Like it or not, risks get communicated to us every day. Whether it’s the climate, the euro crisis or the booze, someone is warning us to change our ways or we may be in trouble. We may get irritated by all this finger-wagging, but there is a serious science that can be applied to all these messages.
Let’s assume we want to communicate some risk. Are we trying to inform people or persuade them to do something? The traditional view is that these were much the same thing: the public are ‘irrational’ because they are ill-informed, and so if we just educate people then they will not hold misguided beliefs and do silly things.
Fortunately this ‘deficit model’ has been superseded by a slightly more sophisticated view, which recognises that people vary considerably, and that their reactions and behaviour are not going to be primarily influenced by the information they receive. Their ‘affect’ – that is the overall positive or negative feeling of individuals towards a potential hazard – is vital, and this is influenced by context, culture and habit. These feelings can be tricky to change, and the simple provision of information can have minimal influence. In contrast, the advice of a trusted source can be crucial.
This may appear rather discouraging, but we have an ethical duty to provide transparent information so that people can, if they wish, weigh up the pros and cons, set their own risk threshold and decide what to do. This is the mind-set underlying the Winton Programme for the Public Understanding of Risk; our team tries to explain risk and debunk myths by engaging the public through stories, creating attractive graphics and entertaining animations, and explaining the ideas behind the numbers.
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Image: Bacon sandwich
Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Joe Gough
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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