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Abstract Two 2017 experiments with a U.S. national opportunity sample tested effects of location, psychological distance (PD), and exposure to location‐related information on Americans’ Zika risk views and behavioral intentions. Location—distance from mosquito transmission of the virus in Florida and Texas; residence within states with 100+ Zika infections; residence within potential mosquito vector ranges—had small, inconsistent effects. Hazard proximity weakly enhanced personal risk judgments and concern about Zika transmission locally. It also increased psychological proximity, and intentions of mosquito control, avoiding travel to Zika‐infected areas, and practicing safe sex. PD—particularly social and geographical distance, followed by temporal distance, with few effects for uncertainty—modestly and inconsistently decreased risk views and intentions. Exposure to location‐related information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website—naming states with 100+ Zika cases; maps of potential mosquito vector habitat—increased risk views and psychological closeness, but not intentions; maps had slightly stronger if inconsistent effects versus prevalence information. Structural equation modeling (SEM) of a location > PD > risk views > intention path explained modest variance in intentions. This varied in degree and kind (e.g., which location measures were significant) across behaviors, and between pre‐ and postinformation exposure analyses. These results suggest need for both theoretical and measurement advances regarding effects of location and PD on risk views and behavior. PD mediates location effects on risk views. Online background information, like that used here, will not enhance protective behavior without explicitly focused communication and perhaps higher objective risk. 

Cross-sectional surveys, despite their value, are unable to probe dynamics of risk perceptions over time. An earlier longitudinal panel study of Americans’ views on Ebola risk inspired this partial replication on Americans’ views of Zika risks, using multilevel modeling to assess temporal changes in these views and inter-individual factors affecting them, and to determine if similar factors were influential for both non-epidemics in the USA. Baseline Zika risk scores – as in the Ebola study – were influenced by dread of the Zika virus, perceptions of a near-miss outbreak, and perceived likelihood of an outbreak. Judgments of both personal risk and national risk from Zika declined significantly, and individual rates of news following predicted slower decline of perceived national risk in both cases. However, few other factors affected changes in Zika risk judgments, which did not replicate in a validation half-sample, whereas several factors slowed or increased the rate of decline in Ebola judgments of the U.S. risk. These differences might reflect differences in the diseases caused by these two viruses – e.g., Ebola’s much greater lethality – but more longitudinal studies across multiple diseases will be needed to test that speculation. Benefits of such studies to health risk analysis outweigh the difficulties they pose. 

The objective of this study is to better understand the effects of media attention on Americans’ perceptions of risk by analyzing the different media sources and outlets, or “repertoires,” reported as used during the small 2016–2017 Zika outbreak in the U.S. We analyzed survey data from a four-wave longitudinal panel study over nine months – July 19, 2016 through April 24, 2017 (n = 743) – using an online panel of American adults. Media attention related to ratings of personal risk, U.S. risk, and need for action. Personal risk was enhanced more by reported attention to international coverage, reduced by certain reported website attention, but enhanced by reported attention to public health agency websites. U.S. risk was enhanced by reported attention to both domestic and international coverages, reduced by television. Judged need for U.S. action was enhanced more by exposure to domestic coverage, reduced by reported attention to television and local newspapers, but enhanced by reported exposure to BBC and CNN. Our results demonstrate how the use of different media outlets and sources are related to different perceptions of risk and need for action during 2016–2017 Zika outbreak. 

We use network psychometrics to map a subsection of moral belief systems predicted by moral foundations theory (MFT). This approach conceptualizes moral systems as networks, with moral beliefs represented as nodes connected by direct relations. As such, it advances a novel test of MFT’s claim that liberals and conservatives have different systems of foundational moral values, which we test in three large datasets ( NSample1 = 854; NSample2 = 679; NSample3 = 2,572), from two countries (the United States and New Zealand). Results supported our first hypothesis that liberals’ moral systems show more segregation between individualizing and binding foundations than conservatives. Results showed only weak support for our second hypothesis, that this pattern would be more typical of higher educated than less educated liberals/conservatives. Findings support a systems approach to MFT and show the value of modeling moral belief systems as networks. 

Different approaches to operationalizing the cultural theory (CT) developed by Douglas, Thompson, Wildavsky, and others in survey research on risk perceptions are rarely compared, never for the same people. We compare for US respondents the construct validity of cultural worldview measures developed by Jenkins-Smith and colleagues—including both indices of items refining the Wildavsky and Dake approach, and short paragraphs (cultural “statements”)—to those developed by Kahan and colleagues based on cultural cognition theory (CCT). Correlational analyses reveal moderate convergent and discriminant validity among these measures, and along with regression analyses controlling for demographic variables similarly moderate predictive validity across measures for judgments of personal risk for ten hazards. CT statements better discriminate between individualists and hierarchists, and CT indices explain more variance in judged risk (predictive validity) when controlling for demographic variables in regression analyses. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of our findings to foster further scholarly comparisons of and improvements in these survey-based cultural approaches to explaining risk judgments.