Communicating Violence Risk: Frequency Formats, Vivid Outcomes, and Forensic Settings
John Monahan and colleagues build on an earlier finding that clinicians were more likely to keep a patient hospitalised when violence risk was framed as a frequency, such as 20 out of 100 patients, than as a probability, such as 20 per cent. That result was attributed to frequencies being easier to visualise. This study tested whether vividly depicting the violent outcome, compared with a pallid depiction, would similarly produce more conservative risk management decisions, using 226 experienced clinical psychologists with a professional interest in forensic psychology. Both frequency formatting and vivid depiction produced more conservative decisions, but only among clinicians working in forensic facilities.
John Monahan and colleagues build on an earlier finding that clinicians were more likely to keep a patient hospitalised when violence risk was framed as a frequency, such as 20 out of 100 patients, than as a probability, such as 20 per cent. That result was attributed to frequencies being easier to visualise. This study tested whether vividly depicting the violent outcome, compared with a pallid depiction, would similarly produce more conservative risk management decisions, using 226 experienced clinical psychologists with a professional interest in forensic psychology. Both frequency formatting and vivid depiction produced more conservative decisions, but only among clinicians working in forensic facilities.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-22 via the Penn State repository.
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doi:10.1080/14999013.2002.10471167. Read at the level of the abstract, which also summarises the 2000 study by Slovic, Monahan and MacGregor.