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You can see how the experiment works . If you hit the "refresh" button on your browser you'll see that sometimes the story has pictures and sometimes it doesn't. The words are always the same. Our aim was to see if adding pictures made any difference to the risk people felt of catching swine flu.

According to our experiment it would appear it doesn't. So the big blue virus at the top of this blog post isn't going to distract you from the facts within it!

And with over 500 people taking part we can be pretty sure about this. Indeed Dr Neil Stewart from the University of Warwick was pleased with the response and the broad spectrum of people who took part. So hopefully we'll do more experiments in the future.

Neil emailed me with some of the other findings;

540 people replied. 41% reported being female, 54% male. A wide range of ages, from 13-99, with a pretty even distribution from 20-70.

On a 0-10 scale measuring the risk, from "Not at all" to "Very much at risk", the median risk rating was 4, with half of people choosing between 2 and 5.

On a 0-10 scale measuring the seriousness, from "Not very serious" to "Extremely serious", the median risk rating was 3, with half of people choosing between 2 and 5.

There was absolutely no evidence that the inclusion of pictures affected risk or value ratings in any way. Because we had a large sample size, we can be pretty sure of this. But, we don't know whether other pictures would have made a difference, and we don't know whether over exposure of everyone to swine flu pictures meant our extra pictures had no effect.

Older people were slightly less likely to think they'd catch the disease (by 1/10th of a point on the scale for each 10 years of age). But older people thought it would be slightly more serious if they did catch the disease (again by 1/10th of a point on the scale for each 10 years of age).

Perhaps most interestingly, males and females did not differ on their estimates of the risk of catching swine flu. But women though the disease would be more serious (by one point on the scale) than men---perhaps not the stereotypical finding. That said, as women have more of a caring role for children and the elderly than men, their concern about the seriousness might reflect these factors.

Of course the journalist in me would have liked to see a dramatic difference between the two stories. But I can perhaps take comfort from the fact you all seem pretty well informed and unlikely to be swayed by presentation.

This result actually contradicts the American we based our experiment on.

Thank you for taking part and as we head into flu season it's great to know you all seem to have a real handle on risk.

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