Risk Communication

Hazard is real. Risk is socially constructed.

This may seem a little odd, or incongruous, but it is critical to understanding how and why risk communication is important. Hazard and risk are different ideas.

HAZARD: danger, calculated by multipying the amount of damage by the severity of the damage

RISK: a construction of how likely it is thought that the damage will actually occur; can be based on many different types of evaluation

RISK COMMUNICATION: bringing these two ideas together in order to make risk-based decisions

For example:

Statistics show, time and again, that you are more likely to be in a fatal accident while in a car that you are while flying in a plane. Yet--fear of flying is more widespread than fear of driving. If we know that the hazard, the actual danger of flying, is less, why do we see the risk as so much higher?

or

Heart disease is the number one killer of adults in America. Doctors tell us that both men and women, even if there is no history of heart disease in their family, need to be concerned and take action to reduce their risk of heart disease. Yet, cancer is a more worrisome disease for people when asked what disease they are most worried about in terms of their own health and the health of their loved ones. Why this disparity?

or

Genetically modfied (GM) foods can be found all over the world. Scientists have differing opinions about the pros and cons of these man-made or altered organisms. In the United States, GM foods cannot be labeled as such and are mixed in with other types of foods. Most people are unaware that they eat GM foods all the time. In Europe, on the other hand, there has been a major outcry against GM foods, and some countries have even banned their import. If the hazard is unclear and is the same in both places, why this different understanding of the risks involved?

The answer to these questions is that the actual hazard in these three situations is very different from the way that the risk is understood, because the hazard is based on the scientific understanding of the dangers and the risk is based on different social issues and social constructions of the different factors at play. We construct the risk of flying in a plane to be high, people without heart disease in their families construct the risk of the disease to be low for them, and people in Europe construct the risk of GM foods to be high, regardless of the actual hazard.

In a study conducted in 1979, Paul Slovic and his colleagues found that relative ranking of risks by lay persons was vastly different than rankings of risks by experts (7). This difference is not based on misperception, or poor information, but rather based on the way in which different people evaluate risk. These differences in risk perception leave a great deal of room for communication to bring the two together.

The study of risk communication is a fairly new but increasingly studied field. The events at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility and the poor communication between residents in the area around the plant and the officials and scientists in charge of responding to the meltdown provided much of the impetus for this field.

Risk communication poses very different challenges than other forms of communication.

Two different types of challenges in risk communication are :

Why do scientists and the public evaluate risks differently?

How does the public make risk judgements? What criteria does the public use?