Alex Just Bought a Drain Cleaner: Situative and Product-Specific Factors that Influence Consumers’ Risk Perception of Household Cleaning Products
Angela Bearth, Michael Siegrist
Consumer Behavior, Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), ETH Zurich, Zurich

The Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS) ensures that consumers around the world, have a way of judging the environmental or health risk of using a particular product (e.g., cleaning product, pesticide, herbicide). For this, chemicals are classified by type of hazard, which in turn is communicated to the consumer visually via pictograms (e.g., corrosive, harmful, environmental hazard). However, it is yet unclear whether consumers use the pictograms to judge the riskiness of a particular usage situation or whether other, potentially misleading, aspects are used. For instance, previous literature found that consumers underestimate the riskiness of eco cleaning products, irrespective of the presence or absence of other risk information. To investigate this further, a 7x4x2x2 mixed-design, scenario experiment was conducted with a sample of Swiss consumers (N = 893). The within-factor denotes the seven scenarios that all participants were exposed to in a random order. The scenarios involved a particular cleaning product that differed between-person and was constructed by systematically manipulating the following three aspects: 1) type of cleaning product, 2) eco or regular product and 3) GHS pictogram visible or not visible on picture of the product. After each scenario, participants were asked to indicate how risky they thought the scenario was and how likely they would be in a similar situation. The results suggest that consumers form their risk perception based on the scenario, the particular type of cleaning product and whether it is labelled as eco or not, but not based on the presence of GHS pictograms. The likelihood of exhibiting risky behaviour was mostly related to consumers’ risk perception. While most participants accurately identified the most problematic scenarios (e.g., unsafe storage of drain cleaner), they were also misled by certain irrelevant aspects. This study supports previous findings regarding consumers’ partly irrational and heuristic judgments of household cleaning products. It furthermore stresses the importance of informing and sensitising consumers about the GHS pictograms.


Reference:
S35-04
Session:
Symposium – Intuitive Toxicology Revisited: People’s Perceptions of the Principles of Toxicology and Implications for Specific Applications
Presenter/s:
Angela Bearth
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
G1350
Chair/s:
Angela Bearth
Date:
Tuesday, 19 June
Time:
15:30 - 17:10
Session times:
15:30 - 17:10