of perceived vulnerability and vaccination intentions. Type-of-risk information was varied across three between-participant groups. Participants learned either: (1) only information about their comparative standing on the primary risk factors (comparative-only), (2) their comparative standing as well as the base-rate of the disease in the population (+ base-rate), or (3) their comparative standing as well as more specific estimates of their absolute risk (+ absolute-chart). Experiential and affective measures of perceived vulnerability predicted protective intentions well regardless of how participants learned about their risk, while the predictive ability of deliberative numeric and comparative measures varied based on the type of risk information provided. These results broaden the generalizability of key prior findings (i.e., some prior findings about which measures predict best may apply no matter how people learn about their risk), but the results also reveal boundary conditions and critical points of distinction for determining how to best assess perceived vulnerability.

People must often perform calculations in order to produce a numeric estimate (e.g., a grocery-store shopper estimating the total price of his or her shopping cart contents). The current studies were designed to test whether estimates based on calculations are influenced by comparisons with irrelevant anchors. Previous research has demonstrated that estimates across a wide range of contexts assimilate toward anchors, but none has examined estimates based on calculations. In two studies, we had participants compare the answers to math problems with anchors. In both studies, participants’ estimates assimilated toward the anchor values. This effect was moderated by time limit such that the anchoring effects were larger when the participants’ ability to engage in calculations was limited by a restrictive time limit.

When judging their likelihood of success in competitive tasks, people tend to be overoptimistic for easy tasks and overpessimistic for hard tasks (the shared circumstance effect; SCE). Previous research has shown that feedback and experience from repeated-play competitions has a limited impact on SCEs. However, in this paper, we suggest that competitive situations, in which the shared difficulty or easiness of the task is more transparent, will be more amenable to debiasing via repeated play. Pairs of participants competed in, made predictions about, and received feedback on, multiple rounds of a throwing task involving both easy- and hard-to-aim objects. Participants initially showed robust SCEs, but they also showed a significant reduction in bias after only one round of feedback. These and other results support a more positive view (than suggested from past research) on the potential for SCEs to be debiased through outcome feedback.

People have more information about themselves than others do, and this fundamental asymmetry can help to explain why individuals have difficulty accurately intuiting how they appear to other people. Determining how one appears to observers requires one to utilize public information that is available to observers, but to disregard private information that they do not possess. We report a series of experiments, however, showing that people utilize privately known information about their own past performance (Experiments 1 and 2), the performance of other people (Experiment 3), and imaginary performance (Experiment 4) when intuiting how they are viewed by others. This tendency can help explain why people's beliefs about how they are judged by others often diverge from how they are actually judged.

A standard method for assessing whether people have appropriate internal representations of an event's likelihood is to check whether their subjective probability or frequency estimates for the event correspond with the assumed objective value for that event. When a person's estimate for the event exceeds its assumed objective probability or frequency, the person's expectancy for the event is concluded to be greater than warranted. This paper describes three lines of reasoning as to why conclusions of this sort can be problematic. Recently published findings as well as data from two new experiments are described to support this main thesis. The case of smoking risk is used to illustrate the more general problem, and issues that must be considered to avoid or contend with the problem are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.