SOE Faculty Evans and Teisl publish research on risk perceptions and food-handling practices

SOE Associate Professor Keith Evans, Interim Dean Mario Teisl, and colleagues (Amy Lando and Sherry Liu) recently published research on risk perceptions and food-handling practices in the home. Using multiple years of FDA Food Safety Survey data, they assessed the link between behavior-specific risk perceptions and three food-handling practices: handwashing, avoiding cross-contamination, and proper refrigeration of cooked foods. They found that optimism bias may distort food-safety risk perceptions, and therefore encourage participation in risky food behaviors. Their results suggest well-designed targeted information campaigns aimed at improving people’s safe food-handling practices must first decrease people’s optimism in the safety of their current practices. Given the lack of regulatory options to influence behavior in the home, reducing optimism bias may provide an effective tool to address issues related to safe food handling. As we experience the COVID-19 pandemic, this research suggests that policymakers should consider factors such as optimism bias when designing and implementing information campaigns. For more information about this research, click here to access the journal article published in Food Policy.