Susan Joslyn

Special issue of APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 27, No. 4, December 2021. The studies contained in this special issue, conducted between April 2020 and March 2021, were selected to represent experimental research that is relevant to this unique situation and that also inform and extend existing theory. These studies investigate three broad topics: Risk perception, decision-making under risk, and risk communication in the context of COVID-19.

This experiment demonstrated that targeted scientific explanations can help members of the public understand complex but important climate change issues. It also demonstrated that providing uncertainty estimates along with climate predictions increased trust in the predictions themselves as well as in the climate scientists who produced them and the perception of scientific consensus about climate change.

This group of experiments provides strong evidence that nonexperts make better precautionary decisions under uncertainty when they have an explicit description of the risk involved, replicating the results of the handful of studies that have made the crucial comparison between decisions made with and without uncertainty estimates.