Investigating the operation of the affect heuristic: is it an associative construct?

Affect is of central importance in risk perception and risky decision-making, and the affect heuristic is a very influential construct developed in relation to this. We examined whether this heuristic operates at an associative level of processing as, despite much theorising, empirical evidence on this issue is lacking. We compared affective heuristic task performance with performance on established implicit association tasks. Participants (n = 151) completed explicit attitude and risk measures, and five experimental tasks (three Go/No-Go Association Tasks (GNAT), a priming task and a time-pressured affect heuristic task). A modified ‘risk-benefit’ GNAT provided a speeded analogue of the affect heuristic task which was equivalent to the evaluative GNAT in terms of response mode and cognitive effort. Affect heuristic task performance was not associated with implicit task performance. The evaluative GNAT did not correlate with the risk-benefit GNAT (speeded affect heuristic task). However, affect heuristic ...