TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2002//
TI  - Perceived Event Frequency and the Optimistic Bias: Evidence for a Two-Process Model of Personal Risk Judgments
JO  - Journal of experimental social psychology
A1  - Voth, Rochelle D.
A1  - Pentecost, Heather C.
A1  - Price, Paul C.
SP  - 242
EP  - 252
VL  - 38
IS  - 3
N2  - People often judge themselves to be at lower risk for various negative life events than are their peers. The two empirical studies presented here show that the magnitude of this optimistic bias can be either negatively or positively related to the perceived frequency of the event, depending on whether people judge their own risk relative to that of an average peer (make comparative risk judgments) or judge their own and an average peer's risk separately (make absolute risk judgments). A new two-process model is presented to account for these results. The model combines a better-than-average heuristic with elements of the singular target-focused and singular- distributional models of Klar and colleagues (Klar and Giladi, 1997, 1999; Klar, Medding, and Sarel, 1996). The empirical results and model have many implications for the study of personal risk judgments, the optimistic bias, and risk-taking behavior.    See erratum in: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 38, Issue 4, July 2002, Page 434.<p />
LA  - 
SN  - 0022-1031
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jesp.2001.1509
ID  - ref1
ER  -