Measuring non-conscious factors of risk – a psychological approach

Symposium: Psychological topics in risk perception and risk decision-making Paper 4/4 Psychologists investigating risk tend to be mainly concerned with attitudes and behaviour. Common approaches include the use of... [ view full abstract ]

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

Psychologists investigating risk tend to be mainly concerned with attitudes and behaviour. Common approaches include the use of questionnaires, interviews, and other explicit measures. While useful these types of measure come with limitations. They normally rely on self-reporting and only capture conscious, explicit attitudes or behaviour. Given that research suggests that some attitudes and behaviours are driven by non-conscious, implicit processing there is a need to develop or utilise other types of measurement. This talk will describe and discuss a selection of such methods. These will include implicit attitude measures, behavioural measures, and eye-tracking.

Implicit attitude measures are methods that aim to capture non-conscious automatic attitudes. It has been suggested that these methods can also capture attitudes that people themselves are not aware they hold, along with being more resistant to dishonest responses (compared with explicit measures). The two examples of implicit measures that will be discussed are the Implicit Association Task (risk versions), and a risk version of the Affective Priming Task (developed by the authors). These tasks involve reaction times and association in a manner which allows for investigation of automatic attitudes. As such, these methods capture attitudes that cannot be captured via explicit measures and therefore provide useful alternative research tools.

There are varying theories regarding the relationship of attitudes and behaviour. For this reason it is useful to develop and utilise behavioural measures for investigation of risk-taking behaviour. The talk will discuss several risk-taking behavioural measures but mainly a new version of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (developed by the authors). This task involves a risk-taking computer game with the new version including a priming component. This means that subsequent risk-taking during the task is potentially influenced by automatic attitudes. As such, it is equivalent to an implicit attitude measure but with behaviour measured directly.

Another behavioural method that will be discussed is eye-tracking. Measuring eye movements make it possible to capture data regarding attention and comprehension. Eye movements are also often driven by automatic or non-conscious factors so this provides another complimentary research tool. Overall the aim of this talk is to clarify the benefits, details, and also limitations of a selection of non-explicit research methods (i.e. methods that measure non-conscious processing). As alternatives or complimentary tools to the traditional explicit methods these other methods can help improve psychological research in risk.