Joint Influences on Perceived Vulnerability and Behavior

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People routinely encounter situations in which they must decide how to respond to a potential danger or health threat (e.g., tornado siren, flu virus, undercooked food, asbestos, sports injury, a dark alley, cigarette smoke, sun exposure, an icy road, a pit bull). A person?s response to a danger or threat should depend on, among other things, the likelihood of harm. For example, a person would be foolish to stop or avoid a desired activity because of a negligible likelihood of harm, yet would be ill-advised to continue with an activity associated with a high likelihood of serious harm. Consequently, it is crucial to understand what shapes people?s perceptions of vulnerability (i.e., subjective likelihood of harm from a threat) and how these perceptions influence behavior. This is a complex challenge because for any given threat, there is a variety of information that could influence perceived vulnerability. To illustrate, consider a person who is about to walk on a forest trail and is thinking about the threat of mosquitoes carrying West Nile Virus. Perceived vulnerability to West Nile might be affected by knowledge of the frequencies of getting bites on past walks, the extent to which the trail seems representative of the type that attracts mosquitoes, a newspaper story about the rates of West Nile Virus, and whether other hikers seem to be concerned about the virus.A key goal for this project is to refine and test a new theory of how various factors jointly shape perceptions of vulnerability and behavior. Unlike existing theories, this one is explicit in representing six factors that drive vulnerability and also makes an important distinction between people?s explicit reports of judged likelihood and the perceptions of vulnerability that drive behavior. An interrelated second goal of the project is to develop a flexible computer-based paradigm that can be used by a broad array of researchers for experimentally testing how various jointly operating factors influence decisions and behavior in the presence of a potential threat. The theory and empirical findings from this project should have important implications across fields concerned with subjective threat assessment and/or decision making under uncertainty. This includes fields like health psychology, occupational safety/injury prevention, and decision making. The studies should also provide insight about how to best measure people?s perceived vulnerability to health risks, as well as how to design public?health interventions aimed at making people aware of their vulnerability.