The thesis Risk Denial and Neglect: Studies in Risk Perception examines societal and individual attention to risks and focuses especially on the issue of neglect. Why do some risks get more attention than other risks and how is this difference in attention related to experts’ roles in society? What can explain people’s tendency to perceive risks as more pertinent to other people? These are some of the issues that are discussed in the thesis. The topics are of interest for, e.g., risk policies, risk management, and for designing campaigns aimed at minimizing risk-related behaviors. The dissertation is written within the field of economic psychology. The research questions are addressed in four separate papers based on three empirical studies. The Papers I and II focus on societal attention to risks. They address the issues of what risks are neglected and overemphasized in society and how the identification of risk is related to experts’ domain of expertise. Papers III and IV narrow down the discussion to individual processes of risk denial – why people tend to believe that risks are more pertinent to other people. The results show that experts in the present study tended to rate risks within their own domain as lower than other risks. They were more prone to act as promoters than protectors. In addition, the robust tendency of optimistic bias was shown to exist also for technological risks (related to the use of computers) and economic risks. Most people seem to hang on to their beliefs that risks are other people’s concerns – it simply won’t happen to them. The results of the present thesis suggest that the relevance of prior experience and the commonplaceness of the risk sources is an area that merits further investigation with respect to risk denial.

Covid-19 pandemin har orsakat ett stort antal sjukdom- och dödsfall i Sverige. Människors beteende är avgörande för smittspridningens utveckling och blir därför värdefullt att undersöka. Aktuell studie testade huruvida Femfaktormodellens personlighetsdimensioner respektive självbetjänande attributionsfelen, bättre-än-medel-effekten och orealistisk optimism, samvarierar med och predicerar smittförebyggande beteenden vid covid-19 pandemin. En enkät besvarades av 126 högskolestudenter från Mellansverige. Resultatet visade inget signifikant samband mellan någon personlighetsdimension och smittförebyggande beteenden. Personlighet kan inte predicera risk- respektive smittförebyggande beteenden. Samtliga mätningar av bättre-än-medel-effekter och orealistisk optimism visade positiva samband med smittförebyggande beteenden varav enbart bättre-än-medel-effekten vad gäller den egna förmågan att skydda sig mot smitta kunde förklara variation i smittförebyggande beteenden. Intressant för framtida studier är att undersöka vad som ligger till grund för dessa resultat samt vidare undersöka vad annat som kan förklara människors beteenden vid pandemiska kriser.

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