John W. Brelsford

Consumer product warnings: The role of hazard perception

Three studies examined factors associated with peoples hazard perceptions of consumer products. A specific interest was how these perceptions relate to willingness to read product warnings. In Study 1, 72 generically-named products were rated on perceived hazard, familiarity, and several expectations associated with warnings, including willingness to read them. Willingness to read warnings was found to have a strong positive relationship with perceived hazard. Though familiarity was negatively related to willingness to read warnings, it provided little predictive value beyond perceived hazard. In addition, products judged as more hazardous were expected to have warnings, to have them in close proximity to the product, and to be less aesthetically impaired by prominent warnings. Since hazard perception was found to be an important determinant of willlingness to read warnings, potential components of hazard perception were examined in Studies 2 and 3. Study 2 showed that perceived severity of injury related more strongly to perceptions of hazard than likelihood of injury. In Study 3, participants generated accident scenarios and rated the severity and likelihood of each scenario. For each product, they also judged overall hazard and their intent to behave cautiously. Results supported the two earlier studies and showed that severity of the first generated scenario was most predictive of hazard perception. Theoretical implications and applications for warning design are discussed.

Receiver Characteristics in Safety Communications

Safety instructions and warnings are communications. It is important that characteristics of receivers, the target audience, be taken into account in designing such communications. Four categories of receiver characteristics that are important for warnings are demographic (gender and age), familiarity and experience with the product or situation, competence (technical knowledge, language and reading ability), and the perception of hazardousness. Research and experience indicate that variability in these receiver dimensions has important implications for the design and effectiveness of warnings. Even when the warning designer has attempted to take into account these target audience factors, there is a final step that generally should be included in the design process. This step is to “test” the warning on a target audience sample.

Consumer Products: How are the Hazards Perceived?

Two questionnaire studies were conducted examining potential components of perceptions of consumer product hazardousness. In Study 1 subjects rated 72 consumer products on perceived hazardousness, expected severity of injuries, and perceived likelihood of injury. The results indicate that severity relates more strongly than injury likelihood with perceived hazardousness. Several product knowledge variables were also examined; these results indicate that technological complexity and confidence in knowing the products hazards add unique variance beyond severity in the prediction of hazard perception. In Study 2 subjects generated accident scenarios for each of 18 consumer products. Subjects rated each scenario according to the severity of the accident and the probability of its occurrence and also provided ratings of overall product hazardousness. Results supported the findings of Study 1. The severity of product injury scenarios were strongly and positively correlated with hazardousness. Probability of injury ratings added negligible hazard predictiveness beyond severity. Product hazardousness was highly correlated with the level of precaution subjects would reportedly take when using the product. For high hazard products the first scenario generated was most severe compared to the other two scenarios. For low hazard products, the first scenario was most probable and the least severe of the scenarios generated. Practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Perceptions of Consumer Products: Hazardousness and Warning Expectations

This research examines several characteristics of consumer products that influence warning communication. Seventy-two generically-named products were rated according to perceived hazardousness, familiarity, and several other measures: 1) willingness to read warnings, 2) need for warnings, 3) location of warnings, and 4) appearance of products with warnings. The results indicate that reported willingness to read warnings is strongly and positively related to the perceived hazardousness of the product. Though product familiarity is significantly related to willingness to read warnings, it provides little predictive value beyond hazardousness. Additional analyses showed, the more hazardous the product: 1) the greater the need for warnings, 2) the closer to the product one expects to find a warning, and 3) the less warnings detract from the appearance of such products. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to applications for warning design.

Relative Contribution of Likelihood and Severity of Injury to Risk Perceptions

The degree of caution that people are willing to take for a given product is largely determined by their perceptions of the risk associated with that product. Research suggests that risk perceptions are determined by the objective likelihood or probability of encountering potential hazards (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein, 1979). However, there is also research suggesting that objective likelihood plays little or no role in determining risk perceptions. Rather, risk is determined by the subjective dimension of the hazard or in other words, the severity of injury (Wogalter, Desaulniers and Brelsford, 1986, 1987). The present research examined aspects of these two studies in an attempt to reconcile the observed differences. Subjects evaluated either the Wogalter et al. (1986, 1987) products or the Slovic et al. (1979) items on eight rating questions. Results demonstrated that severity of injury was the foremost predictor of perceived risk for the Wogalter products, but that likelihood of injury was primarily responsible for ratings of risk for the Slovic items. The two lists differed substantially on all the dimensions evaluated, suggesting that the content of the lists is responsible for the contrary findings. In a second study, subjects rated another set of generic consumer products. These ratings showed a pattern of results similar to the Wogalter products. Overall, this research: (a) explains the basis for conflicting results in the risk perception literature, and (b) demonstrates that severity of injury, and not likelihood of injury, is the primary determinant of peoples perceptions of risk for common consumer products.

The New Alcohol Warning Labels: How Noticeable are They?

An experiment was conducted to assess the effect of various existing warning design factors on the noticeability of warnings on alcoholic beverage containers. One-hundred containers, 50 with warnings and 50 without, were used as stimuli and the time required to determine whether or not a warning was present was recorded. The results indicate that warnings on the front label were found more quickly than warnings appearing in any other location. Also, warnings printed horizontally were found more quickly than warning printed vertically. A regression analysis found that features of the signal word/phrase (“Government Warning”), as well as the amount of “noise” or clutter on the surrounding label, significantly influenced warning detection times. Thus, some of the design features currently used were shown to have an effect on noticeability of warning information. It is suggested that proper manipulation of these features could make the mandated warning more noticeable.

Judgments of Hazard, Risk, and Danger: Do They Differ?

There were three purposes of the present research. The first was to test whether some of the discrepancies found in the hazard and risk perception literature were due to differences between the connotations of the terms hazard and risk. The second purpose was to examine the relationship between willingness to read warnings and generalized cautious intent, as well as other relevant variables suggested by past literature. The third purpose was to examine the relation between objective measures of injury (e.g., frequencies of hospital emergency room admissions) and peoples subjective perceptions. The results showed that the expressions of hazardous, risky, dangerous and hazardous-to-use connote the same meaning to lay participants. Strong intercorrelations were found between overall unsafeness (a composite of the four hazard-risk expressions), injury severity, cautious intent, and willingness to read warnings. While injury likelihood played a small part in the prediction of willingness to read warnings, the results indicated that overall unsafeness (and severity of injury) play the foremost role in peoples judgements of whether to read warnings and to act cautiously. No relationship was observed between objective measures of injury frequency and peoples subjective perceptions of injury likelihood which is taken as a further indication that people do not readily use injury likelihood in their judgements of product safety. The implications are two-fold. First, the results suggest that lay persons do not interpret the term risk in the same way as do experts. These results suggest that other terminology and language may be needed to express probability to lay persons. Second, the results suggest that designers of warnings and educational materials should focus their attention to ways that appropriately communicate how badly a person can get hurt, rather than (or to a lesser extent) the likelihood of getting hurt.

Enhancing Comprehension and Retention of Safety-Related Pictorials

Because of their relatively universal information transmission potential, pictorials have been suggested as a common means of safety communications across heterogeneous groups of users and uses. The present study used a training paradigm designed to enhance comprehension and retention of pharmaceutical and industrial-safety pictorials. Manipulated were time of testing (prior to training, immediately following training, and after a one-week delay), content of instruction (supplying the associated verbal label vs. the verbal label plus an extra explanatory statement), and difficulty level (“easy” vs. “difficult” to understand pictorials according to comprehension rates in earlier studies). Using an incomplete factorial mixed-model design experiment, the results showed substantial training effects. There was little change in scores between the test immediately after training and the test after a one-week delay (and the final test scores did not differ between participants who took or did not take the immediate post-training test). Easy pictorials were comprehended (both initially and following training) better than difficult pictorials, although the latter showed the most dramatic increase in understandability after training. Additionally, the instruction content manipulation (adding the explanatory statement to the verbal label)—which had been expected to influence the degree of encoding–had no effect on retention. The substantial gains in understanding the more difficult pictorials suggest that brief training, as little as giving the pictorials verbal meaning once, can have a large impact in facilitating comprehension for pictorials that would otherwise not be understood by many people.

Cuing Hazard Information for Consumer Products

Rice University undergraduates were given cued and non-cued consumer product questionnaires in order to determine the degree to which product cues would elicit user hazard knowledge, as measured by the number of generated accident scenarios. The difference in the number of scenarios generated by the two groups was not found to be statistically significant. However, there did exist a relatively strong, and significant, relationship between the number of generated accident scenarios and reported hazardousness, degree of precaution that would be taken, and the likelihood of reading the warnings associated with the product. The relationship between the production of known accident information in the form of accident scenarios and these dimensions is thought to have implications for the content of product warnings.

Incidental Exposure to Rotating Warnings on Alcoholic Beverage Labels

No previous research has been published specifically aimed at determining the effectiveness of rotating warnings (as is required in the government-mandated cigarette warnings). This issue has become relevant because decisions may be made with respect to rotating warnings in print and broadcast alcoholic beverage advertisements, and perhaps for labels and ads for other products as well. The present study used 80 participants in a controlled incidental-exposure laboratory experiment. The effect of the current government warning label for alcoholic beverages was compared to a 5-warning and a 10-warning rotating scheme as well as a no-warning control condition. The study was disguised as marketing research where participants were incidentally exposed to the warnings while evaluating a set of alcoholic beverage labels. The dependent measure was performance on a test of alcohol facts and hazards. Findings show that the present single government warning label is inadequate compared to multiple (rotated) warnings. The 10-warning condition produced higher test scores than either the single government warning or no-warning conditions. Overall, the 5-warning condition produced intermediate levels of knowledge. Also, four exposures produced greater specific warning content knowledge than either two or no exposures. The results suggest that rotating multiple warnings are a better means of communicating facts and hazards than a single repeated warning of limited content. Policy implications are discussed.