Framing Effect in Safety Risk Probability Assessment: A Prospect Theory Approach

Abstract

Objective: To understand the relationship between the presentation of risk expressions in terms of loss/gain and safety personnel’s evaluation of risk probability in the context of prospect theory.

Background: One of the major topics of behavioral economics is the issue of decision-making under uncertainty, and prospect theory is the most prominent theory in the field. This theory claims that individuals’ perceptions of losses are more severe than their perceptions of gains, and thus, the utility–value function is not symmetrical.

Method: Two studies (N = 39 and N = 49) were performed in which business aviation safety professionals were asked to assess several risk expressions. In each study, subjects were divided into two groups. One group assessed unframed risk events, while the other assessed positively framed ones. Average probability values of each group were compared to each other, in order to understand whether framing caused a shift in risk assessment.

Results: Positively framing the risk expressions caused risk assessors to focus on threats instead of existing measures and to show “risk aversion” for two out of five risks – notably, the two related to human factors.

Conclusion: These results show that prospect theory predictions regarding decision-making under uncertainty may not be limited to financial decisions and can be extended to safety risk assessment.