Risk perceptions and health behavior
Section snippets
Risk perceptions and health behavior
In health decision-making, individuals are expected to navigate choices involving weighing risk for consequences with benefits of action. Behaviors contributing to disease initiation and progression are often pleasurable (e.g., smoking or overeating). Motivation to forgo such pleasurable behaviors, or engage in inconvenient preventive behaviors, is believed to be driven to some extent by beliefs about the probability that a health consequence will occur [1], [2]. Correlational evidence supports
Formation of risk perceptions
A growing body of literature has probed how risk perceptions are formed. Although risk perceptions can be optimistic (i.e., low) or pessimistic (i.e., high), they are empirically and conceptually distinct from general dispositional optimism, in part because they are domain-specific [8]. Indeed, evidence suggests that, in the general population, individuals are able to differentiate among specific threats when forming risk perceptions [9]. Moreover, several studies suggest that dispositional and
Types of risk perceptions
Classic health behavior theories largely treat risk perceptions as deliberatively derived judgments, and research synthesized thus far has fit this conceptualization. Deliberative risk perceptions are systematic, logical, and rule-based [24], [25]. Theories that emphasize deliberative risk perceptions suggest that an individual relies on a number of reason-based strategies to derive an estimate of the likelihood that the negative outcome will occur. Deliberative risk perceptions are usually
Accuracy of risk perceptions
The formation of accurate — or inaccurate — risk perceptions may have important consequences for health. Although low risk perceptions are by definition optimistic, if an individual is indeed at low risk for a disease threat, those risk perceptions are also realistic. However, often individuals believe themselves to be at lower risk for outcomes than is warranted when examining their objective risk; this phenomenon is termed ‘unrealistic optimism’ [42]. Note that accuracy of risk perceptions
Associations and interactions among types of risk perceptions
Importantly, existing models do not directly address the possibility of a more complex interplay between deliberative and affective influences, despite the fact that evidence suggests that the strength of the associations among deliberative and affective components of risk perceptions may be as important as the absolute magnitudes of those constructs. For example, choice preference strength and readiness for action may be strongest among individuals when deliberative and affective perceptions
Concluding remarks
Health-related risk perceptions play an important role in motivating health behavior change [6••], and empirical evidence suggests that there are three distinct types of risk perceptions: deliberative, affective, and intuitive [38••], [39•], [40], [41]. Much is known about the formation of deliberative health-related risk perceptions, including the role of numeracy, previous experiences and salient instances of the threat, and emotion. Moreover, research has examined the implications of accurate
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
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