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Risk: The Concluding Piece

Risk: The Concluding Piece
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Concluding our series on Risk, this piece covers a crucial aspect that influences our relationship with risk. A lot of what was covered previously, places an emphasis primarily on us (as it should) - our inability to comprehend risk in all its complexity, our tendency to underplay affect and how it warps our risk perception as well as our inability to think in a probabilistic manner. But this aspect takes some of that burden off of us to those who frame and communicate risk to us. The way and manner in which this complex issue is shared with us, also determines how we react to it with respect to forming opinions, making decisions and undertaking action. In this piece, we take a look at the case of Hurricane Katrina as an example of what happens due to the failure of risk communication. While there are several factors influencing how risk is communicated, we focus on the role of Framing - a key heuristic that forms the foundation of communication. But first, a small primer on what Risk Communication is, and where it comes from.

So, What is Risk Communication?

Our days are filled with innumerable calculations. As we established in our last piece, owe are not the best assessors of probability given our vulnerability to particular heuristics and fallacies, we nevertheless indulge in some form of personalised risk calculation to determine (our own weighted) probabilities that influence almost each and every decision through the day - over time setting up defaults for the decisions that seem to work for us. There is a limited amount of cognitive effort that individuals are capable of expending each day. Compound that with a fundamental law of conservation of energy - which is required for this calculation and decision making effort. Defaults are a possibility that answers all of these variables in the equation.

However, the ever evolving nature of the Universe ensures that new circumstances are presented to us, pushing us to keep calculating risks and probabilities with new information. As our basic drives moved from survival to excelling and self actualising - and our transformation into a knowledge and communication based society, a lot of the calculation and decision making tends to emanate from our communication with one another. Any basic communication, including that of risk goes two ways - between the producers / disseminators of the information being communicated (experts, government agencies, journalists, policy makers, etc.) and the consumers of this information - who are also future decision makers / action takers (the public).

Specifically with respect to health communication (which can be considered particularly risky in several cases) WHO spoke about the different kinds of risk communication such as outrage management, precautionary advisory, crisis communication and stakeholder management. Braking down what the communication needs, they elaborate on the expression of scientific evidence and probability in a simple, relatable manner, clear instructions related to policy measures including very specific calls to action that are most easily adopted across the board, addressing trust and credibility concerns, expanding outreach through the use of all possible media channels and influencers.

How not to Communicate in a Crisis - A case study of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina

There’s no case as dire to highlight the importance of Risk Communication than that of Natural Disasters, with a notable example being Hurricane Katrina. This piece by National Geographic traces its development from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane in August 2005. New Orleans faced the hurricane topographically disadvantaged as a low lying, flood-prone area, and supported by structured overdue for maintenance and repair. The city was no match.

Overall, more than 1,800 people lost their lives as a result of Hurricane Katrina. More than 1,500 death occurred in Louisiana, around 230 in Mississippi, and 14 in Florida. Katrina is the third deadliest hurricane in U.S. history. In New Orleans, people were trapped in their houses and on their roofs as the rapidly rising water caught many people by surprise. The flooding and widespread damage from Katrina delayed rescue and aid efforts for days. Besides the death toll, hurricane Katrina left many people homeless as more than 800,000 housing units were destroyed or damaged in the storm. Katrina is the costliest U.S hurricane, with estimated damage over $81 billion and costs over $160 billion (2005 US dollars).

Several studies have highlighted the communication breakdown during the Hurricane as a man made disaster. Here we explore some of the lessons identified by Cole and Fellows (2008) as emerging from a study of risk communication failure in the case of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. The authors establish risk as the expression of a probability of an adverse outcome, and the uncertainty about its occurrence and magnitude. Given this understanding of risk, risk communication involves an understanding of impending crises and the perception of threat to the end of creating an ‘informative & motivational’ dialogue about the nature of this risk, as well as the ways to mitigate it. The ultimate objective is to ‘forestall a crisis or lessen it’s impact’. Thus they break down the purpose of risk communication into:

  1. Communication of the probabilities as well as potential consequences to the specific population that might be impacted, and;
  2. The seeking of consensus among this population about the course of action going forward to mitigate the risk.

For the purpose of this study they used a specific framework of communication - Lundgren & McMakin’s care, consensus and crisis communication paradigm. While care communication elaborated known facts and was highly informative; consensus and crisis communication was more time sensitive, dynamic, in need of customisation and was needed to be persuasive and motivational - calling for action. During the course of their investigation, the authors found that of the first purpose of risk communication - while the first aspect of communication of risk probabilities had occurred, in some cases, the reach of the message had fallen short of it’s intended audience. The four lessons they highlighted were largely drawn from the failure of the second purpose of risk communication. These lessons and what they talk about are outlined below.

The lessons highlighted by the authors following their analysis included:

1. “Effective care communication is to little avail if the subsequent consensus and crisis messages are inadequate.” - Lack of empathy in the semantics of messages, leaving messages too technical or ambiguous.

2. “Message preparation before the crisis is essential.” - Given the time sensitivity of natural disasters, a variety of messages corresponding to the severity of the risk as well as the specific audience being interacted with should be designed beforehand.

3. “To be effective, messages must be credible to their recipient audiences.” - People residing in areas prone to certain disasters may also be desensitised to disaster messaging through optimism bias and exposure. Signalling the credibility of the risk through both the message and the spokesperson becomes imperative to incite action. From the experience in Katrina what emerged was that this (as well as lesson four) can sometimes turn into a difficult two fold problem - the largest portion of affected audience resided in the most threatened low lying areas, and was the same population that demonstrated low levels of trust in authorities (due to prior experiences, etc.).

4. “Ethnicity, class, gender, and similar demographic characteristics of audiences must be adapted if risk communication messages are to be effective.” There is known to be a fundamental difference in risk perception among different races and communities. Failing to adapt risk communication to suit these varying perceptions also contributed to the breakdown of crisis communication.

The breakdown of this crisis communication exacerbated the loss of life, livelihood and property in a city that took over a decade to get back on its feet and has yet to see all of its people return.

The Importance of Framing

A unifying thread in all of the lessons learnt is how simple framing changes could have enhanced the impact of crisis communication, thus helping to potentially mitigate some level of risk. Throughout the write up, the thread that ties many of the pieces that could contribute to the success of risk communication by altering the audience’s risk perception is Framing.

The Framing Effect or heuristic as explained by Tversky and Kahneman (1981) essentially says the same thing - when information is presented in a different manner, it can change the perception of risk for the audience without anything about the original information or circumstance actually changing. Or, if the circumstance has changed and the information hasn’t, it can keep the risk perception (and the possibility of change in action / behaviour) stagnant. For example, in the paper discussed above, the authors also highlight how abstaining from including the word ‘mandatory’ in relation to evacuation effort related communication led to fewer people actually evacuating their homes. Understanding this importance of framing calls for a greater degree of customisation of message when targeting different categories of stakeholders, even towards the same objective. While there are distinctions in the kinds of framing that exist - an either or (if you do this vs. If you don’t do this), highlighting different ends of a probability spectrum (example - 90% chance of surviving vs. 10% chance of not surviving) - the emphasis on understanding audience to present information in the simplest, clearest manner that aids informed decision making, still stands.

In Conclusion

We have tried to explore a fundamental underlying principle that influences our behaviour on a day to day basis. Our attempt was to unfold aspects of this complex phenomenon and explore a few related concepts to put this understanding in the context of a broader tapestry. We hope that you have found this useful in understanding how our warped perception of risk contributes to sometimes faulty decision making and why our judgement of risk is warped to begin with - in our inability to compute risk, ineffectively communicate risk and account for emotional responses to risk.

Whether you’re lying in bed late at night accidentally dropping your phone on your face (sorry about that), stuck in an Uber in traffic (thoughts n’ prayers), bored in the bathroom (we all do it right?), or deleting this thing every time in lands in your inbox (you could just unsubscribe ya know…), I’m so glad to know you’re out there!

You’re the best crew I could ask for and I can’t wait to start sharing with you! I'm so grateful you’re here on this crazy wild ride with me and I’m so excited to have a medium to share all the ups and downs, tips and tricks, sad times, good times, successes and failures.

Thank you for reading The Behavioural Review


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