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Biomedical subjects

N D Weinstein

Publications and source records attributed to N D Weinstein.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

A model of the precaution adoption process: evidence from home radon testing.

We present the precaution adoption process model--a stage theory consisting of seven distinct states between ignorance and completed preventive action. The stages are "unaware of the issue," "aware of the issue but not personally engaged," "engaged and deciding what to do," "planning to act but not yet having acted," "having decided not to act," "acting," and "maintenance." The theory asserts that these stages represent qualitatively different patterns of behavior, beliefs, and experience and that the factors that produce transitions between stages vary depending on the specific transition being considered. Data from seven studies of home radon testing are examined to test some of the claims made by this model. Stage theories of protective behavior are contrasted with theories that see precaution adoption in terms of movement along a single continuum of action likelihood.

Air↗
PubMed1991

Perceived susceptibility and self-protective behavior: a field experiment to encourage home radon testing.

Tested in a field experiment (N = 647) the hypothesis that perceptions of personal susceptibility are important in decisions to test one's home for radioactive radon gas. Experimental group subjects received a personal telephone call to tell them they lived in a high-risk area and a personal letter to reinforce the telephone message. After the intervention, experimental subjects were significantly more likely than minimal-treatment subjects to acknowledge the possibility of high radon levels in their homes. Perceptions of susceptibility and illness severity were significantly correlated with orders of radon test kits and with testing intentions. Nevertheless, there were no differences between groups in test orders or intentions. Results are discussed in terms of the difficulty of getting people to acknowledge susceptibility and the factors other than risk perceptions that influence self-protective behavior.

Air Pollutants, Radioactive↗
PubMed1989

Effects of personal experience on self-protective behavior.

This article seeks to further our understanding of self-protective behavior by examining the effects of a particularly powerful stimulus to action: personal experience. It reviews the effects of automobile accidents on seat belt use, criminal victimization other than rape on individual crime prevention efforts, natural hazards experience on both natural hazards preparedness and compliance with evacuation warnings, and myocardial infarction on smoking. Theories suggesting mechanisms that could link personal experience to behavior are described, and data concerning the effects of experience on some key variables in these theories are discussed. Tentative propositions are offered to resolve the many apparent discrepancies in this literature. These propositions concern the effects of experience on risk perceptions, the influence of experience on risk salience, the specificity of responses to victimization, and the duration of experience effects.

Accident Prevention↗
PubMed1988

The precaution adoption process.

This article presents a critique of current models of preventive behavior. It discusses a variety of factors that are usually overlooked-including the appearance of costs and benefits over time, the role of cues to action, the problem of competing life demands, and the ways that actual decision behavior differs from the rational ideal implicit in expectancy-value and utility theories. Such considerations suggest that the adoption of new precautions should be viewed as a dynamic process with many determinants. The framework of a model that is able to accommodate these additional factors is described. This alternative model portrays the precaution adoption process as an orderly sequence of qualitatively different cognitive stages. Data illustrating a few of the suggestions made in the article are presented, and implications for prevention programs are discussed.

Accident Prevention↗
PubMed1988

Optimistic biases in public perceptions of the risk from radon.

Survey data were obtained from a random sample of 657 homeowners in New Jersey and also from 141 homeowners who had already monitored their homes for radon. People who had not tested tended to believe that they were less at risk than their neighbors, and they interpreted ambiguous predictors of home radon levels in ways that supported their beliefs of below-average risk. Residents who had already tested their homes were relatively accurate about the probability of health effects. In both groups less than half of those who knew that radon can cause lung cancer were willing to admit that it would be serious if they suffered health effects from this source. The optimistic biases of the public may hamper attempts to encourage home radon monitoring and to promote appropriate mitigation measures in homes with elevated radon concentrations.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1987

Unrealistic optimism about susceptibility to health problems: conclusions from a community-wide sample.

A mailed questionnaire was used to obtain comparative risk judgments for 32 different hazards from a random sample of 296 individuals living in central New Jersey. The results demonstrate that an optimistic bias about susceptibility to harm--a tendency to claim that one is less at risk than one's peers--is not limited to any particular age, sex, educational, or occupational group. It was found that an optimistic bias is often introduced when people extrapolate from their past experience to estimate their future vulnerability. Thus, the hazards most likely to elicit unrealistic optimism are those associated with the belief (often incorrect) that if the problem has not yet appeared, it is unlikely to occur in the future. Optimistic biases also increase with the perceived preventability of a hazard and decrease with perceived frequency and personal experience. Other data presented illustrate the inconsistent relationships between personal risk judgments and objective risk factors.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Reactions to life-style warnings: coffee and cancer.

A well-publicized report linking coffee to cancer of the pancreas provided an opportunity to examine how people react to life-style warnings. According to the concepts of cognitive dissonance and defensive avoidance, coffee drinkers might be expected to avoid this report or dispute its validity. Within the sample of 89 secretarial and clerical workers, coffee drinkers were found to be somewhat more likely than nondrinkers to be aware of and to recall the contents of the report. The more they drank, the more likely they were to have changed their coffee consumption in response to the new information. Coffee drinking had no effect on interest in receiving a copy of the original report nor were coffee drinkers more likely than nondrinkers to doubt the future confirmation of the reported coffee-cancer link. It was suggested that life-style warnings, particularly warnings about risks that are newly recognized, do not produce strong avoidance motivations. Several reasons for this lack of avoidance are discussed.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1984

Why it won't happen to me: perceptions of risk factors and susceptibility.

Four studies were conducted with college student subjects to examine: (1) perceptions of susceptibility to health and safety risks; (2) factors that subjects see as important in determining their susceptibility; and (3) subjects' actual standing on objective risk factors. Subjects were generally unbiased about hereditary risk factors and were even somewhat pessimistic about environmental risk factors. Their views of their own actions and psychological attributes, however, were excessively optimistic. Few acknowledged actions or psychological attributes that increased their risk. This pattern of findings helps to explain why risks thought to be controllable (i.e., preventable by personal action) are likely to evoke unrealistic optimism about susceptibility. Family histories of health problems were incorporated into judgments of susceptibility, but, except for smoking, correlations between behavioral risk factors and judgments of susceptibility were surprisingly weak. Self-esteem enhancement is suggested as a motive that could explain many of the present findings. Several recommendations are offered for health campaigns that seek to produce more realistic perceptions of susceptibility to health and safety problems.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1982

Unrealistic optimism about susceptibility to health problems.

In this study, 100 college students compared their own chances of experiencing 45 different health- and life-threatening problems with the chances of their peers. They showed a significant optimistic bias for 34 of these hazards, consistently considering their own chances to be below average. Attempts to account for the amount of bias evoked by different hazards identified perceived controllability, lack of previous experience, and the belief that the problem appears during childhood as factors that tend to increase unrealistic optimism. The investigation also examined the importance of beliefs and emotions as determinants of self-reported interest in adopting precautions to reduce one's risk. It found that: (a) beliefs about risk likelihood, beliefs about risk severity, and worry about the risk all made independent contributions to interest in risk reduction; (b) unrealistic optimism undermined interest in risk reduction indirectly by decreasing worry; and (c) beliefs about risk likelihood and severity were not sufficient to explain the amount of worry expressed about different hazards.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Seeking reassuring or threatening information about environmental cancer.

This study examined information seeking as a potentially adaptive response to a new environmental health threat. College students in a state with a particularly high cancer rate were offered an opportunity to obtain either a reassuring or a threatening informational message concerning the cancer rate. Interview were later conducted with students who had and had not requested a message (N = 502). The results suggested that unconcern rather than defensiveness was the principal reason for not seeking information. Although a majority of both information seekers and nonseekers preferred the threatening message, the choice of message did depend on an individual's beliefs concerning the seriousness of the cancer threat. Most respondents selected the message which supported their own view of the issue. A preliminary model proposed to explain the data emphasized the ambiguity and controversy surrounding most environmental and health warnings.

Carcinogens, Environmental↗
PubMed1978

Cognitive processes and information seeking concerning an environmental health threat.

Interviews with 577 college students in New Jersey, a state with a high reported rate of cancer, were conducted to assess the ways in which they conceptualize this issue and to determine how they would react when offered an opportunity to obtain factual information about the cancer threat. Those who appeared to be most in need of information were found to be the least likely to seek it. Of students who were undecided whether or not living in the state would increase their chance of getting cancer, only 25.7 percent requested the information, compared to 49.1 percent of students who acknowledged the increased risk and 43.9 percent of those who denied the risk. Individuals who had not known previously about the high cancer rates were less likely to request information (37.9 percent) than those who had known (47.9 percent), and they used different arguments to justify their denial of risk. The specific arguments used by students to explain why they denied that there was a threat or why they planned to stay in the state in spite of the risk were generally unrelated to information seeking.

Adaptation, Psychological↗