Risk perception, affect, and information avoidance during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election

Abstract

During a presidential election cycle, voters consume information to alleviate uncertainty about the candidates and the process. As a result, elections offer an interesting (and somewhat novel) context for studying risk-related information behaviors. Here we argue that individuals avoid certain information, depending on the amount of risk they perceive and to what extent they experience risk-related affect. Based on national survey data collected one month prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election (N = 512), we found that risk perception influenced information avoidance through affective responses to the different types of risks. Specifically, financial and political risk influenced avoidance through negative affective response to risk, while policy risk influenced avoidance through both positive and negative affective response. Thus, the mediation of affective responses varies by the type of perceived risks.

Keywords:

• Risk
• affective response
• information avoidance
• presidential election
• PADM
• PRIA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Unfortunately, our data is not public.

2 The researchers identified three types of risk impacting capital flight across 45 nations: financial, political, and policy risk. In other words, these are the universal risk types that can be observed during times of uncertainty.

3 The coding categories were not mutually exclusive, meaning a response could be coded for multiple risk types. This coding is very similar to dummy coding. For example, a participant could answer that they perceive all three types of risks and it would be coded as the person has three risks (political risk: 1, policy risk: 1, financial risk: 1). However, the same type of risk in a participant’s answer was only counted once. For instance, a participant could report three risks that could be categorized into financial risks while the person did not express any other type of risks. In this case, the answer was coded as one financial risk rather than three (political risk: 0, policy risk: 0, financial risk: 1).