Health Risk Perceptions and Consumer Psychology

Abstract

This chapter outlines recent developments in the consumer psychology literature examining people's health-related risk perceptions. We first define risk, and discuss the importance of studying risk perceptions in the health domain. We integrate extant models proposed in social and health psychology and build a theoretical model for examining risk perceptions. We then describe the model in terms of the antecedents of health risk perceptions (e.g., motivational, cognitive, affective, contextual, and individual differences), their consequences (e.g., awareness and interest in the health hazard, trial and adoption of precautions or medical treatments, and subsequent behavior in terms of continued adoption or repetition, and word-of-mouth/recommendations of precautionary steps or treatments), and the factors that moderate the link between these two (e.g., financial, performance, psycho-social, and physiological risk). A primary contribution of our approach is to suggest that eliciting risk perceptions serves a persuasive role besides a measurement role, leading to the provocative question as to whether marketers should knowingly leverage their knowledge of how consumers assess risk to encourage behaviors leading to a healthier lifestyle. Implications for public policy makers, consumer welfare advocates, and commercial marketing companies are also discussed. WHAT IS RISK?Risk, according to the Miriam Webster Online dictionary i , is defined as the possibility of loss or injury. In any task that involves action, people typically assess the probability of such loss or injury. If the probability falls with the "acceptable" range, people engage in the risky behavior (see chapters in Fischhoff et al. 1984). Otherwise, they refrain. This assessment of what qualifies as acceptable risk can vary depending on the context.Risk has been studied from many different perspectives:economic, psychological and consumption. Economists and insurers define risk in terms of a company, country, or instrument defaulting (i.e., not following through on a promised or expected return; see McFadden 1999). Finance defines risk in terms of the volatility of price around a mean (Shefrin 2005). Statisticians think of risk in terms of uncertainty, or a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of an event occurring versus not occurring with this usage common in the behavioral decision theory literature as well (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). Because of the multi-dimensional nature of risk, methods for studying and observing its effects have varied within and across paradigms and disciplines.In this chapter, we define risk as a negatively-valenced likelihood assessment that an unfavorable event will occur. Risk, as defined by us, differs from an uncertainty judgment in three dfferent ways. First, uncertainty judgments can be positively valenced (e.g., winning a sweepstake) or negatively-valenced (e.g., having an accident), whereas we define risk as always being in a negatively-valenced domain. Second, events that occur with a probability of 0.50 are m...

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