Motivated Risk Assessments

Marco Islam ()
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Marco Islam: Department of Economics, Lund University, Postal: Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Box 7082, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden, http://sites.google.com/view/marcoislam/home

No 2021:12, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Do people form risk assessments to justify their actions? I investigate this question in a field experiment studying the dynamics of risk assessments for visiting a cafe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Randomly varying the incentive for a visit, I find that subjects with a high incentive visit cafes more often and downplay the risk compared with subjects with a low incentive. Importantly, the downplaying happens in anticipation of the visit and without new information, suggesting that the assessment update justifies engagement in risky behavior. This finding is inconsistent with Bayesian updating but consistent with the notion of motivated reasoning.

Keywords: Risk Assessment; Motivated Reasoning; Self-Deception; Field Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 85 pages
Date: 2021-10-28, Revised 2022-07-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-rmg
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2021_012

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