The framing of risks and the communication of subjective probabilities for victimizations

Abstract

Response effects, Framing, Vague quantifiers, Survey methodology, Conversational norms,

Moral asymmetries and the semantics of "many"

“…• C -but be such that one more severe offenses (bill-dodging versus robbery versus murder), "identical verbal likelihood expressions correspond to lower numerical probabilities" (Krumpal et al 2011(Krumpal et al : 1343. This phenomenon, also known as the "severity bias" (see Pighin, Bonnefon & Savadori 2011, Bonnefon & Villejoubert 2006, Krumpal et al 2011, suggests that the same mechanism operates in judgments about whether an action is intentional and in judgments about whether a probability is high.…”

“…This phenomenon, also known as the "severity bias" (see Pighin, Bonnefon & Savadori 2011, Bonnefon & Villejoubert 2006, Krumpal et al 2011, suggests that the same mechanism operates in judgments about whether an action is intentional and in judgments about whether a probability is high. In the latter case, two identical probability values on the scale from 0 to 1 can be such that the first will be judged to be high in comparison to the standard relevant for a severe outcome, while the other will be judged not to be high in comparison to the standard relevant for a non-severe outcome.…”

Social Desirability and the Interpretation of Uncertainty Terms in Self‐Report Questions

“…Research suggests that social desirability is not the only factor influencing the interpretation of uncertainty terms in surveys. For example, Krumpal, Rauhut, Bohr, and Naumann () demonstrated how the interpretation of vague quantifiers such as ‘likely’ can vary as a function of whether the term is referencing a gain or a loss. Other researchers have demonstrated group differences in the interpretation of these terms (Schaeffer, ), including cultural differences (King, Murray, Salomon, & Tandon, ).…”

Individual Perceptions of Local Crime Risk

“…Our test relies on changes in crime risk perceptions over time rather than a comparison of objective crime rates with elicited subjective probabilities or assessments of the number of crimes within a population, as in Slovic (1987) and later Dominitz and Manski (1997) and Quillian and Pager (2010). Our approach has the advantage that it does not rely on the assumption that people are able to express their beliefs about crime risk in terms of percentage chances (see Krumpal et al 2011 for a discussion). For our test, verbal assessments of likelihood suffice.…”