“Take care, honey!”: People are more anxious about their significant others' risk behavior than about their own

“Take care, honey!”: People are more anxious about their significant others' risk behavior than about their own. Mirjam Ghassemi, Katharina Bernecker, Veronika Brandstätter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 86, January 2020, 103879. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103879

Abstract: This research investigated people's affective reaction to and cognitive evaluation of risks taken by close others. Five experimental studies showed that individuals were more anxious when a significant other (e.g., their partner) intended to engage in behavior implying risk to health or safety than when they intended to engage in the same behavior themselves. This discrepancy did not emerge if the other was emotionally distant (e.g., an acquaintance), suggesting that the self-other discrepancy in anxiety is moderated by the quality of the relationship. Neither a perceived higher personal control, nor a perceived lower probability of encountering negative events, as suggested by research on self-other biases in risk assessment, accounted for the effect. However, it was partially mediated by individuals' tendency to imagine more severe consequences of others' (vs. own) risk behavior. Results are discussed with regard to their theoretical implications for the study of risk taking and close relationships.


7. General discussion

This series of studies points to the existence of a self-other discrepancy
in people's affective reaction to risk that has received little
attention to date. In five experimental studies involving hypothetical
risks, and in an event-sampling study in the field involving actual risk,
individuals reported more anxiety in response to a behavior implying
risk to health or safety when it was intended by a close other than when
it was intended by themselves. This discrepancy seems to be specific for
close relationships: Across studies, individuals expressed increased anxiety
about the risk behavior of a significant other (like the partner, a
family member, or close friend), but not the risk behavior of a distant
other (like an acquaintance). This result emerged equally for men and
women, speaking to the generalizability of the effect.
We tested several variables in their potential to account for the effect.
Neither self-other discrepancies in the perceived probability of
experiencing aversive consequences of risk, nor self-other discrepancies
in the capacity to exert control reliably mediated the effect. In fact,
there was only relatively weak evidence for self-other biases in risk
assessment in our studies. Already previous studies have pointed out
that the emergence of biases such as unrealistic comparative optimism
is tied to specific circumstances, for instance, that participants think of
a non-specified compared to a specified other, or that studies use a
particular type of answer scale (Lermer, Streicher, Sachs, & Frey, 2013).
Our studies methodologically deviated from studies on unrealistic
comparative optimism in an important way. Whereas these studies typically
ask participants to rate their probability of experiencing an
event relative to the probability of the average person of their gender
and age (Helweg-Larsen & Shepperd, 2001; Shepperd et al., 2013), our
participants either rated their own or another person's risk. Our findings
were highly consistent with those reported by Klein and Ferrer (2018),
who did not find self-other discrepancies in deliberate, but in affective
and experiential perceptions of risk.
In two studies, we assessed participants' deliberate perceptions of
the severity of consequences of engaging in risk, and did not find discrepancies
in appraisals made for self and others. However, when
asking participants to think of three consequences that might result
from taking the risk, participants stated less severe consequences for
their own (vs. others') risk taking. This difference partly explained their
increased anxiety about their significant other's risk taking. To note,
that individuals also thought of more severe consequences of a nonsignificant
other's than their own risk taking suggests that additional
factors need to be involved in explaining a discrepancy in anxiety that
emerges specifically between self and close others. A likely candidate
for this is the personal relevance of the others' outcomes, which varies
with closeness of the relationship. Thus, we assume the discrepancy in
anxiety to be driven by two factors: That more severe outcomes come to
mind for others' (vs. own) risk taking, and that these outcomes are affectively
relevant.
How can the difference in results based on the way that severity of
consequences was measured be explained? It seems that when being
asked to think deliberately about the likelihood and severity of consequences,
people evaluate risk similarly for self and others. However,
when being asked to freely list three potential consequences, the ones
that come to mind when thinking about others' (vs. own) risk taking are
more severe. This might suggest that the ease of retrieving severe
consequences differs. This discrepancy between deliberate judgments
and intuitive responses reminds us of previous work pointing out that
risk can be apprehended in two different ways, one analytical and one
experiental (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004).
Notably, it is possible that thoughts of more severe consequences of
others' (vs. own) risk taking are a consequence, rather than a predictor
of higher anxiety; future studies need to clarify causality (Fiedler,
Harris, & Schott, 2018). What follows is the question why individuals
think of more aversive consequences for others' risk taking than for
their own. Though speculative at this point, one reason might be a
systematic difference in perspective; studies suggest that visualizing
action from a first-person perspective emphasizes agency and control to
a stronger extent than visualizing it from a third-person perspective
(Kokkinara, Kilteni, Blom, & Slater, 2016). Another reason might be
that participants are more aware of the benefits associated with their
own (vs. others') risk taking, and the resulting feeling of positivity
might interfere with thoughts of aversive consequences. Indeed, research
shows that people like to conclude that an action is not risky
when it seems beneficial to them, as they use their feeling of “goodness”
or “badness” as a heuristic for their judgment of risk (Finucane,
Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000; Slovic et al., 2004). Both explanations
point to implicit, automatic processes, which are unlikely to
be accessible via participants' deliberate evaluations of risk.

7.1. Strengths, limitations, and future directions

A strength of these studies is their experimental design, precluding
that the hypothesized effect is based on individual differences (e.g., risk
taking propensity). A further strength concerns the fact that we verified
the effect across a range of health and safety risks. In future research, it
would be interesting to investigate affective reactions to other kinds of
risks. We do not expect that a discrepancy in affective reactions
emerges in response to all kinds of risks (e.g., social, financial), but this
is a question that needs to be answered empirically. Such investigations
would not only provide evidence on the scope of the effect, but would
also provide insight into its cause of occurrence.
Limitations of our studies are the use of single-item measures, the
reliance on non-representative samples with an over-proportion of
women, and the assessment of anxiety by means of self-report. Affective
states are highly subjective, pointing to the validity and relevance of
studying individuals' experience. However, this form of assessment can
be prone to bias, for instance, when individuals change their answer to
be consistent with societal norms or their ideal self (Van de Mortel,
2008). We tried to minimize these biases by controlling for trait social
desirability, which we did not find to have an effect, and by using between-
subjects designs, avoiding direct comparisons between self and
others. Nevertheless, future studies should complement self-reports by
physiological assessments or observer ratings of anxiety.
An endeavor for future research will be to investigate the implications
of the effect for close relationships. Our studies show that, as a
result of increased anxiety, individuals think that their significant other
should engage in the same risk less than they should themselves.
Starting from this, it would be worth investigating if and how the discrepancy
in anxiety influences the way dyads communicate in the
prospect of risk. When intending a behavior that contains risk, it might
often be the partner, parent, or best friend that expresses worry, or even
tries to convince the individual not to take the risk. Worry communicated
by a significant other may alert a person to existing threats
(Parkinson, Phiri, & Simons, 2012; Parkinson & Simons, 2012; Van
Kleef, 2009). Beyond a situational appraisal inherent in an affective
display, relational information is conveyed that might motivate the
acting person to behave with caution out of a sense of responsibility
(Parkinson & Simons, 2012). In this way, the effect might have a protective
function for close relationships. However, if the “worrier” later
intends to engage in risk him or herself, these differing standards may
likewise become a source of conflict.
Differing standards, or more specifically, people giving (good) advice
to others that they fail to live up to themselves, has been researched
under the term action hypocrisy (Howell, Sweeny, &
Shepperd, 2014). While the here studied effect might evoke interpersonal
behavior that looks like action hypocrisy, we assume the underlying
processes to differ. Action hypocrisy denotes a discrepancy
between advice giving and action in a context where action is a desirable
response. It results from varying psychological distance to own and
others' actions, and accordingly, the decision problem being construed
on different levels of abstraction. Due to higher psychological distance
to others' versus own actions, recommendations to others are to a
higher degree based on idealistic concerns (salient at a high-level
construal), while personal decisions are to a higher degree based on
pragmatic considerations (salient at a low-level construal). Two
predictions can be derived from this: First, intentions for distant (i.e.,
future vs. present) personal actions should, due to higher psychological
distance, be more similar to recommendations made to others. Second,
recommendations to close others should be more similar to personal
decisions than recommendations to distant others (Howell et al., 2014).
The second prediction stands in contrast to the here reported findings
that speak to a discrepancy between self and close, but not distant
others. Thus, different psychological processes seem to yield in the
observation that people's recommendations do not match their own
actions.
An applied context in which a gap between recommendations and
personal decisions as a result of differing levels in anxiety might be
particularly relevant to study is that of medical decision making. When
faced with an important medical decision, individuals typically turn to
their partner or close family members for consultation. Despite the
important role that companions play in health decisions, only few
studies have examined decision patterns made by patient-companionphysician
triads (Clayman & Morris, 2013; Laidsaar-Powell et al.,
2013). Based on our findings, it could be expected that companions
systematically favor less risky treatments (e.g., in terms of mortality
rate) than patients themselves (for a similar finding with physicians, see
Ubel, Angott, & Zikmund-Fisher, 2011).
To sum, this research adds an interpersonal perspective to the study
of risk that may contribute to our understanding of how people deal
with and affectively respond to risk. Further research is needed for a
complete understanding of the proccesses underlying the described
discrepancy in affective reaction towards own and close others' risk.
Based on the present findings, we suspect that people experiencing risk
differently for close others than for themselves may have implications
for the dynamics in close relationships.