The challenges of researching risk

We are frequently asked to conduct research projects where we wish people to tell us how they feel about, and might to respond to, risks. Exploring risk is complex. Our tendency is to assume that we make rational decisions regarding the risks we face – weighing up likelihood and potential cost to decide what (if any) mitigations we will put in place.

However, behavioural science shows us that we rely on a vast number of biases and ‘heuristics’ as mental shortcuts (as seen in Buster Benson’s Cognitive Bias Codex) when faced with large amounts of complex information, particularly about high-stakes scenarios.

Decisions regarding the assessment of risk and protection are heavily influenced by how the information is communicated. The same information can lead to very different decisions depending on how it is framed. For example, research relevant here relates to the impact of presenting percentages rather than frequencies when discussing risks. A low-probability event described in concrete terms of relative frequency tends to be given more weight than an event described in abstract terms of chance or probability. For example:

• A disease kills 1286 people out of every 10,000.

• A disease kills 24% of the population.

The first statement tends to be judged as more threatening, even though twice as many people die in the second statement, compared to the first.

How risks are framed can also have a big impact on how people perceive a risk. In fact, previous research has shown that the exact same information can have opposite effects depending on how it is framed. Classically, when consumers were told about treatment available for 600 people with a fatal disease, nearly three-quarters of those who were told “200 lives will be saved” endorsed the treatment, compared to less than a quarter of those who were told “400 people will die”.

These and other findings from past research mean that how risks are described and framed needs to be carefully considered in research design. In our recent research about professional indemnity insurance in legal services, for The Legal Services Board, we used this understanding to shape the design of our research questions and stimulus materials. We worked hard to make the risks of things going wrong when dealing with a lawyer as clear and relate-able as possible and we were very mindful, as we interpreted respondents’ feedback, of the limitations and caveats we should place on our findings.