Question: I'm in the middle of updating the colours of our app and making them as consistent as possible, but also trying to bring them in line with the WCAG AA rating for contrast.

One area I'm unsure if I need to do this for, is an alert/info message that is displayed say at the top of a form to give users info about any warnings, or errors for example.

[![warning message](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfiLN.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TfiLN.png)

In this example, the text has an AA contrast of `7.09:1`, however the yellow box itself is only `1.39:1` and therefore fails, however the containing box is not a component, or anything a user needs to directly interact with so do I actually need to worry about the contrast here? From a design perspective, I'd prefer a lighter colour (and on the other message types as well) but am just conscious of the contrast

Answer: 
It could be a weird inversed effect of Negativy Bias, as the working hypothesis could be related to the idea that respondents liley associate 'none of the above' as a failure and feel compelled to evaluate the question proposed with weighted attention.

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> "..people combine information, they weigh negative information more heavily than positive; i.e., that the whole is evaluated more negatively than the average of its parts.." - David E. Kanouse (1984) ,"Explaining Negativity Biases in Evaluation and Choice Behavior: Theory and Research", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 11, eds. Thomas C. Kinnear, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 703-708.
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There is likely no silver bullet "research" here that supports the context in which you are stating, but i'd wager that the likely reason for 'none of the above' being a false negative is that the answer is doing its job, meaning it is likely encouraging the user to evaluate the question being more closely and of higher importance for fear of failure.
I believe the restraint comes from people not wanting to be **no one**. One solution for this is to give an option to describe oneself.

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mqJS8.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mqJS8.png)

You can then collect this data or group all manual entries as "other" on the backend.