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Judgment, decision making, and risk researchers have learned a great deal over the years about how people prepare for and react to global risks. In recent years, risk scholars have increasingly foc...

Risk communication is about exchanging risk information and opinions, and influences how people perceive and act on risks. This chapter first describes how risk communicators attract people’s attention and present information. Then the chapter explores what influences understanding and acceptance or rejection of messages, with a focus on uncertainty and mental models. Next, the chapter describes how people evaluate and use risk messages and how risk messaging relates to behavioral tendencies and behavioral responses, with an emphasis on choice architecture and habits. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of matching risk communication goals and methods to audience attributes.

Mental models of health risks are the causal beliefs that comprise one’s inference engines for the interpretation and prediction of health and illness experiences and messages. Mental models of health risks can be parsed into a handful of common elements, including beliefs about causes, consequences, and cures as well as identifying information such as symptoms and timing. Mental models research deriving from a risk and decision analysis framework emphasizes exposure sources and pathways as part of causal thinking as well as how interventions may reduce or increase the risk. Mental models can be developed as a function of one’s goals or the problem in a specific context, rather than as coherent, stable knowledge structures in long-term memory. For this reason they can be piecemeal and inconsistent in the absence of expertise or experience with the risk. Derived often by analogy with more familiar risks, mental models of health risks can lead to effective health behaviors but also to costly inaction or misplaced action. Assessing mental models of hazardous processes can contribute to the design of effective risk communications by identifying the concrete information message recipients need to cope with health risks, thereby making or strengthening common-sense links between risk and action representations. Although a wide variety of research methods are used to investigate mental models, achieving this level of specificity requires attention to substantive details. Researchers are beginning to better understand the interactions between mental models of risk and their social, cultural, and physical contexts, but much remains to explore.

Complexity and uncertainty influence opinions, beliefs, and decisions about health, safety, and other kinds of risk, as demonstrated in research on health, climate change, storm forecasts, pandemic disease, and in other domains. Drawing from this research, this article summarizes insights into how people understand and process uncertain or complex information and explores key oil spill and oil spill response-relevant issues regarding the communication of complexity and uncertainty—from the presentation of uncertainties around forecast parameters to the deployment of online oil spill response simulation tools. Recommended practices from this article include (a) to continue to develop and evaluate interactive Web-based oil spill response simulations to help users explore tradeoffs in response decisions, (b) to take how people simplify information into account in designing communications processes and products (and evaluate), (c) to provide numbers along with verbal probability descriptions, and (d) ...

While lauding research progress in risk communication, Roger Kasperson despairs of change in risk communication practices. Advances are nevertheless evident on several fronts, including the development and application of pragmatic and evidence-driven approaches to risk communication design, implementation of new engagement strategies, and efforts to communicate uncertainty. Systematic reviews in risk communication research are starting to appear, and will likely help clarify the lessons to be learned. Progress in these areas suggests building on current momentum by continuing to encourage: (1) systematic reviews of research and trends in risk communication; (2) judgment and decision-making research to inform risk communication design; and (3) integrative risk communication research, across disciplines and application domains.

Central to the precautionary policy is the provision of information about electromagnetic fields (EMF) technology, exposures, potential health risks and exposure management actions to the public. To meet this need at the broadest level, beyond the specific technology foci of previous research, a research project was commissioned as part of Dutch Electromagnetic Fields and Health Research Programme. This study provides an assessment of Dutch EMF information needs from an ensemble of sources by addressing people’s existing ideas and beliefs, using a mental models approach. A summary expert model of influences on and consequences of exposure derived from search of the relevant literature is informed by interviews with 15 scientists and professionals with diverse expertise. Although the professionals characterize the physical characteristics and psychological aspects of exposure to EMF in daily life similarly, there is no consensus regarding potential health effects. Interviews with 12 lay people followed by ...

Nanotechnologies operate at atomic, molecular, and macromolecular scales, at scales where matter behaves differently than at larger scales and quantum effects can dominate. Nanotechnologies have captured the imagination of science fiction writers as science, engineering, and industry have leapt to the challenge of harnessing them. Applications are proliferating. In contrast, despite recent progress the regulatory landscape is not yet coherent, and public awareness of nanotechnology remains low. This has led risk researchers and critics of current nanotechnology risk communication efforts to call for proactive strategies that do more than address facts, that include and go beyond the public participation stipulated by some government acts. A redoubling of nanotechnology risk communication efforts could enable consumer choice and informed public discourse about regulation and public investments in science and safety.

Science and technology have transformed risks and communications in the last century. Smallpox is gone, and polio is fading fast, thanks to vaccines. Communications, commerce and risk have gone global. Wireless networks, wideband communications and immersive interfaces are already in some homes. In the future, ubiquitous communications aids in the form of smart risk agents could tailor both the medium and the message, placing a risk in context for a specific person. By sensing physical risk characteristics and collecting and synthesizing risk information, weighted by judgments about the sources of that information, and conveying these in the media of choice, a smart agent or active technology could provide the ultimate risk communication. Yet theories of risk communication are in their infancy, with some emphasizing cognition and risk control, others social and affective responses that drive behavioral change. To create moral agents, we need to understand how our own and others’ values and goals arise and change in this increasingly information intense society, and how virtual realities can evoke or displace affect, cognition, and social context—that is, life as we know it. Otherwise, we may cross the divide from informed decision making to persuasion without reason.

Dispersant use has been the focus of many research studies over the last two decades. However, traditional research and communication efforts have been unable to successfully resolve decision-making concerns on the ecological effects and effectiveness of dispersant use. This paper describes an innovative project to address these concerns through the use of a theoretically based and empirically tested approach to effective risk communication development and evaluation. The study is founded on the premise that people's basic frames of reference, their previous knowledge on the subject, their set of values, and the format and structure of the new information will all contribute to their interpretation of the information. Only by taking these “mental models” into account can risk communication effectively supply people with the information they need to make informed, independent judgments. Using one-on-one interviews and written questionnaires, the individual perspectives of federal, state, and regional regulators and environmental and marine user groups were elicited relative to dispersant use and its risk. Their mental models were then compared to an expert decision model to identify topics to be addressed in issue papers.

The risks of unfamiliar technologies are often evaluated by comparing them with the risks of more familiar ones. Such risk comparisons have been criticized for neglecting critical dimensions of risky decisions. In a guide written for the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Covello et al.(1) have summarized these critiques and developed a taxonomy that characterizes possible risk comparisons in terms of their acceptability (or objectionableness). We asked four diverse groups of subjects to judge the acceptability of 14 statements produced by Covello et al. as examples of their categories. We found no correlation between the judgments of acceptability produced by our subjects and those predicted by Covello et al..

Risk communication is difficult even when we know our audience and what we want to say to it. These difficulties multiply for risk communication about the possible health effects of global climate change. Such communication requires detailed attention to the decisions that potential audiences face, faithful reliance on existing research results, and rigorous evaluation. In this paper we provide an overview of this challenge for policy-makers and risk managers, and highlight relevant research findings in risk communication and related fields, including behavioral decision-making, science education and cognitive psychology.

Effective risk communication requires an understanding of the audience's mental models of the underlying hazardous process. A method was developed for eliciting such mental models through structured, open-ended interviews. It was applied in interviews with 24 lay people asked to think about the risks from indoor radon. Results were used to design brochures intended to improve these mental models. In an experimental test, these brochures proved superior to a brochure currently in wide use.