Motivated Risk Assessments

Abstract Do people form risk assessments to justify their actions? We investigate this question in a field experiment studying the dynamics of risk assessments for visiting a café during the Covid-19 pandemic. By randomly varying the incentive for a visit, we find that participants with a high incentive visit cafés more often and downplay the risk compared to those participants with a low incentive. Importantly, the downplaying happens in anticipation of the visit and without new information, suggesting that the assessment update justifies engagement in risky behaviour. This finding is inconsistent with Bayesian updating but consistent with the notion of motivated reasoning.