Given that risk beliefs predict engagement in behaviors to prevent disease, it is important to understand the factors associated with risk beliefs. In the present paper, we conducted path analyses to investigate the associations of belief systems (political orientation and cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy) with COVID-19 risk…

Comparing health risks that include ratios of integers (e.g., 12 in 1,000) is challenging. We tested whether a worked-example intervention with number-line visual displays improved adults' risk-comparison accuracy, whether pretest confidence moderated learning, and which individual differences related to accuracy. Replicating prior work, U.S.…

As a key part of the behavioral immune system, disgust is thought to have evolved to motivate the avoidance of pathogens. While evidence for such a role is accruing, naturalistic tests of this thesis are few and exactly how "risk" is implicated remains unclear. Two pre-registered studies tested whether objective "or" perceived…

Health risks, when presented as ratios (e.g., two out of seven people), are challenging to understand, but visual displays can foster accurate understanding. We conducted three experiments to test how characteristics of numbers (Experiment 1), icon arrays (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and number lines (Experiments 1 and 3) influenced people's ability…

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception--whole number bias (WNB)--contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science…