| Summary: | The pursuit of
unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries
various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used
in the literature to explain the decision to pursue an unhealthy activity,
represents that decision as a tradeoff between risks and benefits. We build on
this literature by surveying a rural population in South Africa to elicit the
perceived riskiness and the perceived pleasure for various risky activities and
to examine how these perceptions relate to the pursuit of four specific
unhealthy behaviors: frequent smoking, problem drinking, seatbelt nonuse, and
risky sex. We show that perceived pleasure is a significant predictor for three
of the behaviors and that perceived riskiness is a significant predictor for
two of them. We also show that the correlation between the riskiness rating and
behavior is significantly different from the correlation between the pleasure
rating and behavior for three of the four behaviors. Finally, we show that the
effect of pleasure is significantly greater than the effect of riskiness in
determining drinking and risky sex, while the effects of pleasure and riskiness
are not different from each other in determining smoking and seatbelt nonuse.
We discuss how our findings can be used to inform the design of health
promotion strategies.
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