Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Risk communication, where scientists inform policy-makersor the populace of the probability and magnitude of possibledisasters, is essential to disaster management – enablingpeople to make better decisions regarding preventative steps,evacuations, etc. Psychological research, however, hasidentified multiple biases that can affect people’sinterpretation of probabilities and thus risk. For example,availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) is known toconfound probability estimates while the description-experience gap (D-E Gap) (Hertwig & Erev, 2009) shows lowprobability events being over-weighted when described andunder-weighted when learnt from laboratory tasks. This paperexamines how probability descriptions interact with realworld experience of events. Responses from 294 participantsacross 8 conditions showed that people’s responses, given thesame described probabilities and consequences, were alteredby their familiarity with the disaster (bushfire vs earthquake)and its salience to them personally. The implications of thisfor risk communication are discussed.