Risk Assessment: The Consumer as an Intuitive Statistician - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 294

Note that these symptoms differ in more than their frequency of occurrence in
a population and their actual expected consistency. They are also differentially
ambiguous, which could be another reason contributing to why the less ambigu-
ous symptom of “thoughts of suicide/death” had an inappropriately high weight
in people's judgments of risk of their own level of depression. However, fortu-
nately for managers of pharmaceutical companies who manufacture depression
drugs and public policy officials, this bias in consumers' risk assessments can
be eliminated by providing them with information about the DSM-IV guide-
lines and highlighting the appropriate diagnosticity of each of the symptoms.
When respondents saw the appropriate DSM-IV classification scheme, the
presence of the unambiguous behavior was less likely to dilute the perceived
diagnosticity of the other behaviors on the self-report inventory. To summarize,
the perceived diagnosticity of a high frequency behavior or symptom can be
increased by education and by reducing the accessibility of alternate cues that
have higher perceived diagnosticity due to their lower ambiguity, lower fre-
quency, higher correlation with a disease, or greater extremity of a consequence:
factors covered next.
(c) Correlation with a disease : If every time a symptom occurs, the disease also
occurs, it is defined as having high causal clarity. On the other hand, if there is
a high rate of false alarms (whereby a symptom exists but is due to reasons
other than the disease) the symptom has lower causal clarity.
(d) Extremity of consequence : The more serious the consequences associated with
a symptom, the greater its signal strength.
This implies that symptoms and behaviors that are less ambiguous, less frequent,
and more serious will be perceived to be more diagnostic and feed into perceptions
of higher risk, even if they are not higher in their actual correlation with a disease
than other behaviors or symptoms. It also implies that the mere presence of symp-
toms that are perceived to be diagnostic but are not identified will lead to percep-
tions of lower risk as they are alternate accessible sources of information with a
higher perceived diagnosticity that can be used to make the same risk judgment.
Risk perceptions are most easily shifted by changes in the perceived diagnosticity
of already accessible symptoms and behaviors or changes in the accessibility of
symptoms and behaviors already perceived as diagnostic.
Affect : In addition to the accessibility and diagnosticity of symptoms and behaviors,
consumers may use their positive or negative feelings about a risk when making
their estimate. Perceived risk may be closely associated with the feelings of dread
that risk evokes (Fischoff et al. 1978 ) and consumers' judgments of whether a haz-
ard is good or bad predict their estimates of its danger (Alkahami and Slovic 1994 ).
When consumers like something, they estimate its risk as low and its benefits as
high; when consumers dislike something, they estimate its risk as high and its ben-
efits as low (Finucane et al. 2000 ; Slovic et al. 2007 ). Attempts to change the feel-
ings associated with a risk often focus on the risk itself rather than its symptoms or
associated behaviors. For example, government agencies buy advertising displaying