Risk Perception Alteration Due to Media Exposure
Sree Kanagala
Rutgers University
Research in the Disciplines
December 9, 2020
Introduction
In 2015, a mysterious online game known as “The Blue Whale Challenge” captivated audiences from many countries due to the game’s ability to influence its players into committing violent acts (Ozturkcan, 397). People would join the game as a joke and in 50 tasks, players would die. In Russia sources reported multiple suicides, yet it was still considered a sensationalized hoax until copycat games were widespread and it was too late (Adeane, Origin Story). The incident brought attention to how people are susceptible to having their beliefs altered when their guard is down online. Although there are many precautions that people take in their daily lives to avoid being harmed, these measures are ignored when their actions are from behind a screen and this action leaves vulnerability which can be manipulated (Ozturkcan, 395). Specifically, risk perception is trying to avoid harm, but when a person’s decision making is hacked, like in the case of the Blue Whale Challenge, perceiving harm becomes rigorous.
The current understanding of risk perception shows that there are many layers of information processing which occur before conscious decision making can be performed. Once something is visually recorded, the information is sent to the frontal cortex (Goldstein and Brockmole, 120). The frontal cortex is responsible for many complex systems such as memory and attention and is useful in analytical reasoning. However, if the human response system were based on the frontal cortex, immediate danger could not be assessed in time cortex (Goldstein and Brockmole, 120). Instead, the instinctive response for fear originates when the thalamus relays information to the amygdala and the flight or fight response is triggered based on the sparse immediate data available (Goldstein and Brockmole, 120). Later, the frontal cortex will have conducted some analysis and correlated it to the immediate response. Similar functions for risk assessment occur through the other four senses based on the environment however, these are just the anatomical systems in place. How risk is assessed and acted upon is not physically observable but rather has multiple approaches for explanation including cultural theories and psychometric theories (Bodemer, Abstract). Risk perception is single-handedly the behavior which covers the bottom line of staying alive. Without risk perception, a person would be in danger of death with every decision.
In the psychometric paradigm risk assessment is explained through both innate fears and environmental factors. Fears of predators for example, could be argued either as something learned over time or naturally occurring, but generally the consensus is that a dangerous animal will almost always trigger the fight or flight response in a normally functioning brain (Janmaimool, 6293). In some environments this fear is more applicable than others, and thus some populations are not exposed to fears that others have strongly encoded. How the perception of reality is developed and how fear ties into that has been studied in recent decades such as “When Dread Risks Are More Dreadful Than Continuous Risks: Comparing Cumulative Population Losses over Time” by Nicolai Bodemer, and a common understanding is that everyone has a Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308). This gap is defined as the biases which cloud the “truth” of reality from being viewed (Janmaimool, 6308). For example, after seeing snakes while living in the woods, seeing a stick momentarily might cause someone to confuse reality with their preconceived notions. This Perception Gap determines how safe someone can keep themselves from their environment and, circularly, the environment trains them on what to be aware of.
The time of postmodern technology is unique in that the environment is now global. Fears can be projected from all corners of the world and can shape an individual entirely based on a remote location. How risk assessment is being altered by the increase in media exposure and technology in general is an area which will need immediate attention. Current debates around social media include questioning the ethicality of creating unique algorithms to target users into learning the content that attracts them and then showing them more of it. While this sounds like a positive thing, it strongly affects common biases which distort reality and can stretch the Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308).
The COVID19 pandemic altered many aspects of life for people around the globe, and one channel that was heavily affected is technology use. Due to the in-person restrictions, work, school, and socializing were forced to be integrated online. While this is beneficial because systems continued forward, it brings up the question of how living virtually affects humans psychologically. Given that technology has rapidly changed in the previous few decades, it is shocking to think that in comparison, the brain has barely changed if at all and is adapting to this monumental shift. Given the sudden technology spike in the early 2000’s, people were already bringing up concerns about if they can adapt fast enough; psychologically and physically (Madeleine, Media and Media Consumption). This begs the question of what long-term change could occur with the influx of technology use during COVID19 isolation. Specifically, a major component of interacting with the environment is encoding risks of that environment. This is crucial for the basic task of keeping one-self alive. If people are stuck within four walls and interaction is virtual, what risks will they encode and when will they encode them? More importantly, how vulnerable are they to risk manipulation?
This topic is particularly crucial to study because the response to a global issue as aforementioned drove the world online seemingly overnight in the beginning of 2020. 97% of digital consumers have used social media in October 2020 and 63% state that they prefer using private messaging apps, which do not make them immune to the effects of digital consumption on perception alteration (FLAGSHIP REPORT 2020). The drastic increase in technology use will only further exaggerate the gap between perception and reality and in turn will directly affect how humans encode risk. This paper will delve into how social and information technology alters perception, and more specifically alters risk assessment. Furthermore, it will approach the more dire question of if these companies have a responsibility when directly affecting life-or-death decision-making processes and if it is an instance of villainy. The foundation of this paper will be set with some physiological understanding of risk analysis and then transition into studies about media exposure and perception alteration. A few key studies will be referenced to including the “The Effects of Risk-Glorifying Media Exposure on Risk-Positive Cognitions, Emotions, and Behaviors: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Peter Fischer in which a meta-analysis including 80,000 participants examines whether exposure to specific media increases risk-taking behaviors. Similarly, another case under analysis will be “When Dread Risks Are More Dreadful Than Continuous Risks: Comparing Cumulative Population Losses over Time” by Nicolai Bodemer in which types are risks are assessed. “Dread” is considered a risk which causes mass death versus “continuous” which is an underlying expected risk people have accumulated (Bodemer, Introduction). How social media affects these two categories will be discussed in conjunction to observations about the effects of quarantine.
This paper will be divided into three primary sections; the physiological understanding of risk, how this translates into physical concerns, and how this impacts quarantine and social needs directly. The first section will investigate various risk perception models and characteristics of risk. While these are not universally agreed upon, the paper will explain the overlap among them and why the psychometric model works in this scenario. The next section will be discussing how these physiological instances translate into physical effects. This section will demonstrate why it is important to assess the differences in risk assessment. A major case that will be discussed is the tradeoff between risk and reward. This will serve as a primary theoretical framework for the paper as it shows how risk can easily be manipulated and overwritten with the allure of a benefit. Specifically, the main point will be how rewards increase the gap between perception and reality in the instance of risk, called the Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308). There will be a few cases of this risk reward trade off illustrated which will transition into why that risk manipulation is an ethical concern. The third section will introduce the effects of pandemics and isolation and will target how risk manipulation will affect people who were quarantined in 2020. The main counter arguments addressed will be the need for social interaction during physical isolation and the theory that social media only exaggerates the human tendencies which innately exist. This will all lead to the claim that risk manipulation is a violation of one’s ability to self-preserve and thus an instance of villainy.
Physiological Explanation of Risk
Gaining a clear idea of how risk is encoded will guide an understanding of how it is altered with technology use. Cognitive science is a field which looks to connect the biological understandings of the brain with psychological and physiological studies and it plays a role in deconstructing risk (Goldstein and Brockmole, 19). Looking at how the brain physically operates does not provide enough insight into what invisible processes are occurring. For example, through an MRI scan, we cannot see thoughts and similarly there is no magnifying glass which reveals how risk is processed. Risk can be intuitively divided into many categories including time-dependency, damage, and control (Vassie, 68). It is understood that a fear of getting heart disease after turning 50 is not encoded the same way that the fear of being unemployed is for a 25-year-old. Similarly, the amount of damage being done and if the action leading to the risk was voluntary, will affect how risk is analyzed. In this case, what are the factor for an event being a risk? One common conclusion is that risk is tied to any loss in an environment (Janmaimool, 6293). This based on the psychometric model which states that a person's environment will dictate what risks to encode (Janmaimool, 6294). For example, a person living in the arctic will have a weaker mental model for assessing the risk of a snake than a polar bear. This section will introduce some cases which demonstrate how and why risk is processed.
A study was conducted in which people were asked to rank their fears and the corresponding estimates for how likely that action would cause death (Vassie, 65). Surprisingly, the actions the subjects correlated with high death probability were not even the things they thought were the riskiest. A sub-finding in this study was the sheer amount of impact overconfidence has in determining risk (Vassie, 80). Overconfidence can be tied back to the availability heuristic in which a person will not fear a risk if they are constantly exposed to it. Another key point of this study was analyzing the perceived risk next to the perceived benefit. When an event seems to have a high price but also a high pay off, the perception of the risk decreases (Vassie, 82). In another study by Janmaimool participants were sectioned off into pre-existing risk communities. There was a company responsible for bio-hazardous effects near the three groups but to varying degrees. The group living with the most contamination reported fearing the chemical effects the most but also reported that they were expecting the economic benefits of the company (Janmaimool, 6305). That conclusion seemed to be enough to affect their risk perception of their circumstance. The group with the least contamination were not even aware of the effects of the biohazard most likely due to the availability heuristic (Janmaimool, 6305). These two studies in conjunction begin to show how risk stems from conflicting motives often tied to the environment. This case begins to construct the risk and reward tradeoff framework. When a user is presented with a benefit, they will willingly take a risk without understanding the true balance of risk and reward. The true values for these parameters cannot be stated but the perceptions of risk and reward do not align with the real values. In the previously stated example, the people living in the contaminated village did not have enough context to know that the chemicals they were being exposed to could lead to a life-long illness. They did however have a better estimate of the economical increase the business brought to them. In this instance they had a large Perception Gap between perceived risk and actual risk and the rewards are what enlarged that gap (Janmaimool, 6308).
Another classification of the physiological origins of risk is through sensitivity. As mentioned before, time-dependency is a factor in risk perception but more importantly it has been shown to be more impactful than fatalities (Bodemer, Abstract). For example, an event where 50 people are killed in a mass shooting is more feared than sun exposure and radiation which is continuous and far more deadly. There was a study conducted on the difference between the sensitivity to time versus damage and the results show that the current perception is that continuous risk should be feared more is unaccepted (Bodemer, Results). There were three simulations set up with different characteristics altered, and the outcome demonstrated that dread risk is considered more impactful because it is an attack on an entire group (Bodemer, Simulation Set 1). “Dread” is defined in this study as the fear that an entire society might be affected. This is a monumental finding because if society is now considered the entire global landscape, risk assessment must shift accordingly. How might the brain cognitively change to protect billions of people, and is it moral to put that sense of responsibility on consumers? This is a reversed instance in which perceived risk is higher than actual risk. In the previous paragraph there were cases of people overwriting risk with reward. In this case, the perspective is flipped because a small event happening to a large group of people is perceived worse than a large event happening to one person. This finding shows that it is easy to manipulate a person’s sense of risk and ultimately their responsibility towards preventing that risk by demonstrating the mass effects it can have.
The three of these sources all demonstrate the concept that rewards overwrite risk. This is a critical framework which will be applied to all future cases in this paper to demonstrate how social technology can infiltrate someone's decision-making through appealing to their reward drives. When this occurs, poor risk perception translates into real-life harm.
Transition of Risk into Physical Effects
With the foundational knowledge of how risk is encoded, this next section aims to demonstrate how this seemingly nuanced risk model decides crucial things in everyday lives. First this section will explain two cases of risk manipulation leading people to make dangerous choices and the same findings will be reiterated with a meta-analytic study on risk-glorifying media exposure. The previous models of risk/reward and the psychometric model will be joined by the last framework which is the Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308). Overall, the aim is to demonstrate how certain media exposure could result in extreme situations.
Processing risk incorrectly can lead to increasing the chances of physical harm. One instance of this case is the Blue Whale Challenge in which hundreds of people were manipulated into harming themselves and others due to their perceptions being altered (Ozturkcan, 395). In 2015 there was a social media challenge which circulated the globe in a matter of days. People were asked to do fifty increasingly harmful tasks until the final challenge which was to commit suicide (Ozturkcan, 395). The shocking aspect of this challenge was that hundreds of people knowingly made it to challenge fifty. How did that many people get manipulated into losing control to the maximum level? The previous risk reward framework is a good place to start. Since risk in the psychometric lens is encoded through environment, and people are looking to increase their rewards, this must mean that somewhere in an online environment, people were overwriting their risks with benefits. However, this is an extreme case so the process of overwriting risk must have been highly influential. One study on the challenge explains that the game is broken in different levels- literally and psychologically. The first stage called Induction assimilates a person into this environment (Ozturkcan, 401). The author of the study states that these tasks start off as easy going but quickly manage to escalate with the player continuing. This paper argues that this is where the environment is being re-defined to the user. The game is now merging with their sense of reality and because of that, it does not seem extreme when they are asked to harm themselves. The next stage is Habituation which further envelops the player into that specific environment (Ozturkcan, 401). Now their mind has made a physical habit out of playing the game. Like brushing one's teeth in the morning, it just seems odd for them not to continue. But what is bringing them back? Rewards. In this game once a person finishes a challenge, they submit proof to the platform. The person running the game says congrats and hands them the next challenge (Ozturkcan, 401). However, the terrifying aspect of this game is that the reward they are chasing is not the game’s validation, it is their own. With ever increasing risk, their sense of accomplishment goes up. This means that even without a physical reward, this game was able to manipulate people into believing that the more harm they commit, the more accomplished they are. The game uses rewards to increase the gap between reality and what is perceived, the Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308). As they become adapted to dangerous situations, they alter how their risk is perceived and by the last stage, Preparation, they are not processing what dying is anymore (Ozturkcan, 402). The more the Perception Gap increases, the more likely cases of the Blue Whale Challenge occur.
Another common application of risk perception translating into physical effects is the anti-vaxxer movement. A paper was written about the 2015 measles outbreak in Disneyland where 147 people were infected (Capurro, 25). This traced back to kids who did not get vaccinated and their parents publicly argued that they do not believe in vaccines. The paper by Capurro argues that by labeling them as anti-vaxxers and alienating their view, they cement their ideas and get further polarized (Capurro, 25). This paper will investigate the spectrum of why people condemn vaccines and how their risk analysis model supports that belief. The frameworks mentioned until now are about environment-based risk coding, rewards overwriting risks, and increasing the Perception Gap, thus using these as a foundation to explain anti-vaxxer beliefs will develop the conversation. As Capurro’s paper states, the media has an initiative to tip the scales towards science; to make the voice of the truth objectively louder than conspiracy (Capurro, 26). This means that people who have scientific proof of a theory should have a heavier impact on the media than those without. This was with good intention, but it ended up isolating groups of people who do not support the main view. Because they were suddenly put down and unvalidated they were pushed into being more extreme and stubborn (Capurro, 28). They claimed that vaccines could cause autism, be government tracking agents, or even cause death, which understandably causes more concern than the measles. The anti-vaxxer group did not overwrite risks with rewards, they overwrote risks with greater risks. This group was assimilated to an environment online in which people were talking about foregoing the greater risk (Capurro, 28). With all this misinformation and alarmist news about what the government is doing or what the healthcare industry is hiding, they eventually rewired their risk analysis and increased the gap between reality and what they were perceiving. This was detrimental as people have died from preventable viruses and proves that the occasional Facebook article they read about refusing the flu vaccine ultimately impacted life or death scenarios.
A meta-analysis on risk glorifying media sums up the previous few claims. The study investigated multiple longitudinal, experimental, and observational studies to determine if being exposed to risk online affects how people act (Fischer, 367). Risk-glorifying actions in this study are defined as things like fast-driving, unprotected sex, gambling. Being exposed to these things have had a clear positive correlation with how much risk observers are willing to take (Fischer, 367). One of their findings was separating short-term influences from long-term model building and what they found showed that exposure to this type of media affected both cases (Fischer, 380). People who were recently exposed had a heightened sense of risk acceptance, but also over time their model for risk adapted to fit that increase of risk acceptance. A case they cited was the amount of exposure teens had to tobacco use directly correlating to if they end up with a tobacco addiction. As the media expands in a person's daily cognitive load, what they are exposed to will directly influence how their risk models are built. In the case of quarantine, people are at risk for doubling the cognitive load towards the media and thus time will reveal how this increase changed their risk metrics.
Quarantine Effects
The reason this topic is crucial to address is because of the rapid increase in media exposure, especially since early 2020 at the rise of the Coronavirus pandemic. This shift is imperative to study before long-term detrimental effects take place. This section will look at the effects past crisis’ like SARS had on populations and then will discuss some psychosocial findings of COVID-19. Using the three frameworks, it will be derived that people can expect long-term psychological harm in many regards.
A global pandemic will have lasting psychological effects that are independent of the health concerns themselves, and those psychological affects will be explored prior to predicting how media exposure will affect people post COVID-19. During the SARS epidemic people were asked to quarantine or take similar isolating precautions to COVID19 quarantining methods (Hawryluck, 1206). The effects have been meticulously recorded and thus can be used to predict what the outcome could be for the current scenario. The findings of the case showed that the primary effects were post-traumatic stress, boredom, and anger (Hawryluck, 1210). All three tied to isolation and fear of the virus. Because people were not able to have their usual social interactions, it caused long-lasting psychological harm and resulted in extreme cases such as suicide (Hawryluck, 1210). The people who adapted well had a single factor in common- their attitude towards why they were in isolation. The people whose altruism was appealed to were staying isolated with good mental health since they had freedom because it felt selfless. This category of people did not report an increase in anger or have significant lasting effects and it was primarily due to their ability to adjust their social habits (Hawryluck, 1210). It is understandable that people have social needs, and with current technology, which was not available during the SARS epidemic, people get to have their cake and eat it too regarding social interactions. People have shifted their lives online and this is where the increase in media exposure will alter everyone's risk perception inevitably.
The COVID19 pandemic had people reporting similar symptoms to the SARS epidemic. They reported that they feel acute anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and obsessive behaviors (Dubey, 779). But the results seem to be even more exaggerated in the case of COVID19. The difference between the SARS and COVID time periods is the rapid increase in technology use. In 2003 people were not remotely online for news and media consumption as they are now. And thus, one study argues that half of this crisis is an “infodemic” (Dubey, 781). This means that various news sources stating differing facts and not having unified claims made people unsure and untrusting. Most of the obsessive and compulsive actions have been traced back to not knowing what is right and taking every exhaustive precaution possible (Dubey, 781). This “infodemic” is what this paper will target in terms of understanding risk alteration. The sudden increase in media exposure along with the required isolation has determined that a person's current environment is their house and online. Since there is less consistency among sources regarding COVID risk encoding is difficult. One source may say that a certain mask is effective, whereas another might state that anything less than a hazmat suit is useless. Other polarized sources might state that the virus is completely non-existent. In a regular environment, there is not an argument about if a snake is dangerous, thus people will encode that risk and be alert when needed and move on. However, this risk is confusing in every factor this paper has mentioned. Is it a long term, ignorable risk (Bodemer, Introduction)? Is it a dread risk (Bodemer, Introduction)? Is it killing enough people to be considered an existential risk (Janmaimool, 6291)? There are no unified answers and thus this only creates a rabbit hole in which people just go looking for more information, and circularly end up frustrated. This is alarmingly similar to the Blue Whale Challenge from 2015. There was an Induction stage where people were drawn in by the entertaining aspect of being in a historic event- people were giddily Googling all the crazy changes happening all over the world and were assessing how interesting this year was (Ozturkcan, 401). Then there was Habituation where the media started covering it more and the positions that each source was taking was different. Eventually this inconsistency led to hysteria and people started buying out entire grocery stores to hunker down for this ambiguous risk. This Habituation continued as eight months passed and people assimilated to an environment where this risk is ever-present, and what the media covers only fed back into that panic (Ozturkcan, 401). Eventually this escalated into the Preparation stage. Some people became desensitized to the risk and begin participating in activities which put them at risk of contracting COVID19 and even worse, the fact that they did not get it acts as a reward for overcoming risky behavior just like the Blue Whale Challenge.
Social Interaction Needs
The use of social media and its effects are a paradox, which is the primary counterargument to this paper's motive. What if media is not the root problem, what if it is merely a symptom of something in human nature? In that case, social media is not altering risk perception, it is just exaggerating it and no one company or technology needs to shoulder the blame for an innate human tendency. This section of the paper will illustrate why media is important for risk encoding and how primal instincts could explain away this concern.
2.6 million years ago, when scientists discovered the use of tools by early humans, they also discovered a shift in the social scene (“How Hardwired Is Human Behavior?”). People were communicating beyond necessity through stories, memories, and gossip. From back then, it was important to talk about who was doing what to maintain social order within clans and to have advantages in things like food. The people who survived were the ones who knew the most about their environment, and for them gossip was the primary way to spread and receive “censored” information (“How Hardwired Is Human Behavior?”). Of course, the notion that something is secretive can only mean that it is advantageous to know and thus this gossiping nature of communication has stuck. People enjoy knowing that they are aware of something everyone else is not because it makes them more likely to survive. When aspects like this are ingrained in human nature, it begs the question, is it the media's fault even if it does alter risk perception? If it is hardwired in humans to enjoy gaining knowledge through “infodemics” to be more likely to survive, who is really at fault (Dubey, 781)?
The double-edged sword of media use during the pandemic is that without using the media to stay connected, even worse psychological effects could take place. A lot of the sources cited thus far mention that social interactions are a necessary part of mental development and mental health. This means that either people are exposed to risk altering media but have social relationships or they have no social relationships but are not exposed to risk altering media. Both options are not optimal and so social media companies have the right to argue that they are maintaining mental health. In fact, studies show that the people who perceive the most social support during isolation are the ones who voluntarily quarantine and those who participate with experience sharing activities online (Chatterjee, 1394). These activities include being in online hobby communities or even attending school where people can share their struggles. This much is clear, there is a tradeoff between social needs and media manipulation and that boundary is difficult to assess.
Final Thoughts
The primary frameworks this paper discussed were the psychometric model for encoding risk, the risk reward tradeoff, and the Perception Gap (Janmaimool, 6308). Cumulatively, these three models explain how and where risk can be manipulated through media and how this can translate into physical harm, which when done knowingly is a criminal act. Especially during a time in which media exposure is necessary for survival, the tradeoff between media manipulation and social needs becomes dire to assess for every individual. Some suggested readings for this topic are “Construction of the Risk of Addiction to Social Networks Scale (Cr.A.R.S.)” in the Humans in Computers journal and “18 Years of ethics in child-computer interaction research: a systematic literature review” which both discuss different implications of evolving media usage. This is a conversation which will only increase in importance, and the alarming news is that with more risk perception manipulation, there is no guarantee that the risk of this event will be properly reacted to given enough time.
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