Comprehensive Examination of Heavy Metal Risk Perception = Focusing on Affect, Trust, and Health Literacy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Objectives: Heavy metals represent a substantial health risk in societies of rapid industrialization, such as South Korea. We examined the level of South Korean heavy metal risk perception and factors influencing this level.
Methods: A nationwide online survey of 800 individuals was conducted to measure the respondents’ affect, trust, health literacy, and risk perception.
Results: The risk perception ranked third highest out of seven risks compared, with the highest being radiation leakage, followed by hazardous waste dumps. A negative affect and little trust in public institutions were associated with a higher risk perception. Moreover, health literacy and socio-economic status (SES) indirectly fostered risk perception by exerting powerful influence on affect and trust, which in turn impacted the risk perception. In addition, those with the lowest health literacy showed the highest perception of risk, signifying a distorted impression of a risk; increased health literacy tended to heighten risk perception for the rest group.
Conclusion: Affect and trust are considered as heuristics that influence ordinary people’s risk perception. This study substantiated the role of those heuristics. Furthermore, we demonstrated that health literacy indirectly influences risk perception by directly influencing affect heuristic.