Risk Assessment: The Consumer as an Intuitive Statistician - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 302

10.13 Consequences of Risk Estimation

The question is how do estimates of risk translate into the consequences that
pharmaceutical companies, public policy officials, and consumer welfare groups
would like to see? These would include the decisions to engage in preventative
actions to prevent a disease occurring, seek medical treatment, start a medical regi-
men, and continue with it. These behaviors could lead to faster diagnosis and treat-
ment, consumers engaging in more preventative behaviors, more frequently, and
reducing sickness and the costs associated with disease to medical establishments,
society, and the economy, to say nothing of the individual and their social circle.
These behaviors may also lead to the overuse of prescriptions, the greater likelihood
of undergoing costly treatments, waste of medical resources, and consumer anxiety
due to hypochondria. Some of the consequences of biased over- and underestima-
tion of risk are laid forth in Fig. 10.1 .
One preventative behavior that has been studied is consumers' proactive willing-
ness to get screened: e.g., have a pap smear or mammogram. The Vagisil Women's
Health Center conducted a study among women for who it is recommended to have
an annual pap smear. They found that 28 % did not with the most common reason
cited being that they did not think it was necessary as they did not have any health
problems (Society for the Advancement of Education 2003 ).
It is widely accepted that high perceived risk leads people to engage in preven-
tive or corrective behaviors that seek to reduce that risk (Luce and Kahn 1999 ;
Morris et al. 1994 ; Raghubir and Menon 1998 ; Rogers 1975 , 1983 ; Weinstein 1993 )
and that people's responses to precarious situations are dependent upon the percep-
tion of their own risk (Weinstein 2007 ). A meta-analysis found that people's risk
judgments of a disease motivated their actions toward vaccination (Brewer et al.
2007 ). Kuttschreuter ( 2006 ) explored several psychological determinants that lead
to people's behavioral intentions toward a risk and found that people's perceived
risk strongly determined their risk avoidance.
However, perceptions of risk do not always follow through to behavior.
Perceived control over the disease moderates the link. Perceived control relates to
both the perceived controllability of the disease and preventive behaviors—events
that are not within one's control are less likely to implicate one's self-esteem, and
are, therefore, more robust to biases such as self-positivity (Lin et al. 2003 ).
Further, unless a disease is perceived to be controllable, patients may not wish to
see the doctor to have it cured. To investigate this possibility, Raghubir and Menon
( 2005 ) examined that while the mere presence of the symptom “thoughts of sui-
cide or death” in a depression inventory led to perceptions of lower risk, it also led
to perceptions of greater controllability over depression—for exactly the same
reason—it was extreme and unambiguous. Thus, its presence was a double-edged
sword that could only be leveraged with a relatively simple contextual manipula-
tion: including “None of the above” as an option on the inventory. The mere pres-
ence of the “None of the above” option served as a signal in line with Gricean
norms of conversation that the mere presence of any of the symptoms on the