The earliest studies of risk perception also found that, whereas risk and benefit tend to be positively correlated in the world, they are negatively correlated in people's minds (and judgments, Fischhoff et al., 1978). The significance of this finding for the affect heuristic was not realized until a study by Alhakami and Slovic (1994) found that the inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit of an activity (e.g., using pesticides) was linked to the strength of positive or negative affect associated with that activity as measured by rating the activity on bipolar scales such as good/bad, nice/awful, dread/not dread, and so forth. This result implies that people base their judgments of an activity or a technology not only on what they think about it but also on how they feel about it. If their feelings toward an activity are favorable, they are moved toward judging the risks as low and the benefits as high; if their feelings toward it are unfavorable, they tend to judge the opposite—high risk and low benefit. Under this model, affect comes prior to, and directs, judgments of risk and benefit, much as Zajonc proposed. This process, which we have called “the affect heuristic” (see Fig. 2), suggests that, if a general affective view guides perceptions of risk and benefit, providing information about benefit should change perception of risk and vice versa (see Fig. 3). For example, information stating that benefit is high for a technology such as nuclear power would lead to more positive overall affect that would, in turn, decrease perceived risk (Fig. 3A).