Risk Assessment: The Consumer as an Intuitive Statistician - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 295

the graphic trauma that can result from automobile collisions to try to offset the
consumers' fear-reducing familiarity with driving. Prior research has examined
changing the affect associated with messages by manipulating the level of affective
intensity or simply the frame of the message.
For example, Meyerowitz and Chaiken ( 1987 ) examined the effect of framing a
behavior as a loss or a gain in the context of a breast self-examination. They found
that messages framed using a negative frame of benefits lost (i.e., “Women who do
not do BSE have a decreased chance of finding a tumor in the early, more treatable
stage of the disease”) were more persuasive than those that were framed positively
in terms of benefits gained (i.e., “Women who do BSE have an increased chance of
finding a tumor in the early, more treatable stage of the disease”).
Block and Keller ( 1995 ) found that negative frames were more persuasive than
positive ones in the context of skin cancer and STDs, but only when people pro-
cessed the information in-depth; with in-depth processing more likely to occur
when a recommendation only probabilistically led to a desired outcome (i.e., was
less efficacious than a deterministic recommendation).
In related work, Keller and Block ( 1996 ) uncover that the underlying mechanism
driving persuasion is fear arousal. Low arousal doesn't encourage adequate elabora-
tion but high levels of arousal can lead to too much elaboration. Changing the refer-
ence of the person can change the level of elaboration: Self-reference leads to
greater elaboration than referencing another person. Accordingly, self-referencing
increases the effectiveness of low fear appeals and other-referencing increases the
effectiveness of high fear appeals. This implies that if the accessibility or diagnos-
ticity of a person's own behaviors or symptoms can be increased, they will be less
likely to use their feelings as a source of information to make risk judgments.

10.7 De-biasing Bottom-up Strategies

To conclude, perceived risk may deviate from actual risk when consumers are using
a bottom-up process due to the inaccurate identification of symptoms and behaviors,
an inaccurate perception of their diagnosticity, and inappropriate use of feelings
about risk. The routes to de-bias these risk estimates revolve around making symp-
toms and behaviors more accurately perceived as diagnostic of the disease. Making
symptoms and behaviors more accurately diagnostic would bring β in line with δ
given that they have been identified, and reduce the impact of α (feelings). The char-
acteristics of the symptoms or behaviors provide usable methods to increase the
diagnosticity of symptoms and behaviors: make ambiguous behaviors unambiguous
to help in their identification and improve their diagnosticity, increase their acces-
sibility when they are frequently performed, provide information that allows con-
sumers to assess the correlation of the symptom/behavior with the disease, and
highlight the extremity of their consequences. Examples of these routes to de-bias
consumers who use the bottom-up process are provided in Table 10.1 .