Special Coverage
Judging Likelihood of Safety Based on Information from Different Sources (112)
Toby Prike, Jakub Bijak, and Philip Higham (University of Southampton)
Summary by Jonathan Caballero, Digital Content Associate Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries
from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
Would You Have Met in Austin This Year Despite the Pandemic?
In this session, Toby Prike talked about how we take different sources of information into account to decide whether or not to engage in risky travel prospects.
If you were to start your own Odyssey, would you listen to Odysseus’s or Homer’s advice? Or nowadays: you just found a great vacation package, but there’s an ongoing pandemic. Do you follow travel advisories against travel or follow the advice of your friend to go on as he just had an inexpensive dream vacation?
Prike and his team used two realistic risky travel scenarios, a boat trip for migration purposes and traveling to reunite with loved ones during the pandemic.
He tested how the type of source giving safety advice and how verbal quantifiers of the likelihood of a safe journey (e.g., likely, unlikely) jointly influenced decisions to travel.
Results showed the following across travel scenarios:
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As shown in the figure below, official organizations (e.g., UN/WHO) and accounts of people with relevant experience have the strongest influence on travel decisions. Higher scores indicate a higher probability of deciding to travel.
If Psychonomics was an in-person event this year, who would you ask for advice before making your decision to attend?
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