BackgroundTo 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”).PurposeTo 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.MethodsIn 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.ResultsWhen 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).ConclusionsThe 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.HighlightsConditional 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.

中文翻译：

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引发风险认知：条件问题措辞有缺点吗？


背景为了评估风险认知对预防工作或行为改变的影响，最佳实践涉及条件风险测量，要求人们根据一系列行动估计他们的风险（例如，“如果不接种疫苗”）。目的确定是否使用条件性措辞——以及它引起人们对某一特定突发事件的关注——有一个重要的缺点，可能导致研究人员高估风险认知和预期预防行为之间的真实关系。方法在一项在线实验中，来自亚马逊 MTurk 的美国参与者 (N = 750)向受试者提供有关一种不熟悉的真菌病的信息，然后随机分配到 3 种情况。在所有情况下，参与者都被要求估计他们患这种疾病的风险（即主观可能性）并决定是否接种疫苗。在 2 个条件性措辞条件（其中 1 个涉及延迟决定）中，参与者被问及如果不接种疫苗的风险。对于无条件/基准条件，该条件没有明确说明，但仍然正式适用，因为参与者尚未被告知有疫苗可用于这种疾病。结果当人们在做出决定后对有条件措辞的风险问题进行风险评估时，观察到的感知风险和预防决策之间的关系被夸大（相对于无条件/基准条件）。结论在风险问题中使用条件可能会导致高估感知风险对预防决策的影响，但不一定达到以下程度：应该要求他们的省略。通常建议使用条件措辞来引发风险认知，但它也有潜在的缺点。正如当前工作中所建立的，它可能会高估感知风险和预防行为之间的真实关系。尽管令人担忧，但条件性措辞的偏见效应相对于条件性通常提供的测量效益来说很小，并且不应阻止研究人员对条件性风险认知进行限制。需要更多的研究来确定条件措辞的偏见影响何时最强。