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OCR for page 14
Introduction
When government agencies must decide whether to evacuate
people from areas where toxic substances are leaching from waste
dumps, set standards for exposure to suspected carcinogens, or de-
cide whether to license nuclear power plants despite some low prob-
ability of rupture in a future earthquake, democratic societies are
faced with difficult choices. The usual criteria of consensus or social
acceptability are insufficient to resolve such issues of modern tech-
nology. The decisions also need to be scientifically informed, because
some choices set in motion physical or biological processes whose
results, if they could be foreseen, would be considered undesirable by
most people.
Only a few experts possess the best knowledge available to es-
timate accurately the extent of the possible harm or the likelihood
of its occurrence. But while great weight needs to be given to the
specialized knowledge of these experts, democratic principles require
that the decisions be controlled by officials, generally nonspecialists,
who are answerable to the public. As Jefferson realized Tong ago,
public decisions that require specialized knowledge raise questions
about political power.
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but
the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough
to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is
14
OCR for page 15
INTROD UCTION
not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. (Thomas
Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jamris, September 28, 1820)
15
To remain democratic, a society must find ways to put specialized
knowledge into the service of public choice and keen it from h~.omin
the basis of Dower for on slits
~0
Because technological- decisions have implications for public
health and for political power, they are often highly contentious
and emotional. Participants, expert and nonexpert alike, have much
at stake and are strongly motivated to work for the outcomes they
favor. The ensuing political struggles are often frustrating for the
participants. Nonexperts are frustrated by the inaccessibility of the
knowledge they need to inform their opinions and by presentations
of needed knowledge that are oversimplified, overly technical, or
condescending in tone. Technical experts are frustrated when their
explanations of available knowledge are met with apathy, disbelief,
or anger. Government and corporate officials- are frustrated when
their discussions of technological alternatives are met by expressions
of public mistrust and accusations of malevolence. Environmental
activists are frustrated by requirements that they argue positions
that are based on human and environmental values in the language
of science and technology and by lack of sufficient resources to make
technical arguments strongly.
Participants come to see the debates in different ways, depending
on their positions in them and the frustrations they have experienced
(Dietz et al., 1989; Edwards and van Winterfeldt, 1986; Lynn, 1986
Otway and von Winterfeldt, 19823. Many, especially in the scientific
and technical community and in government, have defined the un-
derlying problem in terms of "public understanding of risk," "risk
perception," and "risk communication." They believe that what
is needed is for people to better understand or more accurately
perceive the potential costs and benefits of certain technological op-
tions. To accomplish this, they argue that scientists, governments,
and the mass media need to do a better job of risk communication,
by which they mean explaining the choices and their likely conse-
quences to nonexperts. They argue that increased efforts of this kind
would make conflicts about technological choices easier to resolve
and would enable the society to make better choices about protect-
ing public health, safety, and environmental quality. For reasons
elaborated throughout this report, we believe this concept of risk
communication and decision making is incomplete and, in important
OCR for page 16
16
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
respects, misleading; it supports misconceptions about the risk com-
munication process and raises unrealistic expectations about what
risk communication can accomplish.
THE NEW INTEREST IN "RISE COMMUNICATION
Interest in "risk communication" is quite recent.1 That interest
is evident in a recent explosion of conferences, seminars, articles,
and books with the term "risk communication" in their titles (Bean,
1987; Covello et al., 1987b, 1988; Davies et al., 1987; Fischhoff, 1987;
Lind, 1988; Otway, 1987; Plough and Krimsky, 1987; Zimmerman,
19873. It reflects increased attention, especially in some agencies
of the federal government but in other organizations as well, to
the task of informing the general public about the nature of the
health, safety, and environmental risks associated with personal and
societal choices. The new concern with informing the public has
several motivating sources, not entirely consistent with each other,
including (1) a requirement for or desire by government to inform, (2)
a desire by government or industry officials to overcome opposition
to decisions, (3) a desire to share power between government and
public groups, and (4) a desire to develop effective alternatives to
direct regulatory control. Moreover, the term risk communication
has different meanings to different users.
Requirement for or Desire by Government to Inform
Sometimes government is required to inform the public. A series
of federal laws, beginning with the Administrative Procedures Act
of 1946 and continuing with the Freedom of Information Act, the
National Environmental Policy Act, and the "Community Right to
Know" provisions of Title IT! of the Superfund Amendments and
Reauthorization Act of 1986, recognizes the public's right to be
informed about certain hazards and risks, even if they have no part in
the decision-making process. Many of these laws have been reinforced
by federal court decisions and presidential executive orders. These
actions emphasize the government's responsibility to be accountable
to the people; they state as national policy that regulators must
explain why one course was chosen rather than another and that the
public has a right to see and challenge the basis for the decisions.
Thus agencies are required to send messages to the public about the
reasons for their decisions and to solicit messages of comment from
citizens. The term risk communication is sometimes used to describe
these messages.
OCR for page 17
INTROD UCTION
17
Some government officials provide information not required by
law. Regulatory officials sometimes do this because they believe that
people would benefit from specific knowledge. For instance, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the past few years has
made an effort to inform householders about the hazard of radiation
exposure from indoor radon. And public health officials, responding
to their general mandate, have long offered information to citizens
about the health risks of dietary and sexual habits, drug and alcohol
use, and other personal activities. Provision of such information is
what some public health officials mean by risk communication.
-
Des~re to Overcome Opposition to Decisions
Over the past 30 years public participation in debates on tech-
nological issues has intensified. More groups have become involved,
including workers potentially at risk from hazardous activities, reg-
ulatory organizations, citizens' and environmental groups, the press,
and the courts. The proponents of controversial technological options
or decisions, most frequently in government or industry, often meet
intense political opposition. Frequently, groups of citizens who op-
pose particular technological projects have delayed or stymied those
projects with lawsuits, mobilization of congressional opposition, or
public demonstrations. When a government or industry official has
the benefit of extensive scientific study and the opposition seems
simply to disregard the technical evidence, the official can come to
see "the public" as irrational. Government and industry officials who
see the issues this way are likely to define the conflicts that surround
them as debates between the informed and the ignorant or, worse,
between the rational and the irrational. Such officials are tempted to
look for ways to influence the members of the opposition, either by
more actively presenting a straightforward account of the knowledge
they have available or by carefully packaging or even distorting that
knowledge to achieve a persuasive effect. The use of information to
overcome political opposition makes some notion of risk communica-
tion attractive to many proponents of controversial technology; it is,
in fact, what they mean by the term.
Desire to Share Power Between Government and Public Groups
Government officials have sometimes seen in risk communication
a way to reduce conflict with segments of the public by sharing power.
In this situation an agency takes the role of technical analyst and
OCR for page 18
18
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
adviser, gathering and summarizing the information relevant to a
decision at hand and explaining that information to various political
actors. The agency's role might be to inform a public debate, for
instance, in a legislative decision on siting of a hazardous facility.
Or, if the agency is legally required to make the decision itself, it
can provide information to the public and use the ensuing debate to
help arrive at a decision that it judges to be both defensible within
its legal mandate and maximally acceptable to the interested parties
involved.
Such an approach was used, albeit unsuccessfully, by the EPA in
a controversial case in 1983. Prior to making a regulatory decision
about an Asarco Corporation smelter that was releasing arsenic into
the air, the agency presented the people of Tacoma, Washington,
with the best information it had available about the risks and ben-
efits of three possible outcomes: continued operation of the smelter,
operation with pollution controls added, and closing of the smelter
(Krimsky and Plough, 19-88~. EPA intended that the ensuing dia-
Togue would help the community arrive at its own preference and
inform EPA so it could make a defensible decision that would also
satisfy local opinion. Administrator William Ruckelshaus justified
his action, which depended critically on the success of the agency's
efforts to provide information, with an appeal to Jefferson's advice to
inform the public's discretion (Ruckelshaus, 1983~. The incident led
to a heated controversy in which EPA was accused by some of an eva-
sion of its responsibility and by others of attempting to manipulate
the public by presenting an incomplete set of options. Although the
smelter was shut down by Asarco before the public process ran its
course, Ruckelshaus's goal of achieving consensus appears unlikely
to have been attained.
Desire to Develop Effective Alternatives to Direct
Regulatory Control
Government officials sometimes wish to persuade individuals to
protect their health by personal action rather than to adopt regula-
tory policies that require health-protective actions. The new interest
in risk communication in government partly reflects a search for al-
ternatives to direct regulatory control of health hazards, which was
accelerated in the 1980s by the Reagan administration's philosophi-
cal opposition to regulation. Government agencies have sought ways
to control hazardous substances or activities short of banning them
OCR for page 19
INTROD UCTION
19
(as they have done with high-dose vitamin preparations), restricting
or taxing them (as with alcohol), or requiring control measures (as
with seat belts). Some of the alternatives involve replacing regulatory
prohibitions and financial penalties imposed on those who produce
hazardous technologies with reliance on informed discretion of the
users of those technologies. For instance, the early 1980s brought a
shift in the government's treatment of most motorists' unwillingness
to use seat belts. A regulatory requirement that manufacturers equip
cars with air bags or other "passive restraints" to protect passengers
who fad! to fasten seat belts was replaced by a campaign to persuade,
relying on paid and public service advertising. The government even
supported research on better ways to convince people to use seat
belts (Geller, 1983~. Now, after many years, there appears to be an
increase in the use of seat belts, although in some cases this may be
due to state laws mandating their use. Such persuasion programs
are adequate as alternatives to regulatory constraint only if two co-n-
ditions are met: if persuasion is accepted as a technique of public
policy and if persuasion is about as effective as direct regulatory
control. To some an important aspect of risk communication is the
use of messages to induce people to protect themselves.
A NEW DEFINITION OF RISE COMMUNICATION
Although the motives for and meanings of risk communication
described above are very different in some ways, each emphasizes a
particular kind of message: a message that is developed by techni-
cal experts; that describes or characterizes hazards, risks, or risk-
reducing actions; and that is addressed to nonexperts. To many who
use the term, risk communication means simply the development and
delivery of this kind of one-way message. This widespread usage is
illustrated in the foreword to the published proceedings of the first
National Conference on Risk Communication, attended by 500 peo-
ple in Washington, D.C., in 1986. William Reilly, the president of
the Conservation Foundation, observed:
[In] the conflict or confusion over risk questions . . . often the commu-
nication process is at fault or, at the least, exacerbates the problem.
Risk communicators simply do not do a good job of getting their
message across. (Reilly, 1987:'rii)
This very typical formulation equates risk communication with
the delivery of certain kinds of messages one-way messages from
government or other risk communicators to the general public about
OCR for page 20
20
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
the nature of risks. It defines the success of risk communication
from the point of view of the senders of those messages, in terms of
"getting the message across." The image is of experts enlightening
or persuading an uninformed and passive public.
We consider this formulation of the problem to be incomplete
in critical ways. Increased efforts "to get the message across" by
describing the magnitude and balance of the attendant costs and
benefits or by telling people which option provides the greatest net
benefit to society will have little effect for several reasons. First,
costs and benefits are not equally distributed across a society. Those
who bear more than a proportionate share of the costs of one of the
options want to convince others that the selection of that alternative
would be unfair to them. Other political participants want to make
similar arguments on their own behalf or to consider the arguments
of all the interested parties. Thus an important aspect of conflicts
about technological issues is that these are often conflicts between
different interest groups. These conflicts cannot be resolved simply
by knowledge about the likely effects of each alternative on the society
as a whole or on various groups.
Second, people do not agree about which harms are most worth
avoiding or which benefits are most worth seeking. They want to
argue for the protection of what they value and to consider which
values are most worth preserving or advancing in each decision con-
text. Because conflicts about technological issues pit values against
each other, it is impossible to calculate net benefit to society or
even to subgroups of the society-on any scale that will satisfy all
the participants. Values need to be debated and weighed in a political
process.
Third, citizens of a democracy expect to participate in debate
about controversial political issues and about the institutional mech-
anisms to which they sometimes delegate decision-making power. A
problem formulation that appears to substitute technical analysis
for political debate, or to disenfranchise people who lack technical
training, or to treat technical analysis as more important to decision
making than the clash of values and interests is bound to elicit re-
sentment from a democratic citizenry. Because of such reactions to
them, problem formulations that attribute technological conflict to
widespread public ignorance only exacerbate the conflict.
We do not deny or minimize the importance of scientific and
technological knowledge to informed public decisions about technol-
ogy. In fact, we strongly endorse the proposition that understanding
OCR for page 21
INTROD UCTION
21
science in general and the likely consequences of particular techno-
logical choices should be more widespread. But we emphasize just
as strongly the fact that technological choices are value laden. Non-
experts need to gain technical knowledge, but technical experts and
public officials also need to learn more about nonexperts' interests,
~ .
values, and concerns.
In a democracy communication is an essential part of all societal
decisions. The participants individuals, groups, and institutions-
express their concerns and viewpoints, present facts and arguments
to support them, and listen to what other participants have to say.
At various points in this ongoing process, elected officials and pub-
lic servants act in the name of the society, sometimes adding their
own messages to those already current. The communication con-
tinues, with concerns and viewpoints about government actions and
messages as well as about the original issues being addressed.
We see risk communication as a particular instance of this sort
of democratic dialogue. Thus we have come to use the term risk
communication differently from its common current usage.2 Risk
communication is an interactive process of exchange of information
and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions. It involves
multiple messages about the nature of risk and other messages, not
strictly about risk, that express concerns, opinions, or reactions to
risk messages or to legal and institutional arrangements for risk man-
agement. As we will establish in Chapter 4, risk communication is
successful only to the extent that it raises the level of understanding
of relevant issues or actions and satisfies those involved that they are
adequately informed within the limits of available knowledge.
Risk communication is a component of risk management, which
is the selection of risk control options. It is the process that provides
the information on which government, industry, or individual deci-
sion makers base their choices. Successful risk communication does
not guarantee that risk management decisions will maximize genera]
welfare; it only ensures that decision makers will understand what is
known about the implications for welfare of the available options.
The above definition of risk communication differs critically from
many common uses in distinguishing between communication, which
is an interactive process, and messages, which flow one way. Among
people responsible for designing messages about risk, there is a temp-
tation to confuse the task of message design and dissemination with
the entire communication process and to equate the success of their
messages in producing the effect desired with the success of risk
.
OCR for page 22
22
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
communication. We have chosen a definition that takes a broader
perspective than that of any single participant in the process in or-
der to emphasize the difference between the disparate activities en c]
goals of the many participants and the social purposes of the risk
· -
communication process.
Risk communication includes all messages and interactions that
bear on risk decisions. Thus risk communication includes announce-
ments, warnings, and instructions moving from expert sources to
nonexpert audiences" the kinds of messages Reilly refers to. But it
also includes other kinds of messages about risk information and
information sources, about personal beliefs and feelings concerning
risks and hazards, and about reactions to risk management actions
and institutions. Not all these messages are strictly about-risk, but
all are material to risk management.
Our use of the term risk communication also pays explicit at-
tention to the social interaction and debate that are essential to
democratic political choice and that often contribute to personal
decisions about hazardous activities. Risk communication includes
messages moving in various directions-not only from experts to
nonexperts but also from nonexperts to each other, from nonexperts
to experts, and especially the messages of political participation,
from citizens to public decision makers. Decisions in government
depend on dialogue between the decision maker and staff within the
responsible agency and between the decision maker and various po-
litical participants, who influence the decision maker's view of the
risks and the risk management options. Messages about nonexperts'
perceptions of fairness, legal constraints, feelings of outrage, and the
mobilization of interest group pressure are among the important ele-
ments of the risk communication process, along with messages about
the risks themselves. Even with personal risk decisions, choice often
depends on a dialogue in which technical knowledge may not be the
dominant influence. Decisions to stop smoking, for instance, have
often been influenced more strongly by the expressed value prefer-
ences of the smoker's children than by experts' messages about health
consequences.
As with other communication in a democracy, the intent of the
participants in risk communication is sometimes political. That is,
messages about risk are sometimes intended to influence the beliefs
or actions of those to whom they are addressed. Risk communication,
then, must be understood in the context of decision making involving
hazards and risks, that is, risk management. Communication about
OCR for page 23
INTROD UCTION
23
risk deserves special attention because the highly technical nature
of the subject matter makes it more difficult than communication
about other controversial issues. Risk decision makers, including
individuals managing personal hazards and participating in public
decisions, need to seek and interpret complex technical information
from scientific disciplines in which they have not been trained. They
must communicate with, and to some extent rely upon, the experts
who generate that information. Because the attendant choices are
controversial, affecting important economic interests and strongly
hell! values, participants in the decision process, including experts
and their employers, have incentives to appeal to emotions, distort
facts, and otherwise use communication to influence the ultimate
choice in the directions they desire. Thus there are no participants
in debates on technological issues on whom nonexperts and public
officials can rely unquestioningly for unbiased information.
RISE MESSAGES AS PART OF THE
RISE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
Risk messages, because they flow in only one direction, are only
part of the interactive risk communication process. Risk messages in-
clude verbal statements, pictures, advertisements, publications, legal
briefs, warning signs, or other declaratory activities that describe,
characterize, or advocate positions or actions regarding risks, haz-
ardous technologies or activities, or risk control options. Each risk
message has an identifiable source and is addressed to one or more
audiences.
Risk messages come from a variety of sources: physicians, jour-
naTists, regulatory agencies, manufacturers, environmental groups,
health officials, and various self-appointed advisers. The messages
are sometimes merely descriptive of risks and scientific studies of
them; at other times the messages also describe the broad context
within which a specific hazard or risk is found, the developments that
preceded its occurrence, comparison of it to other hazards or risks, or
the presentation of information about a risk along with information
about the attendant benefits and the risks and benefits of alterna-
tives. As mentioned above and as discussed-in more detail in Chapter
4, risk messages may be constructed to inform their recipients or to
influence them.
A large theoretical and empirical literature on communication,
social influence, and persuasion provides considerable knowledge for
OCR for page 24
24
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
anyone who wants to design effective risk messages. However, this
knowledge is sufficient only to identify important principles, barri-
ers, pitfalls, opportunities, and so forth. It is not adequate to inform
many of the specific choices message designers make about charac-
terizing particular risks for particular audiences. Lessons from the
communication literature have been applied with some success in a
range of areas, some of which involve efforts to induce individuals to
reduce risks to themselves from cigarette smoking (McAlister, 1981)
and heart disease (Maccoby and Solomon, 1981~.3 The following,
necessarily brief, summary gives some idea of the concepts and gen-
eral conclusions developed in this research tradition. Researchers
typically discuss the message content, the source of the message, the
channel by which the message is transmitted, and the audience or
recipients of the message (HovIand et al., 1953; McGuire, 1985~.
Of key importance to the effect of a message are the charac-
teristics of the intended audience. The important attributes of the
audience include its makeup in terms of cultural background, shared
interests, concerns and fears, social attitudes, and its facility with
language. A message that has a desired effect on one audience may
have little effect on another. Messages in scientific language are
likely to mean little to nonscientists, whereas messages about risk in
everyday language may be unimpressive to scientists.
Risk messages can be carried by a variety of media: face-to-face
interaction, direct mailings, advertising, hot lines, presentations to
groups, press conferences, television or radio interviews, newspaper
or journal articles, and so on. Each medium has its advantages and
limitations-for example, television reaches many people but needs
visual material and is typically presented in short segments, and
newspapers rely on the written word and can present longer, more
complex messages but are less vivid and immediate in emotional
impact. In general, the characteristics of each channel affect the type
of message that can be effectively transmitted.
The characteristics of the source of a message often affect the
way audiences respond to it. Among the key factors influencing the
way recipients judge a message are the degree of expertise the re-
cipients believe the source to possess and the degree of trust the
recipients have in the source. The term "credibility" is used by
researchers in this field to refer to an attribute of a source that
derives from a combination of expertise and trust, as seen by the
audience. It is possible for a source to be credible to some recipients
OCR for page 25
INTROD UCTION
25
and not others or on some issues but not others (McGuire, 1985~.
Thus a locally respected old farmer may be credible to neighboring
farmers as a source of information on pesticide risks but may not be
credible to the officials who convene a regulatory hearing. Similarly,
the scientific representative of a hazardous waste disposal company
may be credible to a federal regulator but not to the neighbors of a
proposed waste site. The officials do not credit the farmer because of
lack of technical expertise; the neighbors do not credit the company's
scientist because of lack of trust.
Where there is widespread mistrust of public sources of informa-
tion, people often rely on word-of-mouth or other local sources, even
if their informants are less expert than those available through public
sources. Because of this practice, public agencies can sometimes be
more effective in delivering technical information to individual citi-
zens by using trusted sources as intermediaries than by designing and
disseminating messages themselves (Stern and Aronson, 19843. Pub-
lic officials can also listen to trusted intermediaries to learn if tasks
might be clelegated or to save the time and expense of questionnaires
or other analyses when less detail is sufficient.
Risk messages are often designed to inform nonspecialists. Be-
cause such messages involve complex and difficult concepts, present-
ing clear and understandable information is a tremendous challenge
for message designers. The source's choice of message content de-
pends on what it believes the audience needs to know, on what recip-
ients can be expected to understand, and on the action or response
the source hopes to engender.
Some risk messages are intended to influence the recipients' be-
liefs or actions. Messages are more effective at producing behavior
change when, in addition to producing understanding, they are spe-
cific about any desired response and proximate in time and place
to that response. Generally, single messages can be expected to
have little effect on recipients' behavior, but organized programs of
messages, in which different messages are aimed at different specific
purposes, can be effective.
As discussed above, considerable research has been devoted to
the study of messages to change individual behavior, and the result-
ing knowledge can help in designing more effective risk messages.
But less is known about other aspects of risk communication. For
instance, there has been little systematic study of ways to design
more effective messages to express citizens' concerns to government
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26
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
or to influence the actions of organizations such as corporations or
government agencies.
SUCCESSFUL RISK COMMUNICATION
A focus on risk communication implies a standpoint outside the
process. It puts no particular actor or message source at the center.
In this respect an emphasis on risk communication is different from
one on risk messages. The source of a risk message is likely to define
and assess the success of its messages according to its own criteria.
It may choose to consider its messages successful when the recipients
understand them, or when they believe them to be accurate, or when
they do what the sender wants to influence them to do. Obviously,
different sources may have conflicting goals for their risk messages.
This is one difference between the success of-a single source's messages
and the success of the risk communication process.
It is possible to arrive at a meaningful idea of success for risk
communication by considering a broad public purpose that successful
risk communication serves. If a society values democratic decision
making and well-informed, goal-directed individual choice, it makes
sense from the societal standpoint to say that the purpose of risk
communication is "to inform the discretion" of government officials,
private organizations, and individuals. from that standpoint, risk
communication is successful to the extent that it raises the level of
understanding of relevant issues or actions and satisfies those in-
volved that they are adequately informed within the limits of available
knowledge.
Informer] discretion for a government official is based on knowI-
edge about the risks and benefits of the choices at hand; about
the management situation, including legal and other constraints on
choice; about the concerns and preferences of citizens and other polit-
ical actors; and about the political environment. Corporate officials
need much the same kinds of knowledge, although they need to pay
special attention to the preferences of shareholders and can some-
times afford to pay less attention to the preferences of the public.
Government and corporate officials usually inform themselves about
risks and benefits with the help of expert employees or consultants
who interpret technical knowledge for them (Chapter 2 discusses
what is involved in understanding risks). They inform themselves
about citizen concerns and political matters by paying attention to
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INTROD UCTION
27
elected officials, the mass media, and diverse other sources. Accord-
ing to the above definition, the more accurate the official's under-
standing of those matters, the better the risk communication system.
Citizens are decision makers in their private lives and when they
participate in political decisions. Thus a successful risk communica-
tion process informs their discretion, too. Citizens inform themselves
by interpreting risk messages from various sources, including experts,
intermediaries such as journalists, public relations officials of public
agencies and corporations, and even friends and neighbors. They
evaluate or balance what they know in order to reach a judgment
and to make decisions regarding risks, such as whether to protest,
ignore, negotiate, or take protective action. The more accurate the
citizens' understanding of the issues at hand, the better the risk
communication may be said to be.
Citizens are well informed with regard to personal choices if
they have enough understanding to identify those courses of action
in their personal lives that provide the greatest protection for what
they value at the least cost in terms of those values. Citizens are
well informed with regard to a public policy issue if they have enough
understanding to evaluate which options provide the most protection
at the least cost, both for themselves and for the things they believe
the society should value. (In Chapter 4 we discuss the meaning of
successful risk communication in more detail.)
It is important to make several points about the definition of suc-
cessfuT risk communication. First, success is defined in terms of the
information available to the decision makers rather than in terms of
the quality of the decisions that ensue. Successful risk communication
does not always lead to better decisions because risk communication
is only part of risk management. Risk managers, including public
officials and private citizens, must also take into account their public
responsibilities or personal values. It is possible to understand fully
what is known about the likely consequences of each available option
and yet to make a "bad" choice; if this occurs, it is not because of
a failure of risk communication. Consider, for instance, the head of
a federal agency who is constrained by law to ban a food additive
even though the risk communication process has made it clear that
there are no less harmful or costly alternative additives. Making the
legally required decision does not mean the communication process
failed; in the long run the process may even provide impetus for
changing the law. Similarly, if someone understands but disregards
information about the dangers of smoking, skydiving, or riding a
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28
IMPROVING RISK COMMUNICATION
motorcycle without a helmet, this may not mean risk communica-
tion was at fault. People sometimes put themselves at risk with full
knowledge, and observers attribute their acts to overriding values,
willfulness, or addiction rather than to a failure of communication.
Risk communication, even at best, can accomplish only so much.
Second, s?`ccessfut risk communication need not result in con-
sensus about controversial issues or in uniform personal behavior.
Although such objectives often serve the producers of risk messages
as criteria of success for those messages, they are not appropriate
criteria for the risk communication process in a democracy. To say
that success requires that the recipients do or believe what a partic-
ular message source desires is to assume that that message source is
a better judge of the recipients' interests than the recipients them-
sel~res. Because people do not all share common interests or values,
better understanding will not lead them all in the same direction.
And it will not necessarily make choices easier for decision makers in
government agencies or elsewhere.
Third, according to the definition of success, the recipient must
be able to achieve as complete an understanding of the information
as he or she desires. In Chapter 4 we develop the reasons underlying
this definition of successful risk communication. A risk communica-
tion process that disseminates accurate information is not successful
unless the potential recipients achieve a sufficient understanding.
Thus the risk communication process must be judged by the level of
knowledge on which decision makers act rather than by the level of
knowledge reflected in particular messages or even in the full set of
messages accessible to decision makers. It is common for accurate
messages to be ignored, misunderstood, or rejected; it is also possible
for several inaccurate messages from different sources to be compared
with each other in such a way as to give the recipient a fairly accurate
overall picture.
Risk communication, then, is more than one-way transmission of
expert knowledge to the uninformed. Certainly, messages describing
expert knowledge to nonexperts play a critically important role in risk
communication. They provide essential information that nonexperts
cannot get from other sources. They are also essential because, by
revealing expert dissent, they give nonexperts, including many gov-
ernment officials, an important toot for checking against omissions or
excesses in any one expert's analysis. Messages about expert knowI-
edge are necessary to the risk communication process; they are not
sufficient, however, for the process to be successful. Thus, although
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INTROD UCTION
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experts and the organizations that disseminate their knowledge are
important participants in risk communication, nonexperts also play
an important active part by expressing concerns to experts and by
asking or pressuring them to provide analysis of aspects of risk that
they may not yet have examined in detail. They play an essential role
by participating in the debate about what values ought to be applied
to knowledge about risks and how they ought to be applied. Citizens'
dialogue with public and industrial risk managers, even when it does
not directly address risk, can be critical to risk management deci-
sions. The broad definition of risk communication is a reminder that
public decisions about risk require debate about values and interests
as much as about risks because risks cannot be weighed against each
other without considering values. As we will see in the next chapter,
they cannot even be understood without considering values.
NOTES
1. For discussions of the recent interest in the subject of risk communica-
tion, see Plough and Krimsky (1987) and Stallen and Coppock (1987~.
2. For a complete listing of the special terminology used in this report,
see Appendix E.
3. Extensive reviews of the communication literature, covering well over
1000 sources, can be found in chapters of the 1985 Handbook of Social Psychology
(McGuire, 1985; Moscovici, 1985; Roberts and Maccoby, 1985~. A review of
much of this literature with a focus on risk communication has been completed
by Covello et al. (1987b).
Representative terms from entire chapter:
communication process
