Journal ArticleDOI
Unrealistic optimism about susceptibility to health problems: conclusions from a community-wide sample
TLDR
The results demonstrate that an optimistic bias about susceptibility to harm-a tendency to claim that one is less at risk than one's peers—is not limited to any particular age, sex, educational, or occupational group.Abstract:
A mailed questionnaire was used to obtain comparative risk judgments for 32 different hazards from a random sample of 296 individuals living in central New Jersey. The results demonstrate that an optimistic bias about susceptibility to harm-a tendency to claim that one is less at risk than one's peers—is not limited to any particular age, sex, educational, or occupational group. It was found that an optimistic bias is often introduced when people extrapolate from their past experience to estimate their future vulnerability. Thus, the hazards most likely to elicit unrealistic optimism are those associated with the belief (often incorrect) that if the problem has not yet appeared, it is unlikely to occur in the future. Optimistic biases also increase with the perceived preventability of a hazard and decrease with perceived frequency and personal experience. Other data presented illustrate the inconsistent relationships between personal risk judgments and objective risk factors.read more
Citations
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Book
Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment
TL;DR: In this article, a review is presented of the book "Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman".
Journal ArticleDOI
Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the implica- tions of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap, including performance errors, computational limitations, the wrong norm being applied by the experi- menter, and a different construal of the task by the subject.
Journal ArticleDOI
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives
Daniel Kahneman,Dale T. Miller +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a theory of norms and normality is presented and applied to some phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes, such as emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior and the role of norms in causal questions and answers.
Book ChapterDOI
Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment.
Daniel Kahneman,Shane Frederick +1 more
TL;DR: The program of research now known as the heuristics and biases approach began with a survey of 84 participants at the 1969 meetings of the Mathematical Psychology Society and the American Psychological Association (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971) as discussed by the authors.
Book ChapterDOI
The affect heuristic
TL;DR: This article introduced a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions and argued that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as "the affect heuristic" and discussed some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.
References
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Book
Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research
Martin Fishbein,Icek Ajzen +1 more
Book
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Amos Tversky,Daniel Kahneman +1 more
TL;DR: The authors described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, availability of instances or scenarios, and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
Book
Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior
Icek Ajzen,Martin Fishbein +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the author explains "theory and reasoned action" model and then applies the model to various cases in attitude courses, such as self-defense and self-care.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Health Belief Model: A Decade Later:
Nancy K. Janz,Marshall H. Becker +1 more
TL;DR: A critical review of 29 HBM-related investigations published during the period 1974-1984, tabulates the findings from 17 studies conducted prior to 1974, and provides a summary of the total 46 HBM studies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Historical Origins of the Health Belief Model
TL;DR: The Health Belief Model (HBM) as mentioned in this paper is a well-known theory in the field of epidemiology that has been the subject of considerable direct study and has directly or indirectly spawned a good deal of additional research.