Emotional Aspects of Risk Perceptions

Understanding the public’s perceptions of risk is of great importance to governments, businesses, and scientists worldwide because the public influences what policies are enacted. As a result, how people perceive (and misperceive) the risks of various hazards and activities has been of interest to academic and other researchers for many years. Researchers in the field of judgment and decision making have examined and understood risk perceptions in two primary ways: risk as feelings and risk as analysis (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001; Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2002). Risk as analysis assumes people judge risk by assessing the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes and integrating this information in a logical fashion. In contrast, risk as feelings suggests that people make risk judgments based at least in part on their feelings about possible hazards and activities. Risk as feelings calls attention to the vital role that affect and emotions play in the process of judging risk. Affect and emotions are beneficial in that they allow us to navigate efficiently through our risky and uncertain world. The primary aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of research that highlights the role of affect and emotions in risk perceptions. We focus on two related lines of work that have been fundamental to our understanding of risk as feelings: the affect heuristic and the appraisal- tendency framework