Measuring availability – media presence and risk perception (Symposium: Psychological aspects of risk perception and behavior)

Identifying and judging emerging risks – potentially upcoming risks in the next five or ten years – is a central aspect in risk management not just for insurance business but for several other businesses and domains like... [ view full abstract ]

Identifying and judging emerging risks – potentially upcoming risks in the next five or ten years – is a central aspect in risk management not just for insurance business but for several other businesses and domains like logistics, urban planning, or supply chain management. When judging these risks, experts cannot or can only partly rely on own experiences, but have to consider other sources of information, i.e. media or social networks. However, media presence might influence expert’s judgments, in that it facilitates the mental availability of reported risks which leads to an overestimation of these risks. Psychological research regarding media’s influence on risk perception is ambiguous, which led us to further investigating the phenomenon in a longitudinal design. Three studies were conducted to find an indicator for availability/media presence and identify strategies that debias risk estimations. Tools to analyze the presence of certain key words, i.e. risks in social media and (print)publications were compared over several months. Furthermore, since the trends of the risks’ media coverage were similar in all tools, one was depicted and used as an indicator for media presence. A survey measuring participants’ risk perception and the influence of a set of debiasing strategies on risk estimation was conducted on two dates, one in December 2014 and one in May 2015. In addition, a third qualitative inquiry was attached in July 2015. We found no correlation between changes in media presence and changes risk perception, indicating that the mere counting of key words might not be precise enough to capture risk perception. We propose to broaden the volume analysis by affective responses associated with these risks. Furthermore, results indicate that deliberate thinking about contra, but also about pro arguments reduces individual risk perception. Presenting distracting or risk related texts had no influence on participants’ risk perception. In addition, our results provide suggestions which scales are more sensitive in capturing changes in risk perception and render hints for designing risk management processes that reduce availability biases.