The effects of emotional state and information framing on risk decision-making

Symposium: Psychological topics in risk perception and risk decision-making Paper 2/4 The affect heuristic (a cognitive process in which people use their positive and negative feelings to evaluate risk) has become an... [ view full abstract ]

Symposium: Psychological topics in risk perception and risk decision-making
Paper 2/4

The affect heuristic (a cognitive process in which people use their positive and negative feelings to evaluate risk) has become an important focus for research in risk perception and risk decision-making. Researchers have reported that when induced into a fearful/anxious emotional state, people make more risk-averse choices and when induced into an angry emotional state, people make more risk-seeking choices (e.g. Lerner & Keltner, 2001). The reliability of these finding can be questioned as these studies do not include manipulation checks after emotional induction.

This paper investigates the effect of emotion (i.e. fear, anger) on choices people make about cyber-security. Specifically, we investigated how cyber-security information framed positively or negatively in text form is affected by emotional state. The current study extends the literature by investigating the effects of induced emotions by using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to induce fear as in our pilot work we were unable to induce a fearful / anxious emotional state in participants using Lerner and Keltner’s method. We use Lerner and Keltner’s method to induce anger, but include manipulation checks to account for the strength of induced fear and anger. We also explore the effects of scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (Frederick, 2005), which is a measure of rational, System 2 processing, and scores on the Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely et al., 2012), which is a measure of numeracy.

Our findings suggest that people who are experiencing strong emotions (fear or anger) are not subject to the effects of information framing (usually positively-framed information leads to risk-averse choices, and negatively-framed information leads to risk-taking choices). These findings cannot be accounted for by performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test or Berlin Numeracy Test. Theoretical implications for risk perception and risk decision-making are considered as are implications for the practice of risk communication.