Everyday behaviour and everyday risk: An approach to study people's responses to frequently encountered food related health risks

Abstract

Food consumption constitutes behaviour that is carried out on a daily basis. The risks and benefits associated with such behaviours are often small, and the time and effort people are, consequently, willing to invest in behavioural decisions are limited. Instead, experience, in the form of an integrated evaluation of past behaviours, may serve as a predictor for future behaviour, allowing reasonable choices to be made with limited effort. This paper discusses the characteristics of daily occurring risks and suggests a model of how prior experience can accumulate and play a role in acting while exposed to daily risk. The core of the approach is a feedback loop that adjusts the current situation until a preset situation is reached. This is based on integrated past experiences and is, thus, continually updated by new experiences. To establish such a feedback mechanism, emotions are argued to play a vital role as an integrator for different types of information, such as perceptual, cognitive and physiological information. This approach may help in understanding how consumers deal with risks in daily (food-handling) practices.

Keywords:

• Risk perception
• experiential behaviour
• feedback
• emotion
• heuristic

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Lynn Frewer for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

1.Food safety practices are often communicated as heuristics, such as ‘wash your hands when you come to the table,’ or ‘clean, separate, cook, chill’ in the recent US food safety campaign (http://www.fightbac.org/).