Cuing Hazard Information for Consumer Products

Rice University undergraduates were given cued and non-cued consumer product questionnaires in order to determine the degree to which product cues would elicit user hazard knowledge, as measured by the number of generated accident scenarios. The difference in the number of scenarios generated by the two groups was not found to be statistically significant. However, there did exist a relatively strong, and significant, relationship between the number of generated accident scenarios and reported hazardousness, degree of precaution that would be taken, and the likelihood of reading the warnings associated with the product. The relationship between the production of known accident information in the form of accident scenarios and these dimensions is thought to have implications for the content of product warnings.