RC3 - Emotional perspective (keyterms, mp + scenario questions)

What is the affect heuristic?

A mental shortcut where people use their overall positive or negative feelings about an object as information when making risk judgments — with or without conscious thought (Slovic et al., 2002, 2004)

What is integral affect?

Feelings that are directly tied to the object or stimulus itself (e.g., fear of cancer when thinking about cancer screening)

What is incidental affect?

Mood states that are unrelated to the stimulus but get misattributed to it (e.g., feeling sad about the rain and carrying that negativity over to judgments about climate change)

What is the inverse relationship between risk and benefit in the affect heuristic?

When people have positive affect toward something, they perceive its risks as low and its benefits as high; negative affect produces the opposite — high risk, low benefit — regardless of actual statistics (Alhakami & Slovic, 1994)

Give an example of the inverse risk-benefit relationship

Train rails evoke positive affect → perceived as low risk and high benefit. Nuclear energy evokes negative affect → perceived as high risk and low benefit

Under what conditions do people rely more on affective processes?

When there is time pressure (less opportunity to deliberate) and when the judgment is complex, unfamiliar, or unanticipated (e.g., judging ChatGPT risk vs. cancer risk)

What are the four functions of affect?

1. Affect as information (how do I feel about this?) 2. Affect as common currency (translating complex info into simple evaluations) 3. Affect as spotlight (directing attention to specific details) 4. Affect as motivator (triggering approach or avoidance behavior)

What is affect as information?

Using the feeling itself as data — "I feel uneasy about this surgery, so it must be dangerous." Risk communication can backfire when affect is negative (e.g., breast cancer screening)

What is affect as common currency?

Affect translates complex, incomparable risk information into a simple positive/negative evaluation that allows different risks to be compared intuitively

What is affect as spotlight?

Affect directs attention to specific information (e.g., numerical cues); what ends up in the spotlight disproportionately shapes risk perception and decisions (e.g., graphic images on cigarette packages)

What is affect as motivator?

Affect triggers approach or avoidance tendencies that drive behavior (e.g., negative affect motivating cancer screening or quitting smoking)

What did Evans et al. (2015) find about the functions of affect in smoking communication?

1. Graphics produced greater negative affect than text (affect as information) 2. Greater negative affect led to greater quit intentions (motivator) 3. Negative affect from graphics promoted more careful scrutiny of risk information, increasing risk perceptions and quit intentions (spotlight)

What is the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF)?

A framework stating that specific discrete emotions influence risk judgments through their unique cognitive appraisal dimensions — not just their valence (positive/negative)

What are the six cognitive appraisal dimensions in the ATF?

1. Pleasantness 2. Certainty 3. Control 4. Anticipated effort 5. Attentional activity 6. Others' responsibility (agency)

What is the key insight of the ATF compared to the affect heuristic?

Emotions of the same valence (e.g., fear and anger are both negative) can have opposite effects on risk perception because their cognitive appraisal profiles differ

How do fear and anger differ on cognitive appraisal dimensions?

Both are low on pleasantness. Fear = low certainty, low individual control, high others' responsibility. Anger = high certainty, high individual control, high others' responsibility

How does fear affect risk perception?

Fear decreases certainty and individual control → leads to higher perceived risk and greater risk aversion

How does anger affect risk perception?

Anger increases feelings of certainty and control → leads to lower perceived risk and more risk-taking behavior

What is the link between ATF and Slovic's dread/unknown risk dimensions?

Unknown risks relate to the certainty dimension; dread risks relate to the individual control dimension — both core appraisal dimensions in ATF

What is the representativeness heuristic?

Judging the likelihood of an event based on how closely it resembles a mental prototype or stereotype, rather than on actual statistical probability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)

What biases does the representativeness heuristic produce?

Conjunction fallacy, base-rate neglect, insensitivity to sample size, and misconceptions of chance

What is the conjunction fallacy?

The error of judging a combination of two events as more probable than either event alone (e.g., thinking "feminist bank teller" is more likely than "bank teller")

How can the conjunction fallacy be reduced?

Frame the question as a frequency — ask people to imagine 100 people fitting the description, rather than judging probability directly

What is base rate neglect?

Ignoring the underlying statistical frequency of a category when making probability judgments — focusing on how representative someone/something seems instead (e.g., judging Jack is an engineer based on personality despite only 30% of the group being engineers)

What is the availability heuristic?

Judging the probability or frequency of an event based on how easily examples come to mind — not on actual statistics

Why does the availability heuristic distort risk perception?

Vivid, memorable, or media-covered events (e.g., terrorist attacks, plane crashes) are easily retrieved, making them feel more likely than statistically rare events

What is bounded rationality?

The concept that humans have limited cognitive capacity and time, making it impossible to process all available information — leading to the use of heuristics to simplify decisions

What is the heuristics and biases program?

A research tradition (Tversky & Kahneman) emphasizing that heuristics lead to systematic cognitive errors (biases) through attribute substitution — replacing hard questions with easier ones

What are the four heuristics identified in the heuristics and biases program?

1. Availability heuristic 2. Representativeness heuristic 3. Affect heuristic 4. Anchoring and adjustment heuristic

What is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic?

Estimates are strongly influenced by an initial reference point (anchor); people adjust insufficiently from it, and external anchors selectively activate consistent information in memory

What is ecological rationality?

The idea that heuristics are accurate and adaptive when they fit the structure of the environment — making them superior to complex algorithms in certain real-world conditions

What are fast and frugal heuristics?

Simple, efficient decision rules that require minimal information and lead to accurate decisions when matched to the right environment (adaptive toolbox approach)

What is the take-the-best heuristic?

A fast and frugal heuristic where decisions are made based on only the single most valid, discriminating cue (one-reason decision making)

What is the recognition heuristic?

Choosing the option you recognize over the one you don't — a simple heuristic that often leads to accurate decisions

What is the 1/N heuristic?

Distributing resources or investments equally across all options to spread risk — a simple but often effective strategy

What is the local warming effect?

People are more likely to believe in global warming on a day when local temperature is unusually high — a real-world example of the availability heuristic affecting climate risk perception

What is a nudge?

A subtle change to the choice environment that steers behavior in a predictable direction without forbidding options or changing financial incentives (e.g., default organ donation)

What is a boost?

An intervention that strengthens people's own decision-making capacity rather than steering their behavior externally — the alternative to nudging

What is risk as feelings vs. risk as analysis?

Risk as feelings = fast, intuitive, automatic emotional responses to danger. Risk as analysis = slow, deliberate, logical evaluation of probability and outcomes. When they conflict, affective centers often dominate

What is the key finding of the 'Risky Feelings' paper?

Patients' emotional responses to medical risk information are more influential than their cognitive knowledge. Effective communication must target the emotional gist patients attach to risks, not just statistical facts

What is hindsight bias in medical risk communication?

After learning the actual risk, patients feel it matches what they already expected — making prior self-estimates unreliable and distorting how new information is received

What is information evaluability?

The difficulty of judging whether a risk number is good or bad without a reference point — the emotional meaning of "6%" depends almost entirely on the comparison context provided

What are comparative risk statistics and why are they powerful?

Statistics that compare a personal risk to a reference group (e.g., population average); the same personal risk feels far more alarming when framed as above-average, directly increasing preventive behavior

What are evaluative labels?

Simple qualitative words (e.g., "positive," "low risk," "high") attached to medical results that shape emotional perception more strongly than the underlying numbers

What is an affect-rich outcome?

A potential consequence (e.g., getting a stoma) that triggers vivid, intense emotional reactions — causing patients to avoid treatments with such outcomes even when those treatments statistically reduce mortality

Why does cancer recurrence feel more frightening than a new cancer of equal statistical risk?

Recurrence carries a unique emotional weight — the return of a known threat feels more personal and certain than the possibility of an entirely new disease, even when the probabilities are identical

What is cultural cognition theory and what is its counterintuitive finding?

People align risk perceptions with their social group's values. Counterintuitively, individuals with the highest scientific literacy are the most polarized — they use their skills to filter information to fit their cultural worldview, driven by fear of social exclusion

What is objective numeracy and how does it affect risk processing?

The measurable ability to work with numbers and probabilities. Low-numeracy individuals are more influenced by superficial affective cues; high-numeracy individuals extract more precise affective meaning from actual probabilities

How does arousal affect long-term risk perception?

Higher physiological and mental arousal causes deeper processing and better memory encoding of risk information — keeping risk perception elevated even after the initial emotion fades

What is emotion regulation and why does it matter for risk decisions?

The conscious management of one's emotions (e.g., reappraising a situation positively); it plays an influential role in how people make decisions under uncertainty or adversity

What distinguishes the affect heuristic from the ATF?

The affect heuristic treats affect as a general positive/negative signal; the ATF goes further by showing that specific discrete emotions (fear vs. anger) with the same valence produce systematically different risk judgments due to their unique appraisal profiles

What cognitive question does each emotional theory answer?

Affect heuristic: what role do general feelings play in risk perception? ATF: how do specific discrete emotions shape risk judgments differently? Heuristics chapter: how do people simplify complex decisions under risk and uncertainty?