This site is an archive of a closed Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, provided for educational and historical purposes. Please note that this content is not routinely updated and that contact information and social links may not work.

Heuristics

Home

Why some women have an optimistic or a pessimistic bias about their breast cancer risk: experiences, heuristics, and knowledge of risk factors

 Perceived risk to a health problem is formed by inferential rules called heuristics and by comparative judgments that assess how one's risk compares to the risk of others. The purpose of this cross-sectional, community-based survey was to examine how experiences with breast cancer, knowledge of risk factors, and specific heuristics inform risk judgments for oneself, for friends/peers, and comparative judgments for breast cancer (risk friends/peers - risk self).

Perceived breast cancer risk: heuristic reasoning and search for a dominance structure.

 Studies suggest that people construct their risk perceptions by using inferential rules called heuristics. The purpose of this study was to identify heuristics that influence perceived breast cancer risk. We examined 11 interviews from women of diverse ethnic/cultural backgrounds who were recruited from community settings. Narratives in which women elaborated about their own breast cancer risk were analyzed with Argument and Heuristic Reasoning Analysis methodology, which is based on applied logic.

Syndicate content