The other day we had an hour call with David Lee, one of GE’s health economists (who we mentioned the other day). Anyway, I have about six pages of notes I need to parse and start posting, but this morning I was thinking about something very specific he said: People tend to overestimate small risks. A perfect example is cancer, while any individual’s chance of having it is relatively small we don’t tend to think about it that way. This overestimation can keep us from doing things like getting cancer screenings because we’re afraid of what we might learn.
So … In bed this morning I was wondering whether anyone had studied the effect of knowing this human trait on decision making. Like what happens if you remind people right before you ask them whether they’d like to be screened that all humans tend to overestimate the chances of something that is actually quite rare? Will have to ask David this next time we speak (and if it hasn’t been done maybe we can get someone to do the study). In some ways this feels like exactly the kind of intersection between marketing, health and economics that we can really be helpful in (as marketers).
Just a thought.