Communicating About Risk

Abstract

Ask a scientist what “risk” means and, more likely than not, they will emphasize the likelihood of something nasty happening. But, as communicators and social scientists have examined the interface of technology and society more closely during the last 25 years, they have reached a general consensus that non-scientists view risk in an almost antithetically different way from those in the scientific community. Social scientist Peter Sandman (1991) has said, “The things that kill people and the things that scare people are diametrically opposed.” For scientists and engineers, and those who communicate about their work, the take-home lesson is this: citing the probability of something negative happening is never enough. If you want people who do not share your scientific viewpoint to accept your information, you’ll have to do more than cite probability. Scientists and engineers who deal in risk are usually driven by numbers and hard data obtained from tests and experiments. While these may be quantitatively valid for setting exposure levels and probabilities of accidents, such scientific observations do not deal with the broader public’s hard-to-measure psychological reactions to risks. The non-probabilistic aspects of risk are the focus of this chapter. When communicating about risk, public trust and the communicator’s credibility are the most important factors. Content has been shown to be secondary to these intangibles.