Evaluating the success of terror risk communications

TERRORISM HAS CREATED unprecedented choices for ordinary people. As individuals, they must decide how to protect themselves and their families. As citizens, they must decide which policies best serve the nation’s desire for physical safety, economic vitality, civil liberties, and social cohesion. Without good information, people may find themselves living with choices that they do not understand or want. Feeling that they have been denied critical information further complicates an already difficult situation. If things go badly, having misunderstood the risks can intensify the attendant pain and regret. Citizens’ dissatisfaction may extend to the leaders and officials who seemingly failed to meet their information needs, as has happened with other apparently mismanaged risks.1–6 Reducing these social risks means providing citizens with relevant information in a credible, comprehensible form. Doing so requires analytical research, to identify the risks most critical to citizens’ decision making, and empirical research, to identify the current state of their belief.7–8 Risk communications should focus on those facts that people most need to understand but have yet to learn. Just as citizens need information in order to respond effectively, policy makers need to understand citizens’ beliefs, in order to create behaviorally realistic policies. In a November 2002 survey of Americans, Blendon et al.9 documented the mixed success of communications about smallpox. We report on a concurrent survey with a similar sample, embedding beliefs regarding smallpox risks in a broader set of issues and focusing on facts that are easily understood if communicated properly and that are critical to managing widely reported risks. If citizens have not learned these facts, then our risk communication processes have somehow failed to convey them in a salient, comprehensible, credible way. Because effective decision making requires recognizing the extent of one’s understanding, we look at the strength of lay beliefs, as well as their general trend. People who confidently hold erroneous beliefs may not consult better-informed sources before acting. They may also not be alert to signs of things going awry.