Leveling the playing field using an asymmetric informational intervention: the case of radon risk surveys

Surveying behavioral intentions on unfamiliar health risks is challenging due to limited public awareness. Researchers therefore sometimes use asymmetric informational interventions (II) that provide background knowledge to less-informed respondents, before assessing attitudes and behavioral intentions. While such informational interventions are not suitable for experimental research—since they are provided asymmetrically, only to a specific subgroup—they still allow us to test whether instant information can influence people’s intentions to detect or prevent health risks. Guided by the Ability, Motivation, and Opportunity (AMO) framework, we analyze how such an II mitigates the effect of prior knowledge (ability), moderates effects for specific groups (motivation), and depends on prior campaign exposure (opportunity). Using survey data from seven EU countries (N ≈ 8900) collected in the EU-funded RadoNorm project, we test the impact of an audiovisual II about radon—an unfamiliar but significant lung cancer risk—on behavioral intentions and three of its main predictors: susceptibility, efficacy, and social norms. Findings show that the II partly reduces the prior knowledge gap and has generally similar effects across tested predictors and groups, suggesting well-designed asymmetric IIs can support informed responses without producing systematic differences in survey data. We do find that national campaign context conditions these effects, with stronger influence where public sensibilization is weaker. This study advances methods for researching perceptions of unfamiliar health risks.