Beyond concern: exploring risk attention as a marker of relevance in risk perception

Risk perception research often assumes that survey-reported concerns reflect the everyday relevance of risks in people’s lives. That assumption is examined by introducing risk attention as a proxy for everyday-life relevance—capturing how frequently individuals think about a risk beyond the survey situation. The analysis also evaluates how different knowledge bases of risk perception (experience-based, media-based, heuristic) relate to both attention and concern, offering a more differentiated view of what underlies public judgments. Using an online sample (N = 1666) and a 2 × 3 factorial design, participants were randomly assigned to one of two prompting conditions (neutral vs. explicit low-risk framing) and evaluated three different risk issues (aluminium in antiperspirants, vitamin A in cosmetics, microplastics in tuna). This design allows testing the relationships of everyday-risk relevance with other psychological variables across different informational prompts and hazard types. The study demonstrates that risk attention is empirically distinct from concern. It is strongly associated with psychological outcomes such as anxiety, modern health worries, and warning intentions. Moreover, the knowledge base of risk perception is linked to risk attention: experience-based perceptions elicit the closest attention, media-based perceptions moderate levels, and heuristic reasoning elicits the lowest, while concern remains stable across knowledge groups. Overall, the findings shed light on the motivational foundations of risk perception. Risk attention reflects how strongly people are engaged with a risk issue. It predicts emotional involvement and precautionary tendencies. These outcomes underscore that risk perception is not merely an evaluative judgment but a motivational process shaped by salience, related to the type of knowledge people rely on when evaluating risks. Therefore, incorporating risk attention into risk-perception surveys enhances the validity and usability of findings, reduces the likelihood of overstating public worry, and provides a sharper basis for understanding how different knowledge sources influence the salience and motivational force of perceived risks.