Risk perceptions and health behavior

• Interventions that change risk perceptions subsequently change health behaviors.
• Individuals form risk perceptions tailored to specific health threats.
• Risk perceptions can refer to deliberative, affective, and experiential components.
• These components can interactively influence health behaviors.
• The formation of accurate risk perceptions has implications for health behaviors.

Risk perceptions — or an individual's perceived susceptibility to a threat — are a key component of many health behavior change theories. Risk perceptions are often targeted in health behavior change interventions, and recent meta-analytic evidence suggests that interventions that successfully engage and change risk perceptions produce subsequent increases in health behaviors. Here, we review recent literature on risk perceptions and health behavior, including research on the formation of risk perceptions, types of risk perceptions (including deliberative, affective, and experiential), accuracy of risk perceptions, and associations and interactions among types of risk perceptions. Taken together, existing research suggests that disease risk perceptions are a critical determinant of health behavior, although the nature of the association among risk perceptions and health behavior may depend on the profile of different types of risk perceptions and the accuracy of such perceptions.