Judgment of riskiness: Impact of personality, naive theories and heuristic thinking among female students

Abstract

Three different studies were conducted to examine the impact of heuristic reasoning in the perception of health-related events: lifetime risk of breast cancer (Study 1, n = 468), subjective life expectancy (Study 2, n = 449), and subjective age of onset of menopause (Study 3, n = 448). In each study, three experimental conditions were set up: control, anchoring heuristic and availability heuristic. Analyses of Covariance controlling for optimism, depressive mood, Locus of Control, hypochondriac tendencies and subjective health, indicated significant effect of experimental conditions on perceived breast-cancer risk (p = 0.000), subjective life expectancy (p = 0.000) and subjective onset of menopause (p = 0.000). Indeed, all findings revealed that availability and anchoring heuristics were being used to estimate personal health-related events. The results revealed that some covariates, hypochondriac tendencies in Study 1, optimism, depressive mood and subjective health in Study 2 and internal locus of control in Study 3 had significant impact on judgment of riskiness.

Keywords:

• Heuristic
• lay theories
• perceived risk
• breast cancer
• subjective life expectancy
• onset of menopause

Notes

Notes

1. Subjective longevity and subjective life expectancy are interchangeable here.

2. We deliberately chose students in the Arts and Humanities and not in the Life Sciences or Medicine.

3. A significant number of answers were missing, undoubtedly due to the fact that the participants were unaware of exactly how old their great grandparents were at death. Thus, this variable was excluded from the analysis.