Judgments of Hazard, Risk, and Danger: Do They Differ?

Abstract

There were three purposes of the present research. The first was to test whether some of the discrepancies found in the hazard and risk perception literature were due to differences between the connotations of the terms hazard and risk. The second purpose was to examine the relationship between willingness to read warnings and generalized cautious intent, as well as other relevant variables suggested by past literature. The third purpose was to examine the relation between objective measures of injury (e.g., frequencies of hospital emergency room admissions) and people's subjective perceptions. The results showed that the expressions of hazardous, risky, dangerous and hazardous-to-use connote the same meaning to lay participants. Strong intercorrelations were found between overall unsafeness (a composite of the four hazard-risk expressions), injury severity, cautious intent, and willingness to read warnings. While injury likelihood played a small part in the prediction of willingness to read warnings, the results indicated that overall unsafeness (and severity of injury) play the foremost role in people's judgements of whether to read warnings and to act cautiously. No relationship was observed between objective measures of injury frequency and people's subjective perceptions of injury likelihood which is taken as a further indication that people do not readily use injury likelihood in their judgements of product safety. The implications are two-fold. First, the results suggest that lay persons do not interpret the term risk in the same way as do experts. These results suggest that other terminology and language may be needed to express probability to lay persons. Second, the results suggest that designers of warnings and educational materials should focus their attention to ways that appropriately communicate how badly a person can get hurt, rather than (or to a lesser extent) the likelihood of getting hurt.