Many features of perception and assessment of people risk

One of the most common effects of biased assessment of the facts is the tendency of binding judgments to the facts originally presented (figures estimated). Thus, in one experiment the first group of subjects reported that 50 thousand people die annually in car accidents, and the second group – that one thousand of annual deaths occur from electric shock. Although both messages were accurate, the difference in estimates of risks of death for different reasons in the two groups differed in some cases 5 times. In another experiment, the subjects estimated the risk of death from influenza. One group gave an average score of 393 death per 100 thousand cases of influenza. But the second group reported that 80 million people a year get the flu. In this group the mortality rate from the influenza was estimated at an average equal to 6 per 100 thousand cases, which is approximately 65 times less than in the first group.

It also identified many features of perception and assessment of people risk. People assess risk very differently when they see it in couples (e.g. husband and wife) than when judging about it separately. The decision to buy insurance policy is often cancelled when a problem looks like a choice between participation in a risky venture that promises in the future a large sum of money, or loss less amounts of money, but today. Similar options risk, described in terms of lives saved, can be evaluated quite differently, being structured in terms of lost lives. That is a very important and significant effects of format of the data and the context in which these data are presented. Such minor differences in performance risk have much psychological impact on how risk is perceived, and this suggests that the people responsible for information programs and data have very real opportunities to manipulate perception. Moreover, since these effects are not widely known, people can unintentionally manipulate his own perception through spontaneous rash decisions about how to organize my life.