Judgment of riskiness: impact of personality, naive theories and heuristic thinking among female students.

ABSTRACT

Three different studies were conducted to examine the impact of heuristic reasoning in the perception of health-related events lifetime risk of breast cancer (Study 1, n = 468), subjective life expectancy (Study 2, n = 449), and subjective age of onset of menopause (Study 3, n = 448). In each study, three experimental conditions were set up control, anchoring heuristic and availability heuristic. Analyses of Covariance controlling for optimism, depressive mood, Locus of Control, hypochondriac tendencies and subjective health, indicated significant effect of experimental conditions on perceived breast-cancer risk (p = 0.000), subjective life expectancy (p = 0.000) and subjective onset of menopause (p = 0.000). Indeed, all findings revealed that availability and anchoring heuristics were being used to estimate personal health-related events. The results revealed that some covariates, hypochondriac tendencies in Study 1, optimism, depressive mood and subjective health in Study 2 and internal locus of control in Study 3 had significant impact on judgment of riskiness.