Eliciting Risk Perceptions: Does Conditional Question Wording Have a Downside?

Abstract

Background: To assess the impact of risk perceptions on prevention efforts or behavior change, best practices involve conditional risk measures, which ask people to estimate their risk contingent on a course of action (e.g., "if not vaccinated").

Purpose: To determine whether the use of conditional wording-and its drawing of attention to one specific contingency-has an important downside that could lead researchers to overestimate the true relationship between perceptions of risk and intended prevention behavior.

Methods: In an online experiment, US participants from Amazon's MTurk (N = 750) were presented with information about an unfamiliar fungal disease and then randomly assigned among 3 conditions. In all conditions, participants were asked to estimate their risk for the disease (i.e., subjective likelihood) and to decide whether they would get vaccinated. In 2 conditional-wording conditions (1 of which involved a delayed decision), participants were asked about their risk if they did not get vaccinated. For an unconditional/benchmark condition, this conditional was not explicitly stated but was still formally applicable because participants had not yet been informed that a vaccine was even available for this disease.

Results: When people gave risk estimates to a conditionally worded risk question after making a decision, the observed relationship between perceived risk and prevention decisions was inflated (relative to in the unconditional/benchmark condition).

Conclusions: The use of conditionals in risk questions can lead to overestimates of the impact of perceived risk on prevention decisions but not necessarily to a degree that should call for their omission.

Highlights: Conditional wording, which is commonly recommended for eliciting risk perceptions, has a potential downside.It can produce overestimates of the true relationship between perceived risk and prevention behavior, as established in the current work.Though concerning, the biasing effect of conditional wording was small-relative to the measurement benefits that conditioning usually provides-and should not deter researchers from conditioning risk perceptions.More research is needed to determine when the biasing impact of conditional wording is strongest.