ArticlePeerJ2014
Out of control mortality matters: the effect of perceived uncontrollable mortality risk on a health-related decision.
Article in PeerJ, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Relationship Between Perceived Uncontrollable Mortality Risk and Health Effort: Replication, Secondary Analysis, and Mini Meta-analysis.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2024Pooled it
- Appealing to fear: A meta-analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories.Psychological bulletin · 2015Pooled it
- Behavioural public policy should take the psychology of poverty into account.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Unhealthy behaviours in disaster survivors are associated with scarcity and present bias.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Risk perception, compliance with COVID-19 measures, and the role of social media after China's lockdown lift.Heliyon · 2024Article
- The Uncontrollable Mortality Risk Hypothesis: Theoretical foundations and implications for public health.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Associations Between Early Life Adversity, Reproduction-Oriented Life Strategy, and Borderline Personality Disorder.JAMA psychiatry · 2023Article
- Perceptions of control over different causes of death and the accuracy of risk estimations.Zeitschrift fur Gesundheitswissenschaften = Journal of public health · 2023Article
- COVID-19: the relationship between perceptions of risk and behaviours during lockdown.Zeitschrift fur Gesundheitswissenschaften = Journal of public health · 2023Article
- Does higher perceived risk of morbidity and mortality decrease risk-taking?Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Predicting attitudes towards screening for neurodegenerative diseases using OCT and artificial intelligence: Findings from a literature review.Journal of public health research · 2022Article
- A qualitative study of perceptions of control over potential causes of death and the sources of information that inform perceptions of risk.Health psychology and behavioral medicine · 2022Article
- Path Tortuosity in Virtual Reality: A Novel Approach for Quantifying Behavioral Process in a Food Choice Context.Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking · 2019Article
- Broadening horizons: Sample diversity and socioecological theory are essential to the future of psychological science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Low perceived control over health is associated with lower treatment uptake in a high mortality population of Bolivian forager-farmers.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2018Article
- Local environmental quality positively predicts breastfeeding in the UK's Millennium Cohort Study.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2017Article
- Effects of local extrinsic mortality rate, crime and sex ratio on preventable death in Northern Ireland.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prior evidence from the public health literature suggests that both control beliefs and perceived threats to life are important for health behaviour. Our previously presented theoretical model generated the more specific hypothesis that uncontrollable, but not controllable, personal mortality risk should alter the payoff from investment in health protection behaviours. We carried out three experiments to test whether altering the perceived controllability of mortality risk would affect a health-related decision. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a mortality prime could be used to alter a health-related decision: the choice between a healthier food reward (fruit) and an unhealthy alternative (chocolate). Experiment 2 demonstrated that it is the controllability of the mortality risk being primed that generates the effect, rather than mortality risk per se. Experiment 3 showed that the effect could be seen in a surreptitious experiment that was not explicitly health related. Our results suggest that perceptions about the controllability of mortality risk may be an important factor in people's health-related decisions. Thus, techniques for adjusting perceptions about mortality risk could be important tools for use in health interventions. More importantly, tackling those sources of mortality that people perceive to be uncontrollable could have a dual purpose: making neighbourhoods and workplaces safer would have the primary benefit of reducing uncontrollable mortality risk, which could lead to a secondary benefit from improved health behaviours.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.