Are some deaths worse than others? The effect of 'labelling' on people's perceptions

Angela Robinson, Judith Covey, Anne Spencer and Graham Loomes ()

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2010, vol. 31, issue 3, 444-455

Abstract: This paper sets out to explore the extent to which perceptions regarding the 'badness' of different types of deaths differ according to how those deaths are 'labelled' in the elicitation procedure. In particular, we were interested in whether responses to 'contextual' questions - where the specific context in which the deaths occur is known - differ from 'generic' questions - where the context is unknown. Further, we set out to test whether sensitivity to the numbers of deaths differed across the 'generic' and 'contextual' versions of the questions. We uncovered evidence to suggest that both the perceived 'badness' of different types of deaths and sensitivity to the numbers of deaths may differ according to whether 'generic' or 'contextual' descriptions are used. Qualitative data suggests two reasons why responses to 'generic' and 'contextual' questions differed: firstly, some influential variable(s) were omitted from the 'generic' descriptions and secondly, certain variables were interpreted somewhat differently once the context had been identified. The implications of our findings for 'generic' questions, such as those commonly used in health and safety and environmental studies are discussed.

Keywords: Preferences; Context; effects; Affect; heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-4870(10)00018-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Are Some Deaths Worse Than Others? The Effect of 'Labelling' on People's Perceptions (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:31:y:2010:i:3:p:444-455

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().