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Full Disclosure:

The Risk Communication Case

for Revealing Small-but-Scary Risks

by Peter M. Sandman

Here’s the dilemma. Assume you are trying to convince people to take some action – we’ll call it X – that you are confident is the right thing to do. Or you’re trying to convince people to believe X, which you are confident is correct. Assume the best case: Doing or believing X is a plus for everyone: good for your target audience, good for the world, and good for you (or your employer).

If you want an example in mind right away, imagine that the X is deciding to get a flu shot or believing that everybody should get a flu shot. Or pick your own example.

Now assume that there are a few facts – A, B, and C – that seem to suggest that X isn’t such a good idea after all. A, B, and C are all accurate. They are valid truths (or at least partly valid half-truths) on the other side. But for the most part the other side is mistaken. There are a lot more facts on your side. Unfortunately, A, B, and C are likely to have a lot of impact. They’re emotionally loaded, and you’re worried that in the minds of your audience they may very well outweigh the comparatively dry facts on your side. You’re right on the merits – but you think many people will erroneously decide you’re wrong if A, B, and C get out.

Should you reveal A, B, and C, or should you withhold these inconvenient facts?

It is tempting to suppose that this dilemma simply doesn’t arise, that all accurate information improves decision-making. That assumption is the basis for much that we believe in, from education to the free market. And yet we can all think of counterexamples – pieces of accurate information that ended up distorting a decision instead of improving it; factoids that were true but nonetheless misleading because they loomed larger in people’s minds and emotions than they merited.

One class of such potential distorters is particularly relevant to risk communicators: scary facts about a situation that isn’t actually very dangerous. The benefits of X outweigh its risks, and a well-informed, rational decision-maker would therefore decide to do X (or let you do X). But some of the risks of X are very vivid and emotionally accessible, much more so than its benefits. In my language, X is low in “hazard,” but its potential to arouse “outrage” – whether mostly fear or mostly anger – is quite high. If people are accurately and successfully informed about these high-outrage aspects of X, that information is likely to make some of them see X as riskier than it really is, and riskier than its benefits justify. They will end up with the impression that the risks of X outweigh its benefits, leading them to make what is objectively the wrong decision.

In such situations, is it okay to withhold particular pieces of information that are likely to lead to bad decisions?

I think it is not okay. The rest of this column examines the question, and the reasoning behind my answer. I will cover eight reasons why full disclosure of small-but-scary risks isn’t just the most ethical strategy. In many cases it is also the most effective:

1. Two-sided arguments are often more persuasive than one-sided arguments.
2. Two-sided messages engender more trust, while one-sided messages arouse more suspicion.
3. People feel betrayed when they belatedly find out facts they think you should have told them earlier.
4. Opponents are delighted when you decide against full disclosure, leaving them the pleasure of disclosing for you.
5. Ambivalent people go to the side of their ambivalence that is inadequately represented in their communication environment.
6. When people are newly aware of a risk, they often go through a temporary overreaction called an “adjustment reaction” – and then they adjust and calm down.
7. Even if one-sided risk communication might work for a single decision, it won’t work for an ongoing relationship.
8. Risk decisions aren’t symmetrical – reassuring communications have a stronger full disclosure obligation than alarming communications.

In mid-2009 I received an email raising this question from a public health policy researcher in Washington, D.C. She wrote:

Public agencies are sometimes afraid of full disclosure of risk in cases where the benefit of an intervention (e.g. vaccines) outweighs the risk. There is a concern that full disclosure about those risks could derail achieving policy objectives to maximize public health benefit.

Is there evidence from your research (or that of others) that such a concern is justified? Or does the evidence in fact support full disclosure because honesty/transparency outweighs any hesitation triggered by full disclosure about risks? Or something else?

In the months after I received this email, two aggressive flu vaccination campaigns were launched in the U.S., one to sell vaccination against the seasonal flu and the other to sell vaccination against the H1N1 pandemic flu. In both cases – but especially the latter – questions were raised about the safety of the vaccine … and about the trustworthiness of public health officials to be completely candid about the safety of the vaccine. I think most Americans rightly believe that public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would not withhold health-related information the agency considered important. But would the CDC withhold (or at least downplay) negative information it considered likely to sway people excessively? Should the CDC withhold or downplay such information?

I don’t know of any studies assessing how often people are misled by vivid, emotionally impactful information about small risks. But it’s commonplace – no doubt about it. And it constitutes a common rationale for less-than-full disclosure. If certain bits of accurate information will (mis)lead people to make a bad decision, the reasoning goes, better to suppress the information.

On the other side are ethical (and in some cases legal) precepts that simply require full disclosure. In most of the developed world, for example, surgeons are obligated to warn their patients of the risks of surgery – even if the surgery is essential, the risks are unlikely, and the patient is overanxious. The essence of the informed consent principle is the patient’s right to withhold that consent, however unwisely, based on information the surgeon is required to provide.

But “full disclosure” and “informed consent” aren’t the dichotomies they may seem to be. They are sliding scales. On one extreme is overtly lying about the risks in question. On the opposite extreme is laying out those risks vividly, in a personal conversation, in detail, with color pictures – and with plenty of time for follow-up questions to make sure the patient really understands. Somewhere in the middle is what surgeons typically do: give the patient a short, oral summary that emphasizes the conclusion the surgeon considers most sensible, and bury the remaining risk information in a pile of polysyllabic paperwork that the patient has to sign but isn’t actually encouraged to read carefully.

There are a range of such intermediate information strategies. You might decide not to volunteer scary information about the risks of the action you’re recommending, but to provide it if you’re asked. You might explain that the information is available, but recommend against examining it since it doesn’t really change the bottom line. You might leave it out of your TV ads and brochures, but put it in some obscure corner of your website. You might sort through the available risk information and skip the most upsetting low-probability factoids, settling instead on milder and less memorable ones to present. And so forth….

In short, there are many ways to meet your full disclosure obligation to your own ethical satisfaction while minimizing the probability of actually deterring your audience from making what you consider the wise choice.

Judicial systems face the same dilemma. On the one hand, witnesses must promise to tell (in one common formulation) “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” On the other hand, rules of evidence keep the jury from hearing big chunks of the truth – the truth about what a third party told the witness the defendant said (because it’s hearsay); the truth about whether the witness believes the defendant is guilty (because it calls for a conclusion); etc. In fact, truthful evidence is withheld from the jury whenever the judge considers it more “prejudicial” than “probative” – that is, likely to influence the jury’s decision more than the judge thinks it deserves. A defendant’s prior bad acts, for example, are not usually admissible in evidence. Horrific autopsy photographs are frequently excluded on the same grounds. (There are of course precedents that are supposed to constrain the judge’s decisions about whether information is more prejudicial than probative, and appellate courts that are empowered to review those decisions.)

Note that it’s not just permissible for the legal system to shield juries from truthful information that seems likelier to mislead or distract them than to aid in their deliberations. It’s obligatory. As a risk communication professional, I’m very skeptical about the legal profession’s judgment that juries shouldn’t be trusted with the whole truth.

But the burden of proof is on me. Judges literally suppress emotionally arousing truths that might influence juries excessively in the direction of making poor choices. Surgeons don’t quite suppress but certainly bury emotionally arousing truths that might influence patients excessively in the direction of making poor choices. Why shouldn’t risk communicators similarly omit or at least deemphasize emotionally arousing truths that might influence the public excessively in the direction of making poor choices?

(There’s a related issue I don’t plan to discuss in this column: whether it’s okay to overemphasize emotionally arousing but minimally significant truths that might influence the public excessively to makegood choices.)

The full disclosure question is usually seen as an ethical dilemma: the ethical obligation to provide complete information versus the ethical obligation not to provide information – true information – that seems more misleading than helpful. How aggressively candid should we be about risks that might scare people out of making sensible choices? But if I’m reading her email right, the health policy researcher I quoted earlier is asking an empirical question instead: Ethics aside, is there an empirical case to be made for being more aggressively candid than we tend to be in these situations?

I think the answer is yes. But there isn’t a lot of research evidence one way or the other – mostly just examples and reasoning.

To inform our thinking, let’s consider two specific cases:

Your multinational corporation is trying to site a new chemical factory in a working class neighborhood. You are confident that the benefits of your factory will greatly outweigh its risks. Of course a significant portion of the benefits will accrue to you and your company. Still, you anticipate substantial community benefits – jobs and taxes, in particular – which in your judgment clearly exceed the lifestyle damage your factory may cause (trucks, smoke, viewscape) and its exceedingly theoretical and almost certainly negligible health and safety risks. There are ways to reduce facility risks still further, but they would be prohibitively expensive. Using current technology, a disastrous explosion is extremely unlikely though not impossible; and your routine emissions of suspected carcinogens will be kept within strict government standards. But mentioning words like “explosion” and “carcinogen” would be terrifying, and mentioning the availability of additional precautions the company considers too expensive would be infuriating. How aggressively candid should you be about these truths?Your public health agency is trying to eradicate polio in a developing country. The benefits of doing so will accrue not only to the country in which you are working but to the entire world, since if the disease remains endemic in a few countries it could stage a comeback in others. You have opted to use the oral (live) vaccine – banned in most of the developed world – because it is much less expensive to administer than the injected (dead) vaccine, and because children given the oral polio vaccine shed the vaccine virus in their feces, facilitating (involuntary) second-hand “vaccination” of the vaccinee’s close contacts. You are aware that the oral vaccine infrequently induces polio in a vaccinee or a close contact. On rare occasions it can even give rise to a new outbreak of vaccine-derived poliovirus. Using the dead (injected) vaccine to prevent these uncommon but horrendous side-effects would be prohibitively expensive. You are confident that the live vaccine will prevent far more polio cases than it causes. But mentioning that the live vaccine can cause polio would be terrifying, and mentioning that developed countries use the safer, more expensive dead vaccine instead would be infuriating. How aggressively candid should you be about these truths?

For pretty much the same reasons, both the multinational corporation and the public health agency feel a strong temptation to be less than fully candid in these two situations. (Both are drawn from real situations on which I have consulted.)

The corporation is likelier to resist the temptation; it will probably come closer to full disclosure than the health agency. An increasing number of corporate communicators know from experience that downplaying facility risks does them more harm than good. When the truth comes out, as it usually does, their failure to be candid confirms the public’s suspicions about their basic dishonesty, and undermines their prospects for a successful siting. Companies still withhold inconvenient factoids when they think they can get away with it. But they are less and less inclined to think they can get away with it.

Public health agencies, by contrast, see themselves as the good guys, and they’re used to being seen by the public as the good guys. They’re not accustomed to the sorts of controversies that polio vaccination campaigns have provoked in some developing countries. Because they have altruistic motives, public health agencies feel more entitled than corporations to be less than fully candid; because they have altruistic reputations, they are less likely than corporations to get caught, and may be less harshly punished when they are caught.

But the time is coming, I believe, when public health agencies, like multinational corporations, will decide that withholding or deemphasizing inconvenient factoids is no longer the optimum public health strategy.

Why do I think so? What is the empirical case (as opposed to ethical case) for full disclosure?

The core problem with full disclosure of risks is that scary information sometimes deters people from doing X, the action that you want them to take (and that you believe is best for them to take). That’s simply true.

But in many situations this problem is greatly mitigated by countervailing factors. The rest of this column will outline some of those factors.

I want to underline that the question we’re considering isn’t whether it’s okay to lie about a risk in order to persuade people to accept that risk. Nor are we asking whether it’s okay to mislead your audience by withholding risk information that even you consider genuinely significant – facts and counterarguments that might well lead a rational person to reconsider your recommendation. People do sometimes lie or withhold significant information. But almost everyone agrees in principle that they shouldn’t.

The focus of this column is on a more debatable question: whether it’s okay to withhold inconvenient factoids about a risk, factoids that you think are themselves misleading. They’re accurate, but more emotionally compelling than logically dispositive. You believe they are likely to distort people’s judgment, not guide their judgment. In legal terms, you’re convinced that the information in question is more prejudicial than probative.

Many practicing risk communicators think it’s okay to withhold that kind of information – whether they’re working to convince people to accept a new chemical factory or a polio vaccination. I believe it is unwise to do so. I believe full disclosure about risks is usually the wiser course – not just the more ethical course, but the more effective one. Here is a list of eight reasons why.

1. Two-sided arguments are often more persuasive than one-sided arguments.

Going back at least to the 1940s, communication researchers have studied the pros and cons of one-sided versus two-sided persuasive arguments. Their conclusions in a nutshell: One-sided arguments work better when the audience is uninformed, uneducated, and inattentive; when the audience is already on your side; and when the action being promoted is temporary. But more interested and more educated audiences respond better to two-sided arguments, especially if they have reservations about your message, if they are already aware of some of the counterarguments, or if they’re likely to hear some of the counterarguments before whatever you’re trying to accomplish is completed.

There are some risk-related decisions that meet the specs for using a one-sided argument – but not too many. Most of the time, we find ourselves talking to people who are fairly interested, fairly educated, fairly aware of the other side, or fairly likely to encounter the other side before we’re done with them. Under those circumstances, acknowledging the risks we’re tempted to ignore isn’t just good ethics; it’s good persuasion.

This is certainly the case for a corporation trying to site a chemical factory. And it is increasingly the case for a health agency trying to run a polio vaccination campaign.

One key reason why two-sided messaging works better than one-sided messaging is the existence of opponents. If you’re trying to site a chemical factory, there are bound to be activists, politicians, neighbors, and others arguing against letting the factory in. Your polio vaccination efforts will also encounter opposition. Vaccination proponents may decry the existence of an anti-vaccination movement, but that movement is not going away. Vaccination communication strategy needs to allow for the reality that many prospective vaccinees (or their parents) have heard or will hear “popular” anti-vax arguments.

But even when there is no active opposition, a good case can be made that two-sided persuasion is more effective than one-sided persuasion. Experienced salespeople have learned the hard way that customers are likelier to buy when the sales pitch includes a few product drawbacks than when the pitch is one-sided ballyhoo.

This brings me to my second point.

2. Two-sided messages engender more trust, while one-sided messages arouse more suspicion.

Many people have learned to respond skeptically to virtually all one-sided messages, wondering: “What’s the catch?” Even in conversations with service providers whom we assume to be on our side (our doctor, for example), we still want to know the downsides of the recommended action. We may or may not ask, depending on how hurried the conversation is and how comfortable we feel voicing our skepticism. But asked or unasked, “What’s the catch?” is a question that one-sided arguments routinely provoke.

Answering the question if it’s asked should be a no-brainer.

Answering the question even before it’s asked is often better risk communication, because it engenders trust and allays suspicion. Maybe your audience already knows some of the case against your recommendation, and is waiting to see if you’re going to acknowledge it. Maybe your audience simply assumes there must be some drawbacks, and is wondering generically what they are. Either way, you’re better off mentioning the downsides of your recommendation without waiting to be asked.

If you think you’re talking to someone who would rather not be confused by conflicting information, you can ask permission first: “I think the benefits of X greatly outweigh its risks, but as always there are some risks. Would you like me to go over what they are?”

Talking about the risks of your own recommended course of action is what lawyers call an “admission against interest.” That is, you’re saying something your audience can tell you’d rather not say. Admissions against interest are intrinsically credible. More importantly, they increase the credibility of the rest of your message. Most of us would rather buy a used car from someone who gives us a rundown on its defects as well as its merits than from someone who insists it has no defects. (Even dishonest used car salespeople know they’d better mention some defects, though they may hold back on the most important ones.)

Bottom line: Most people smell a rat when they’re exposed to one-sided messages … even if they don’t know what the rat is. That’s a big piece of why two-sided messaging so often works better.

I don’t want to overstate this point. (I’m about to do two-sided messaging about two-sided messaging.) Sometimes people aren’t in the least skeptical. Maybe their trust in you is very high. More likely their interest in your recommendation is very low. They know next to nothing and care next to nothing about what you’re telling them, so they’re perfectly willing to take your word for it. They don’t even need you to cite much evidence. Just tell them what to do/think and off they go. Elsewhere I have called this “playing the follow-the-leader game.” If the game is follow-the-leader, it’s unwise to burden your would-be followers with excess information about why they might not want to follow you after all.

But when you’re urging people to do something that might entail some risk, the game is seldom follow-the-leader. Your stakeholders may have heard from the other side already, or may hear from the other side soon. They may simply be skeptical, sensing that there’s got to be another side. Unless you’re confident that follow-the-leader is really the game you’re playing, full disclosure – or at least something closer to full disclosure – is usually a better bet.

3. People feel betrayed when they belatedly find out facts they think you should have told them earlier.

Whether or not your one-sided messaging arouses suspicion at the outset, once people finally hear the other side (usually from your opponents) the other shoe drops. They reassess – with a vengeance.

They don’t just reassess the wisdom of your advice. They reassess you – your credibility and your integrity. Moreover, when people discover that relevant information has been withheld, their feeling of betrayal reliably leads them to overreact to that information.

This is the standard I routinely recommend to clients trying to decide whether to leave a particular fact out of their messaging: Imagine that at some future date people will learn the fact you’re planning to omit. As your audience digests this fact in hindsight, will the new information cast doubt on the truth and integrity of your original message? If so, you need to include it now.

The core implication of this standard is that you can dispense with much of the evidence that you’re right about X, while it is essential to include any indication that you might be wrong. Suppose there were 27 safety studies of your chemical factory or your polio vaccine, and 26 of them found no problem. The 27th is an anomaly, with serious methodological flaws that lead you to consider it entirely without merit. You may discuss as many or as few of the 26 studies that came out on your side as you like. But you absolutely must discuss the 27th, the worthless one that came out against you.

Here is another way I often make the same point. When somebody else reveals a piece of information that reflects badly on you, your organization, or your argument, it does roughly 20 times as much harm as when you “blow the whistle” on yourself. That’s not a hard-and-fast number, just a rule-of-thumb. But it’s useful because you can do rough math with it. If the odds are less than one-in-20 that your audience will eventually find out the inconvenient fact you’re planning to omit, then your decision to omit it is a sensible risk – still ethically suspect, but at least empirically defensible. But if the odds are, say, one-in-ten that somebody will eventually clue people in, then you would be wiser to clue them in yourself now.

Even in a courtroom, where juries understand that each side’s job is to present carefully selected facts showcasing one side of the story, lawyers have learned that it’s usually smarter to acknowledge the opposition’s best arguments first, before the opposition uses those arguments to torpedo their case later. In less adversarial situations, where people expect you to inform them about all sides of an issue, it’s much more damning when they discover later that you intentionally left out some inconvenient facts.

The mistrust that results when corporations are found to have withheld inconvenient information is straightforward: We figure they misled us to further their own interests.

The mistrust tends to have a different feel to it when the source is a nonprofit organization like a public health agency. We want to believe that public health agencies have our interests at heart. They don’t withhold information so they’ll get rich. They withhold (or at least underemphasize) information for our own good, information that they think we might overreact to or misperceive. They’re not trying to deceive us. They’re trying to protect us from information they think might deceive us, even though the information is true. They don’t trust us to make wise decisions if we’re fully informed – so we can’t trust them to inform us fully. That’s why I entitled my 2009 Berreth Lecture to the National Public Health Information Coalition “Trust the Public with More of the Truth.”

If we can’t trust public health agencies to inform us fully, then we have to rely on their critics to tell us the rest of the story. And not just their responsible critics. Crank websites and neighborhood rumors gain credence – even for their most extreme claims – because of the full disclosure lapses of public health agencies.

Now put yourself in the shoes of an international agency trying to stamp out polio. If you admit that the oral polio vaccine can actually cause polio, some people who might otherwise vaccinate their children will decide not to do so – and some children you might have saved will die. You almost certainly feel ethically diminished when you refuse to admit that your vaccine can give people polio, but you figure dishonesty is not too high a price to pay for saving children’s lives. What you’re not noticing is that your dishonesty is leading some people to believe your critics’ most extreme claims – not just that your vaccine can occasionally cause polio (which is true) but also that your vaccination campaign is a western genocidal plot (which is not true). That too will cost lives, many more lives in the long run, I believe. But somehow you feel far more responsible for the lives that would have been lost if you had disclosed an inconvenient truth than for the lives that will be lost because you drove people into the arms of your critics.

4. Opponents are delighted when you decide against full disclosure, leaving them the pleasure of disclosing for you.

Even if you have no opponents, the odds that members of your audience will eventually run across the inconvenient information you decided not to disclose are probably higher than my one-in-20 standard. And when they do run across it, they may well become your new opponents, determined to spread the word. So even in an opponent-free world, failing to disclose inconvenient information is a bad risk.

When you have legions of opponents, failing to disclose inconvenient information isn’t merely a bad risk. It’s stupid. It’s especially stupid (crazy, even) when the inconvenient information isn’t actually secret – when it’s readily accessible on Google (a research tool your opponents just might have access to) or even in your own technical report or on your own website.

This is the worst of both worlds: You are revealing the inconvenient truth to your opponents, who will be sure to unearth it – while leaving them the pleasure of deciding when and how to reveal it to your undecided stakeholders, whose research is less diligent.

Remember, my assumption in this column is that you’re quite sure your side is the right side. You’re not omitting the other side’s best arguments because you’re trying to mislead the audience into making a bad decision; you’re omitting them because you think the other side’s best arguments would mislead the audience into making a bad decision. Your motives are pure.

It’s your strategy that’s flawed. The other side’s best arguments are misleading. They’re true as far as they go, but they’re more emotionally compelling than rationally dispositive … which is precisely why you don’t want to acknowledge them. But they’re all the more effective, and thus all the more misleading, when you neglect to mention them, giving your opponents the golden opportunity not just to fill in the blanks but also to emphasize your dishonesty.

This is one major reason why a scientific debate in which most of the evidence is truly on one side can often look like a toss-up to journalists and bystanders. For example, I think there’s a much stronger case that global climate change is a serious problem than that it’s a leftist fairy tale. But the opposition viewpoint does have some arguments on its side. Far too often, in my judgment, proponents of reducing the world’s output of greenhouse gases ignore or trash the other side’s case. That allows climate change skeptics/deniers to showcase their few good points in the most effective of frames: “What the global warming people aren’t telling you is….”

Exactly the same thing happens when a company ignores or trashes the few good arguments against its proposed chemical factory, or when the international public health profession ignores or trashes the few good arguments against the oral polio vaccine. If your side of a controversy is 90% right, or 99% right, or even 99.99% right, it’s far wiser to disclose the remaining ten percent or one percent or one hundredth of one percent of the truth than to ignore it or trash it, thereby giving your opponents their strongest argument on a silver platter: your failure to disclose.

When I first studied communication in the 1960s, one of the major approaches was called “inoculation theory.” Nearly 50 years later it is still a major approach. Developed by William J. McGuire, inoculation theory argues that people are likelier to resist an opposition message if they’re already familiar with it and have had a chance to rebut it in their minds … or at least to put it into context.

The analogy to medical inoculation is apt. A weakened form of a disease agent is developed, one that’s (usually) too weak to cause the disease but still strong enough to trigger the production of antibodies, thus protecting the patient from future illness caused by that disease agent. McGuire’s theory has inspired hundreds of research studies showing why it’s good communication strategy to expose people to a “weakened” form of the opposition’s best arguments. In practice, that often means acknowledging the opposition’s best arguments in the same message that incorporates your side’s even better arguments.

Put yourself in your opponents’ shoes. They know you can make a pretty strong case for the chemical factory or the polio vaccination, but they’ve got one or two dynamite counterarguments they hope will be enough to turn the tide. Their best shot is if their counterarguments come as a total surprise to the audience, a shocking revelation that casts doubt on everything you’ve been saying. So don’t let that happen. Disclosing the other side’s best arguments is your best shot at inoculating the audience against those arguments.

There’s another reason for acknowledging the true but misleading arguments of your opponents: Doing so enables you to distinguish those arguments from the opponents’ arguments that are egregiously false. This works a lot better than pretending they’re all nonsense. Thus your failure to disclosure the other side’s best arguments not only makes those arguments more powerful when the other side springs them on the audience. It also strengthens the other side’s not-so-good arguments, and even its ridiculous arguments.

5. Ambivalent people go to the side of their ambivalence that is inadequately represented in their communication environment.

What I have sometimes called the seesaw of risk communication is fundamental to resolving the full disclosure dilemma. People trying to decide whether or not to do X are often torn – that is, ambivalent. They’re aware of its benefits and find them attractive, but they’re also concerned about its risks. Benefits and risks are doing battle in people’s minds.

Here’s the paradox of the seesaw: When people are ambivalent, they tend to resolve their ambivalence by emphasizing the half of it that everyone else seems to be neglecting. If everyone keeps harping on the benefits of X, I’ll focus all the more on its risks. If others are going on about the risks, I’ll rebut them in my head with the benefits. Of course people aren’t always ambivalent – but when they are, overselling the benefits of X is a lot less persuasive than acknowledging its risks alongside its benefits.

My wife and colleague Jody Lanard used to be a practicing psychiatrist. Even though her sickest patients were desperate for symptom relief, many were also understandably (and wisely) leery of psychopharmaceuticals. When Jody wanted to prescribe meds to a patient, she usually started out on the anti-drug side of the seesaw, emphasizing that psychotropic medications were a mixed blessing with lots of unpleasant side effects. She often assigned her patients to study the complete patient package insert and come back with questions. The more reluctant Jody was to prescribe, the more enthusiastic most patients became about trying the meds.

Jody’s goal wasn’t simply to use “reverse psychology” (that is, the seesaw) to lure her patients into accepting their meds. Ultimately, she wanted to guide her patients toward the seesaw’s fulcrum, to give them a balanced understanding of both the benefits and the risks of the drugs she was considering prescribing. We sometimes call the fulcrum of the seesaw “the place where grownups live.”

Some years ago I consulted for a company that manufactured fiberglass. When the International Agency for Research on Cancer announced that fiberglass was a possible human carcinogen, competitors said as little about the problem as they thought they could get away with. My client, by contrast, put out endless communications about the uncertain state of the science and the ways fiberglass users could protect themselves from the possible risk (and in some cases the possible liability). For many customers, my client quickly became the supplier of choice. I’m not sure if this was the seesaw at work, or the dynamics of trust, or some other factor or combination of factors. What I know is that many fiberglass users decided they’d rather buy from a company that was determined to keep them up to date on the cancer issue than from a company that had little to say about the issue.

A few months ago I told this story to a pharmaceutical industry client trying to decide what to tell women about the adverse health effects of birth control pills. (Although these health effects are less serious than the effects of an unwanted pregnancy, they are not trivial.) Of course every oral contraceptive company produces a patient package insert that offers customers the legally required risk information … which very few customers actually read. Would a more aggressive campaign to tell young women about blood clots and other oral contraceptive risks trigger a seesaw response, actually relieving some users’ concerns about health effects? Would such a campaign build trust? Would it diminish the impact of later anti-pill communication campaigns (by attorneys fishing for prospective plaintiffs, for example)? Would it encourage pill users to monitor their own symptoms more effectively and thus reduce the frequency of serious side effects? Would it encourage juries to see the case differently when some pill users had later medical problems that might have been side effects and decided to sue the company? Or would it just scare off a lot of women who would rather imagine that their birth control pills were completely safe?

All of these effects doubtless occur. Their relative frequency is what determines whether full disclosure that goes beyond a company’s legal obligation is wise or foolish. I accept that there are times when fully, aggressively, proactively disclosing the risks of a recommended course of action isn’t the best way to get people to do what you’re recommending. But far more often than my clients imagine, full disclosure (or something close to full disclosure) is exactly that: not just the most ethical thing to do, but the most effective as well.

There’s another seesaw worth mentioning here, because it comes up so often in risk controversies. It’s the seesaw of respect.

You may well consider your critics – at least your most extreme critics – to be crazies who aren’t worthy of anybody’s respect. But your undecided stakeholders are likely to be on a seesaw about that too. If you talk about your critics and their arguments with contempt, or refuse to dignify them by mentioning them at all, your lack of respect can easily make them seem more respectable (and certainly more powerful) to the rest of us. By contrast, if you are endlessly respectful of your most extreme critics and everything they have to say, we feel far freer to start rolling our eyes at their outlandish claims.

Of course being respectful doesn’t mean validating the truth of those outlandish claims. Respectfully validate your critics’ valid points, even if they represent only a tiny piece of the overall truth. Respectfully explain why your critics’ invalid points are mistaken, even if you have explained that umpteen times already. Leave the eye-rolling to the rest of us.

6. When people are newly aware of a risk, they often go through a temporary overreaction called an “adjustment reaction” – and then they adjust and calm down.

I have written before about adjustment reactions, and won’t go over the same ground here.

The main thing to remember about adjustment reactions is this: With rare exceptions, you can’t skip that step. Sooner or later, people are probably going to hear about the risks associated with your recommended behavior. When they do, they’re going to have an “Oh My God” moment, a brief overreaction. You can provoke the adjustment reaction now by acknowledging the risks, or you can hide or downplay the risks in order to postpone the adjustment reaction until later. That’s basically your only choice.

“Now” is usually the better option. For one thing, you’re there now to guide people through the adjustment reaction – to validate people’s fears and help put them into context. And there may be time for people to get through the adjustment reaction before they have to act on your recommendation.

Perhaps if you’re trying to push your audience into an instantaneous and irrevocable decision, it may make tactical sense to postpone the adjustment reaction until it’s too late for people to back out. (It is to avoid such tactics that many laws provide for a period of “buyer’s remorse,” during which purchasers can legally back out of a contract they signed in haste.) But if you’re trying to build support that will last for a while, you’re better off front-loading the adjustment reaction than postponing it.

7. Even if one-sided risk communication might work for a single decision, it won’t work for an ongoing relationship.

Many risk decisions, perhaps most, are part of a series of such decisions. How candid a communicator was last time has a lot to do with how the audience is likely to respond next time.

That’s why wise organizations care about their reputations, and why trust is one of the reputational variables they track. In my recent column on “Two Kinds of Reputation Management,” I argued that for most purposes a bad reputation hurts more than a good reputation helps. I’m pretty sure that’s true of the trust component of reputation. A reputation for trustworthiness probably does confer a bit of a halo effect; when you come under attack, people may be predisposed to believe your defense. But the trustworthiness halo is unlikely to survive a concerted, high-profile attack – and there’s no way it can survive actual, documented misbehavior. (The U.S. banking industry once had a reputation for trustworthiness.)

A reputation for untrustworthiness is much more stable. Once people notice that your organization tells only the part of the truth that suits its purposes, they aren’t about to take your word for anything.

So let’s assume, hypothetically, that a brand new organization with no reputation at all is trying to decide whether it should fully disclose the fairly minor risks of a recommended action. Let’s also assume that in this particular situation suppressing the inconvenient risk information stands an 80% chance of success; the odds are four out of five that nobody will ever find out. And let’s assume that the recommended action will be over soon, so even if the truth does come out later it won’t do 20 times as much harm (as I argued in #3) because the die will have already been cast. Looking simply at this one situation, then, full disclosure would be a dumb move (ethics aside).

Now let’s look at a series of four such situations. Each time, the organization has an 80% chance of getting away with telling only the self-serving parts of the truth. The probability that it will get away with doing so four times in a row is 80% × 80% × 80% × 80% – which is 41%. In other words, by the time our hypothetical organization had decided against full disclosure in four separate situations, the odds are better than even that it has been caught at least once.

Once caught, the organization has earned a reputation for untrustworthiness – a reputation that will stay with it for years to come. Now the probability of its getting away with less than full disclosure is no longer 80%. It’s close to zero, because people will be suspicious, closely checking every claim the organization makes, every word it says. Now, in fact, even full disclosure won’t come across as trustworthy. “If even these dishonest SOBs are admitting A and B and C,” untrusting stakeholders may speculate, “imagine what they must be hiding!”

This hypothetical arithmetic explains why so many organizations get sucked into a reputation-destroying pattern of one-sided risk communication. It’s hard to resist each individual 80% shot at successfully suppressing inconvenient information.

This arithmetic also explains why such organizations find it so hard to reverse course. Once you’re not trusted – either because you’ve been caught withholding relevant information or merely because people have come to sense how one-sided your information is – full disclosure no longer has much payoff for you. Your low-trust reputation is a sunk cost; people are discounting what you say anyway. So where is the incentive to change your ways?

After 40 years of risk communication consulting, I am convinced that organizations can overcome a reputation for untrustworthiness. In fact, they can overcome it rather quickly. Switching to a policy of full disclosure is obviously a prerequisite, as is implementing that policy consistently. But the toughest requirement is acknowledging that it’s a new policy. “It’s not enough to start being completely honest,” I tell my clients. “You need to point out – not just once but again and again – that you haven’t been completely honest in the past.” For a wide range of reasons, from ego to morale to liability, my clients are rarely willing to do this.

8. Risk decisions aren’t symmetrical – reassuring communications have a stronger full disclosure obligation than alarming communications.

This column is about the reasons why advocates of a potentially risky action ought to disclose the risks, even when those risks are small – why a chemical company should disclose the risks associated with the factory it’s urging people to accept into their neighborhood, and why a polio vaccination campaign should disclose the risks associated with the vaccine it’s urging people to accept into their children’s bodies.

Even if you are confident that your chemical plant or your vaccine will benefit your target audience much more than it will endanger them, and even if you are justifiably concerned that too much candor might deter people from making a sound decision, there are good reasons why you should at least give serious consideration to disclosing the risks anyway. In this column I have tried to lay out some of those reasons.

I can’t imagine writing a parallel column about the reasons why activists who are convinced the chemical plant or the vaccination campaign is more dangerous than valuable should nonetheless disclose the arguments on behalf of acceptance.

Many societal institutions are conservative with regard to risk. We calibrate smoke alarms to go off too easily, for example, preferring the hassle of an occasional false alarm to the disaster of a fire we weren’t warned about. We similarly calibrate activists to go off too easily. Within reason, we consider exaggerated warnings a public service. But exaggerated reassurances are an unmitigated disservice.

This asymmetry understandably infuriates those who are stuck on the reassuring side of a controversy.

One key reason for the asymmetry is the fact that people are more attached to what they have than to what they might get. Research by Daniel Kahneman and others has repeatedly demonstrated this phenomenon, known as “loss aversion.” It explains why “double or nothing” is usually an unattractive wager; the risk of losing $100 that’s already ours feels like a bigger deal than the lure of winning an additional $100. Faced with a choice between a benefit (something new that we might get) and a risk (something we already have that we might lose), nearly everybody focuses more on the risk. There are exceptions – entrepreneurs and gamblers, for example – but for most of us a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush.

In the typical risk controversy, the alarming side is the one protecting what we have already, giving it a built-in advantage. The reassuring side may be offering us the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it is threatening some of what we have already. So the reassuring side has a full disclosure obligation than the alarming side doesn’t have.

Sometimes it may be possible for the reassuring side to reframe the controversy so it’s got something to alarm us about. Global warming skeptics started out on the reassuring side, downplaying the risk of climate change. But they have managed to reframe the issue so it’s largely about the risk of destroying our economy and way of life if we overreact to the unproved prospect of climate change. Similarly, a controversy over the risk of the polio vaccine intrinsically favors the anti-vax side. A controversy over the risk of polio outbreaks favors those who want to get people vaccinated.

However a controversy gets framed, the alarming side is freer than the reassuring side to overstate its case and ignore its opponents’ case.

This asymmetry doesn’t mean the alarming side in a risk controversy is free to say anything it wants. Dishonesty can be costly to credibility and reputation even when you’re sounding the alarm. Consider the heavy cost global warming alarmists have paid for the “Climategate” revelations of carefully one-sided research reports. Or consider the reputational damage done to the World Health Organization in Europe because it kept harping on the seriousness of the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010 long after the European public could see how mild it actually was.

Even so, when you think people are insufficiently concerned about some risk and you’re trying to rouse them out of their apathy, you are granted considerable leeway to argue your case one-sidedly. Your principal obligation is to dramatize your cause as effectively as you can. If in the process of doing so you overstate your evidence a bit and pretty much ignore your opponents’ evidence, that’s probably not going to devastate your credibility. Sooner or later people will notice your one-sidedness, and will rightly categorize you as more activist than objective observer. (That can be a problem for health officials who want to talk like activists but still be seen as scientists.) But unless you go too far, sliding down the slippery slope from dramatization to exaggeration to flat-out dishonesty, there’s a respectable niche for alarmist activism.

Full disclosure simply isn’t as important an issue for the kind of risk communication I call “precaution advocacy”: trying to increase people’s outrage about serious hazards.

But full disclosure is a crucial issue for the opposite kind of risk communication, “outrage management”: trying to decrease people’s outrage about small hazards.

Precaution advocacy requires dramatization and vividness, and permits a fair amount of one-sidedness. Outrage management, by contrast, requires excruciatingly thorough disclosure of the other side’s piece of the truth, no matter how miniscule.

Full disclosure is important when you’re trying to convince people to accept your chemical plant or your polio vaccine despite its small risks. Your opponents, the people insisting the risks aren’t small at all, get to be a lot more one-sided than you do. Sorry.

Climate Change Risk Communication:

The Problem of Psychological Denial

by Peter M. Sandman

A few months ago, I received two emails in the same week asking what I thought should be done about climate change denial. One came from a radio reporter in Boston, the other from a health official in California. Both referenced evidence that most Americans don’t seem to care very much about global warming. Neither said anything about “awareness” or “apathy.” Those weren’t the problem, my correspondents seemed to think. The problem was denial. (The reporter produced a ten-minute story on global warming denial that’s worth listening to.)

I think they’re onto something. Their emails forced me to think more deeply about the implications of denial for climate change risk communication – particularly the messaging of global warming activists.

Let me quickly define a few terms:

• By “global warming denial” I don’t mean the claims of people who aren’t upset about climate change and aggressively insist that it isn’t real or isn’t serious. I’m focusing on people so upset (or hopeless) about climate change they can’t bear to think about it: people “in denial,” not “deniers.”
• By “global warming activists” I don’t mean just environmental advocacy groups, but anyone trying to sound the alarm about global warming, from NGOs to philosophers, from regulators to academics.
• Throughout this column, I will use the terms “global warming” and “global climate change” interchangeably. Many activists today try to avoid “global warming,” both because it’s not harsh enough (some have suggested “global frying” instead) and because it’s not entirely accurate (climatic effects of greenhouse gases are more complex than just temperature). But journalists like “global warming,” the public is used to it, and I believe we’re stuck with it.

The last half of this column will explore how the precaution advocacy messaging of climate change activists is likely to affect audiences that are in or near denial about global warming. Precaution advocacy is designed for audiences whose outrage is too low. But the outrage of people who are in or near denial isn’t too low; it’s so high they’re having trouble bearing it. The correct risk communication paradigm for them isn’t precaution advocacy; it is crisis communication.

First I need to sketch in the role of denial in risk communication generally, make a case that global warming denial is important, and identify its sources.

Apathy versus Denial

The life history of any public issue starts with unawareness. People aren’t pro or con. They aren’t even apathetic. They simply haven’t heard about the issue yet.

Three Simple Points

Fostering awareness isn’t easy. Absent a stunning event, it takes powerful messaging and endless repetition in the media to break through the clutter and establish the existence of your issue in the minds of your audience.

In most of the developed world, that has now been accomplished for global warming. Today, most people know what “global warming” means. And they know it’s bad – itself an accomplishment, since most preexisting connotations of “warm” were positive.

Once people are aware of your issue, some of them decide you’re right and become supporters. They may or may not be inspired to work on the issue, but at least they’re on your side. Others decide you’re wrong; they’re your opponents, either active opponents or uninvolved opponents. Still others decide to reserve judgment; they’re aware but undecided.

But for most people the stage after awareness isn’t support or opposition or reserved judgment. It’s apathy. When people are newly aware of an issue, the most common response is not to have much of a response. Sometimes we have a brief “Oh my God, this is serious” reaction – but it is hard to convert that feeling into sustained action or even sustained interest. It most often recedes into apathy. Yes, we’re aware, at least more aware than before. But we’re not interested.

“Apathy” has pejorative connotations, but apathy about most issues is our normal state. Nobody has time or energy to deal with every issue that comes along. We have to choose. That is, we have to be “apathetic” about most things. Anyone who wants to get a particular issue onto our worry agenda – not to mention our action agenda – must compete first for our awareness, then for our continuing attention, and eventually for our allegiance.

For any one issue, the vast majority of people who know about it aren’t allies or opponents or undecideds; they’re apathetic.

Then there’s denial.

Denial looks like apathy. In fact, denial actively masquerades as apathy; people in or near denial will tell you they’re just not interested. But unlike apathy, denial is unconsciously motivated. If I’m really “just not interested” in your issue, that’s apathy – your issue didn’t make my list. If I can’t bear to get interested, if the issue threatens my sense of how the world works or arouses emotions I cannot tolerate, that’s denial.

The distinction matters because the appropriate messaging for apathy and the appropriate messaging for denial are antithetical in crucial ways. If the diagnosis is apathy, the treatment is to get me interested, to arouse more concern. If the diagnosis is denial, trying to arouse more concern will backfire, propelling me more deeply into denial. The treatment for denial is to help me bear the concern I’m already feeling.

But in other ways messaging aimed at apathy and messaging aimed at denial are compatible. A sense of futility often accompanies both apathy and denial. So persuading people that there are useful actions they can take works for both groups. Efficacy is common ground.

Efficacy

Here are some common reasons people give for not getting involved in an issue:

• “I’m not a powerful person. Nothing I do is going to help.”
• “There’s really nothing for the individual to do. It’s all up to governments and institutions.”
• “It’s too late. The die is cast.”
• “The issue is simply too big. There is nothing to be done.”
• “Everything is foreordained.”

Psychologists often distinguish among these sentiments: powerlessness, hopelessness, helplessness, fatalism, futility, etc. In particular, believing there’s nothing you can do is genuinely different from believing there’s nothing anyone can do. (The psychological literature often uses the terms “self-efficacy” and “response efficacy” to refer to these two kinds of efficacy. See Kim Witte's “Putting the fear back into fear appeals.”) But the sentiments are closely related, and I’m going to use the term “efficacy” to refer to the whole cluster.

Efficacy complicates the distinction between apathy and denial. Here’s how:

• Low efficacy can lead to apathy. If I believe I can’t do anything about your issue, it is sensible for me to focus instead on some other issue I can do something about. So feelings of low efficacy are a major source of apathy: I shrug off your issue in part because I don’t see an effective way to help. Almost all successful efforts to arouse concern therefore include some efficacy messaging: “You can help,” “here are some things you can do,” “together we can solve this problem,” etc.
• Low efficacy can rationalize apathy. Sometimes people shrug off your issue for other reasons entirely, and then tell you it’s all about efficacy. It is more courteous to tell you there’s nothing I can do than to admit you’re boring me. It is more self-respecting to tell myself there’s nothing I can do than to admit I don’t really care. Distinguishing between efficacy-as-cause and efficacy-as-excuse is often hard.
• Low efficacy can lead to denial. If I care deeply about an issue, the feeling that the issue is hopeless can be extraordinarily painful. The feeling that I am personally powerless to influence the outcome can be just as painful, especially if it worsens other emotions like fear and guilt. Understandably, people may find these feelings unbearable. Robert Jay Lifton has called the result “psychic numbing.” It is a kind of denial. When denial is rooted in hopelessness and helplessness, efficacy messaging should help.
• Low efficacy can rationalize denial, or result from it. If I’m in denial for reasons other than efficacy, I may to retreat to claims that there’s nothing to be done, or at least nothing I can do. My feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are real, but they’re hiding deeper and even less bearable feelings. When efficacy messaging isn’t helping much, it may be because the denial is rooted elsewhere.

The nature of journalism exacerbates the problem of low efficacy. The media tend to define their audience as, well, an audience: bystanders rather than players. What is sometimes called “mobilizing information” – information that would help the audience do something about an issue – is comparatively rare in hard news, relegated mostly to sidebars and features. (Decades ago when I was doing PR for activist groups, I used to try to persuade reporters to put my group’s phone number into the story, so interested readers could more easily call and get involved. I rarely succeeded.) Gerhart Wiebe coined the phrase “the syndrome of well-informed futility” to describe this effect of modern journalism on citizenship. Instead of feeling a civic obligation to do something about issues, we feel a civic obligation to know about them.

It is possible that the Web will reverse these trends; I think it’s too soon to tell.

Efficacy is where apathy and denial meet. When people are comfortably aware of an issue and comfortably convinced that there’s not much they can do about it, they’re apathetic – and low efficacy is part of their apathy. When people are so angst-ridden about how powerless they feel that they can’t bear it and go numb instead, they’re in denial – and low efficacy is part of their denial.

Global warming apathy or global warming denial?

Efficacy messaging is a twofer: an important part of communications aimed at apathy and a crucial part of communications aimed at denial.

In most other ways, those two kinds of communications are antithetical. The most straightforward solution to apathy is to arouse concern. But if people are near denial, efforts to arouse their concern may push them into denial; and if people are in denial already, efforts to arouse their concern will push them more deeply into denial. People in or near denial don’t need to feel more upset. They need to feel more supported, so they can bear how upset they are already.

When people are aware of a risk but aren’t expressing much interest in it, usually the problem isn’t denial. Too little concern is usually the right diagnosis; arousing concern is usually the right prescription.

But even though denial is much less common than apathy, it is not rare. And when communicators don’t address it, they’re mishandling an important segment of their audience. If we assume an audience is apathetic (just not interested) when it is actually in or near denial (can’t bear to think about it), our efforts to motivate precaution-taking won’t just fail; they will backfire, making that audience even more resistant to future messaging.

Global warming activists have two types of precautions in mind: lifestyle changes to reduce our individual carbon footprints, and political support for policy changes to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. The question is how best to move people in these two directions. The answer depends on our assessment of why they haven’t been moved already.

If people are apathetic about climate change, their failure to act means they’re fully occupied with other issues, and global warming hasn’t made the cut. The most crucial risk communication task, then, is to pierce the apathy. Piercing the apathy may necessitate offering people things to do and persuading them that those actions will be efficacious. Piercing the apathy almost certainly necessitates arousing concern – getting people more concerned, worried, or even frightened about global warming (and therefore by definition less concerned/worried/frightened about other risks contending for their attention), so they will give it a higher priority.

But if people are in or near denial about climate change, their failure to act is more deeply psychological. It’s not that they are giving priority to other issues; it’s more that they can’t bear to think about this issue. The most crucial risk communication task, then, is to make it more bearable to focus on global warming – to diagnose the reasons why people are so powerfully motivated to avoid the issue, and to change our messaging to reduce their avoidance and make it easier for them to face the issue and take action.

How do you distinguish apathy from denial? Apathetic people become less apathetic (at least briefly) when exposed to alarming information. People in denial, on the other hand, retreat more deeply into denial when exposed to alarming information.

So let’s do a thought experiment. Picture an audience gathered to watch Al Gore’s remarkable global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” I’m not talking about an audience of supporters, seeking out the movie in order to be reenergized by Gore’s intellect and passion. Nor do I mean an audience of opponents, watching under protest and knowing in advance they disagree. Imagine an audience made up entirely of people who are already aware of the issue but haven’t thought much about it, haven’t adopted a position pro or con, and haven’t taken any relevant actions. Assume they happen across the movie by accident – on an airplane, say, or in a classroom. How will it affect them?

If they emerge galvanized into climate change activism – or even moved modestly in that direction – then they were apathetic to start with and the movie has helped.

But if they recoil from Gore’s message and start telling themselves reasons why they don’t have to do anything about climate change (he’s just a lefty propagandist, the economy’s too shaky to worry about anything else right now, it’s too late anyway, whatever), then the movie has done damage. Probably they started out in or near denial and the movie has exacerbated the problem; conceivably the movie scared them directly from apathy into denial.

Other reactions to “An Inconvenient Truth” are also possible. Some people may prefer a less emotional or more emotional approach than Gore’s. Some may be open to the message but not from that particular messenger. Some may simply decide they disagree on the merits. I’m not trying to reduce everybody who isn’t an activist on either side of the climate change debate to the simple dichotomy of apathy versus denial. Still, that dichotomy explains a large portion of the population – and that dichotomy matters in trying to figure out how best to mobilize climate change action.

At nearly every showing of “An Inconvenient Truth,” some newcomers to the issue are inspired and some are put off. That is, there are apathetic people in the audience who become less apathetic, and there are people in or near denial who go more deeply into denial.

The relative size of the two groups may be changing. When “An Inconvenient Truth” premiered in 2006, apathy about global warming was the obvious messaging problem; psychological denial about global warming was barely on the radar. In the short time since then, media attention has increased, public concern has increased, and the seriousness of the crisis has increased. More and more people have transitioned from unawareness to apathy, then from apathy to concern … and then from concern to denial. Still more are likely to make this transition in the next few years.

Is denial now a bigger messaging problem than apathy? Is “An Inconvenient Truth” now doing more harm than good? I seriously doubt it. But I do think denial is a bigger problem than it used to be. And notwithstanding all the good it does, I think “An Inconvenient Truth” is doing more harm than it used to do.

Never underestimate the staying power of apathy! Most people are “in their lives,” focused on home, job, family, etc. The outside issues we attend to are mostly issues (like the economic recession) that directly, palpably affect our immediate personal affairs. What little time is left over we allocate to local charities and controversies: the soup kitchen, the little league, the city council, the art museum, the nearby polluting factory. National and global issues are too big. We read about them. Our concern is momentarily aroused. We even email the article to friends. Then we go back to our lives.

The battle against global warming apathy is anything but passé. It is far from won, and it will be hard to win. As my colleague and friend David Ropeik has written:

The psychology of risk perception also confronts us with the reality that issues like climate change just don’t ring our alarm bells. We use a dual process of reason and affect [emotion] to gauge the threats we face. Intellectually, climate change is threatening, sure. Majorities say so in nearly every survey. But emotionally, climate change is distant … an idea … not a threat that individuals feel is going to directly impact them. You see this in surveys too. Ask a few friends, “Name one way that climate change will significantly negatively impact you in the next 10 or 20 years.” Most of the people I know struggle with that one. Which is why, while majorities say they are concerned about climate change, they shrink to minorities when asked to support carbon taxes or higher energy prices or, God forbid, changing personal lifestyles. Without feeling personally threatened, people just don’t respond to risks urgently at all. It’s just the way it is.

I don’t disagree with Ropeik that it’s still hard for many people to see global warming as personally relevant. In survey after survey on climate change attitudes, far more respondents say they expect negative impacts on the world than on themselves and their families. This is usually interpreted the way Ropeik interprets it: it’s not obvious yet that a polar bear struggling to stay atop a shrinking ice floe has anything to do with you and me. But the same data are also susceptible to an interpretation grounded in denial. People in denial push the problem away; they see it as somebody else’s problem. So, yes, lots of people still don’t realize that polar bear is our warning sentinel. But some people – an increasing number, I believe – are defended against this realization, because they are finding it too hard to bear.

I dealt briefly with global warming apathy in response to a July 2006 Guestbook comment that asked how to arouse more outrage about climate change. The comment referenced not just “An Inconvenient Truth” but also a wonderful Los Angeles Times op-ed article called “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming.” My response stressed that precaution advocacy takes time, that global warming is a tough issue to arouse outrage about, and that surprisingly good progress was being made. I went on to suggest a few outrage components I thought could be better used to arouse more global warming outrage. (For a generic overview on how to arouse outrage in apathetic audiences, see “‘Watch Out!’ – How to Warn Apathetic People.”)

“An Inconvenient Truth” is still a powerful tool of climate change precaution advocacy. It works for waking up those who are still unaware; it works for arousing higher levels of concern in those who are aware but apathetic; it works for revving up supporters. But like much global warming risk communication, I think it pushes away a growing audience of people who are finding it almost unbearable to think about climate change.

I can’t find much quantitative evidence to confirm – or rebut – the importance of psychological denial about global climate change. A small but growing empirical literature is devoted to global warming communication: how to persuade people to change their individual and political choices in the direction of climate change mitigation. But the studies I have seen do not specifically address the distinction between apathy and denial. Paying more attention to this distinction might help explain some of their findings. For example, the mixed results of various studies of the effectiveness of fear appeals begin to make sense if we consider that scaring apathetic people tends to help while scaring people in or near denial tends to backfire.

One good summary of current research is a November 2008 article from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine: “Communication and Marketing as Climate Change-Intervention Assets: A Public Health Perspective,” by Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. Maibach and Leiserowitz also collaborated on “Global Warming’s ‘Six Americas’: An Audience Segmentation.” This extremely useful 2008 report partitions the U.S. population into six groups – alarmed, concerned, cautious, unconcerned, doubtful, and dismissive – and proposes communication strategies for each group. The word “denial” does not appear in either document. An earlier (2005) segmentation effort from the U.K. distinguishes “settlers,” “prospectors,” and “pioneers.” Written by communications strategist Chris Rose and colleagues, the report proposes climate change persuasion strategies for each audience segment. Once again, there is no mention of denial.

Also worth a look is a 2004 master’s thesis entitled Risk Communication on Climate Change by J.A. Wardekker; it actually has a short section entitled “Dissonance and denial.”

Most published writing about what works and what doesn’t in climate change risk communication makes the implicit assumption that apathy is the problem. This column will examine what works and what doesn’t when denial is the problem.

Some other cases of denial

Australian pediatrician Helen Caldicott has helped lead the movement against nuclear weapons for almost four decades. Starting in the 1970s, Caldicott gave countless anti-nuclear speeches in which she briskly narrated the devastation that would result if a small nuclear warhead exploded “right here right now.” Beyond doubt, Helen Caldicott’s “bombing runs” (as insiders called the speech) inspired thousands of new activists. Also beyond doubt, thousands of others walked out of that same speech more numb than they walked in. It was just too upsetting, more than they could bear.

In 1986, JoAnn M. Valenti and I wrote about nuclear apathy and nuclear denial – and their implications for anti-nuclear risk communication – in an article entitled “Scared Stiff – or Scared into Action.” The editor’s introduction to that article nicely encapsulates our point: “At a time when everyone ought to be working to prevent nuclear war, the ‘bombing run’ tactics of activists have numbed many people. Activists should appeal to more positive emotions to empower people and inspire action.”

In the 1990s, I dealt with another issue that struck me as more about denial than apathy: endocrine disruptors. Zoologist Theo Colborn was first to argue systematically that many environmental chemicals disrupt the development of the endocrine system, causing irreversible damage in animal species, including humans. By the time Colborn’s book, Our Stolen Future (coauthored with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers), was published in 1996, it seemed almost inevitable that endocrine disruptors would be the environmental issue of the last years of the twentieth century. Both environmental groups and chemical-emitting corporations assumed as much; both assigned staff to work the issue. It seemed an irresistible story for journalists, especially in its sexual implications: frogs with stunted penises, humans with diminishing sperm counts, etc.

But it never caught fire – not so far, anyway. Though its scientific validity and health significance are still unsettled, the endocrine disruption hypothesis should have been a big public controversy. It possessed nearly all the “outrage factors” that I have argued determine how people respond to a risk: coerced, unnatural, unfamiliar, memorable, dreaded, etc. Were people nonetheless too apathetic to focus on it? Or were they too terrified? I think the latter.

A third example is terrorism. One of the risk communication errors the U.S. government made after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was its failure to offer people things to do. In 2003, the government finally started proposing ways we could all help prepare for the possibility of more attacks. This was an important step forward. But the initial public response was disdainful, especially with regard to the inclusion of duct tape on the government’s list of items a prepared citizen ought to have on hand.

So Jody Lanard and I wrote a column on “Duct Tape Risk Communication,” trying to make sense of this weird public response. We likened it to a similar cynicism in the 1950s about precautions against nuclear bombs. Denial wasn’t the only thing going on in the rejection of duct tape in 2003 or the rejection of fallout shelters fifty years earlier. In both cases, a major source of the cynicism was people’s sense of futility (low efficacy). The threats seemed so huge and the recommended precautions so trivial. But denial almost certainly accounted for more than apathy in explaining the widespread public derision regarding fallout shelters and duct tape.

Are we getting it wrong again, this time about climate change?

I think we’re still making pretty good progress with regard to the apathetic segment of our audience. But we must also talk to a small but growing audience segment that is experiencing global warming denial, not global warming apathy. And too often instead of mitigating the denial, we’re provoking it.

This is a fundamental error in risk communication categorization. Global warming activists rightly see their core task as precaution advocacy; the situation is high-hazard but low-outrage, so they’re trying to arouse more outrage. But for people who are in or near denial about global warming, it’s a mistake to assume that outrage is low; their outrage is intolerably high. For them, the paradigm is crisis communication: high-hazard, high-outrage. To reach them, arousing more outrage isn’t what’s needed; instead, we need to help them bear the outrage they’re already feeling.

Kinds of denial

The most literal sort of denial is explicitly believing that the risk isn’t real: “No, the world’s climate isn’t changing as a result of accumulating greenhouse gases.” But there are subtler ways of evading a situation that threatens our worldview or our emotional stability. Here are some common variants or cousins of denial that are relevant to global warming:

• People sometimes acknowledge the reality of a risk without feeling its emotional punch. A few days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a friend I used to play poker with asserted blandly and affably, “I’m not upset about what happened. It’s going to lead to a holocaust.” Psychiatrists call this defense mechanism “isolation of affect.”
• People sometimes acknowledge the reality of a risk without acknowledging its importance or its urgency – for example by predicting that scientists will find a solution, or society will adapt, or it will somehow turn out less disruptive than the alarmists are claiming. The rationales for shrugging off the issue can get pretty complicated. This psychological defense mechanism is called “intellectualization.”
• People sometimes avoid worrying sufficiently about X by worrying excessively about Y instead. Psychiatrists have a label for this one too: “displacement.” Some people who overreacted to the anthrax attacks of late 2001, for example, were experiencing emotions displaced from their recent memories of 9/11 and their fear of another serious attack. As I wrote at the time: “[T]he hazard of anthrax for ordinary people is infinitesimal. I think we know that – which is what makes freaking out over anthrax psychologically safer than pondering, say, smallpox, or the prospect of a suitcase nuclear bomb.”
• People sometimes make fun of a risk, turning it into an object of ridicule in order to avoid having to take it to heart. I came of age at the height of the cold war, when the fear of nuclear Armageddon was routinely transmuted into humor, à la the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove. Many psychiatrists see this sort of humor as a defense mechanism in its own right.

The core of denial is motivated inattention. I direct my attention away from information that threatens to upset my worldview or my emotional stability – such as information about global climate change. Denying that global warming is real, denying that I’m upset about it, asserting that it’ll turn out to be just a small problem in the end, obsessing over something else instead, and making fun of other people’s worry about it are all ways of accomplishing the psychologically necessary inattention to what’s happening to the world’s climate.

When I talk about global warming denial, I do not mean conscious, strategic denial. There are people who privately believe that climate change is real and serious, but have reasons for pretending otherwise – paid spokespeople for organizations that have a vested interest in denying the significance of climate change, for example. Strategic denial is rarer than we usually imagine. Those employed to deny the significance of climate change usually manage to convince themselves that they’re on the right side.

But people do occasionally voice opinions that are not what they believe in their innermost hearts. That’s not the kind of denial I’m worried about.

Nor am I talking about intellectual denial, the position of climate change skeptics and contrarians. Some members of this group have reviewed the evidence and decided that the case for a global warming crisis is weaker than the majority of experts now say it is.

Others just smell a rat. Their intuition tells them that the crisis is overblown, and that the expert consensus to the contrary may be just an artifact of herd mentality or political allegiance. Before dismissing this mistrust of the experts as willfully anti-scientific, consider your own skepticism about the ways science is deployed by institutions you disagree with. Environmentalists who insist that global warming climatology is unchallengeable have no trouble challenging, say, corporate toxicology – and vice-versa, of course. The view that “sound science” is often biased, politicized, and coopted by interest groups is itself grounded in sound science.

Please note that my own belief that the global warming contrarians are wrong is not grounded in the evidence. Since I lack the appropriate expertise, I am simply playing the odds, betting that the expert consensus will turn out right (as it usually does) and the contrarians will turn out wrong (as they usually do).

So we can distinguish three kinds of global warming denial:

• Strategic denial: I pretend to disagree for reasons of my own – to keep my job, enrich my business, get elected by my constituents, placate my spouse, whatever.
• Intellectual denial: I genuinely disagree (whether based on evidence or based on intuition and mistrust).
• Psychological denial (the focus of this column): I can’t bear to let myself agree; I have a strong cognitive or emotional need to avoid the issue or to be on the other side.

In the real world the three can be hard to distinguish. Most people in psychological denial avoid the issue that gives them pain. But some are unable to push it away, and become scoffers instead … which makes them look like the intellectual deniers, the contrarians. And of course the strategic deniers work hard to look like contrarians.

Moreover, the three are sometimes intermixed. For several years I worked with a CEO who was a high-visibility global warming denier, one of the ones journalists could always count on for a colorful contrarian quote. He ran an oil company that was under significant pressure to reduce its carbon footprint. He had a science Ph.D. and could support his position with lots of data. And he had a big ego that would clearly have taken a blow if he had ever decided that the evidence was trending against him and the problem looked serious after all. Was his denial strategic, intellectual, or psychological? All three, I assume, in proportions I couldn’t begin to guess.

Sources of Psychological Denial

A common source of psychological denial is the one I just attributed to my oil industry ex-client: ego. I have built my career on the contention that people’s perception of risk results more from what I call “outrage” than from the actual, technical hazard. Suppose evidence were to start accumulating that I was wrong, that people’s risk perception is actually highly correlated with risk assessment data. I would find such a development very embarrassing. So I would scrutinize the studies for methodological flaws (as if the studies on my side didn’t have flaws too), and I would be among the last to join in any emerging expert consensus that the outrage hypothesis is false.

Magical thinking is also closely related to denial. We have all learned the aphorism that “if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true.” But most of us have to keep learning the lesson. The current economic meltdown is widely (and justly) attributed to greed on the part of many financial institutions, and to incompetence or ideology on the part of government agencies that were supposed to regulate those institutions. But it is also attributable to magical thinking on everybody’s part – including individual home purchasers and investors who let themselves pretend that prices and values could go up forever. We denied the reality of economic cycles, and we’re paying for it now.

The two sources of psychological denial of greatest importance to global climate change are cognitive dissonance and intolerable emotion. I want to look at those two in detail.

Cognitive dissonance

Human beings are superb rationalizers. We seek out information that confirms our preconceptions and validates our existing behaviors, so we can hang onto our sense of how the world works. And we work hard to avoid the “cognitive dissonance” that results from learning information that disconfirms our preconceptions or invalidates our existing behaviors.

It is extremely painful to discover that a deeply held conviction that you have acted on publicly (or even privately) is mistaken. Most people, most of the time, find ways to avoid such unpleasant discoveries.

In a 1956 book entitled When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter studied an end-of-the-world cult that had to cope with the world’s failure to end on schedule. In 1954, Marian Keech of Lake City, Utah announced that she had learned from extraterrestrial sources that global cataclysm was about to destroy the world, except for those who were “spiritually mature”; they would be picked up by an alien spaceship at midnight on December 21. The Lake City cult existed for only about five months; it attracted only a dozen or so serious followers. Importantly, those followers made public commitments to their beliefs. They quit their jobs, sold their belongings, and moved to Lake City.

At 5 a.m. on December 22 – five hours past deadline – Keech heard from the extraterrestrials again. They told her that the group’s devotion had led God to save the planet. Her followers spread the word. Then Keech got another message, that the rapture had been rescheduled for 6 p.m. on December 24. About 200 people showed up, but there was no rapture. Keech’s explanation this time: The spacemen had arrived on schedule, but they made themselves invisible to nonbelievers in order not to provoke a riot.

Festinger and his colleagues argued that Keech’s followers could not bear disconfirmation of beliefs to which they had committed so deeply. They simply had too much invested; being proved wrong would lead to intolerable cognitive dissonance. So they suppressed their doubts, reinterpreted the evidence, sought out new rationales for their convictions, and proselytized for additional converts.

The Lake City cult died very quickly. But When Prophecy Fails says the same strenuous efforts to prevent or reduce cognitive dissonance characterize all deeply held beliefs that are challenged by contrary evidence – regardless of whether the challenged belief is widespread or rare, regardless of whether it grows or disappears, and regardless of whether it is objectively true or false (or neither: unprovable and unfalsifiable).

A year later, in 1957, Festinger’s masterwork was published. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance argued that dissonance extends to any situation where there is a discrepancy between two beliefs, two behaviors, or (most upsetting) a belief and a behavior. You believe in animal rights but you eat meat. You know smoking is dangerous but you smoke. You consider yourself a loving person but you’re often unkind to your next-door neighbor. Faced with cognitive dissonance, people look for ways to reconcile the conflict.

Some of the implications of cognitive dissonance theory are counterintuitive – and very important to persuasive communication (including risk communication).

For example, people often do something new for reasons that don’t make much sense even to them – in response to advertising appeals they don’t actually believe, for instance. (Ads implying that using a particular product will give you sex appeal rarely convince people that the product will improve their sex lives – but they increase sales anyway.) New behaviors without intellectual support give rise to cognitive dissonance – so we seek out information to validate the behavior and reduce the dissonance. Thus, while information is a weak motivator to do something we haven’t done yet, it is a strong rationalizer and reinforcer to support something we just started doing.

In other words, it’s hard to get people do X for sound reason Y. If people aren’t doing X already, learning Y would create some dissonance, so they’d rather not learn it. But suppose you get them to do X for unsound reason Z – for example, by triggering an irrelevant motivator like sexuality. Now they’re actively looking for information to justify X. So telling them Y now won’t add to their dissonance, it will actually reduce the dissonance that doing X for reason Z has aroused.

This gives rise to a very effective two-step persuasion strategy, grounded in cognitive dissonance. For example:

Step 1: Switch to long-life fluorescent light bulbs (X) because your kid gets all bent out of shape whenever you use a traditional bulb (Z).

Step 2: Learn about global warming (Y) and congratulate yourself on having reduced your carbon footprint to help save the planet.

Between Step 1 and Step 2, of course, comes the cognitive dissonance: “Why am I letting my child harass me into changing what kind of light bulb I buy?”

And then there’s a Step 3: Generalize your new understanding of climate change issues to a whole range of additional behaviors (ones your kid has nothing to do with), from what car you drive to what politicians you vote for.

Starting in the 1970s, I have developed many campaigns for environmental activist groups that followed exactly this structure:

an irrelevant and intellectually unconvincing motivator to trigger a new behavior;cognitive dissonance aroused by not knowing any good reasons for the behavior;information to rationalize and generalize the behavior.

For a more detailed description of how such campaigns worked, see Brian Day’s book chapter on “Media Campaigns.”

The unsoundness of the motivator that launches Step 1 is essential to the process; if the motivator were intellectually convincing the behavior wouldn’t arouse any dissonance. In a classic cognitive dissonance experiment, people were offered varying amounts of money to argue an opinion they actually disagreed with. If they were offered too small an amount, people would simply decline. If they were offered too much, they would give the speech but feel no dissonance; they felt comfortable telling themselves they did it for the money, so there was no need to reconsider their opinions. Somewhere in the middle was a financial offer sufficient to get people to give the speech but not sufficient to get them to feel okay about giving it. That’s when people experienced the most cognitive dissonance, and therefore the most interest in finding information to support the view expressed in the speech, and therefore the most change in their own opinions.

When an existing opinion conflicts with a proposed new behavior, people try to avoid the new behavior, because acting in ways incompatible with their belief system would arouse cognitive dissonance. When an existing behavior conflicts with a proposed new opinion, people try to avoid the new opinion for the same reason.

What about when an existing opinion conflicts with an existing behavior? People are usually more deeply committed to the behavior. So we seek out ways to resolve the dissonance that won’t require us to change what we do. Ideally, we would prefer not to have to change what we think either. We look for a rationale that makes the two compatible, or we try to avoid noticing the inconsistency. But if something’s got to go, it’s probably going to be the opinion.

This explains why pointing out people’s inconsistency or hypocrisy is rarely an effective way to change their behavior. When I was a graduate student, I was briefly employed on a project to help university professors improve their teaching. We interviewed profs on the goals of their courses; then we studied the extent to which the courses actually achieved those goals and fed the information back to the profs. The educators who designed this project figured the professors would change their curricula to better achieve their goals. What actually happened: They changed their goals to better match what their courses were already accomplishing.

Similarly, telling people they can’t possibly be serious about their global warming concerns when they’re driving an SUV is not a good way to get them to abandon the SUV. It’s far likelier to get them to abandon their global warming concerns. Likelier still, they’ll find a way to reconcile their global warming concerns with their SUV. Take your choice:

• My carbon footprint is smaller than that of most of my peers. Everyone’s entitled to at least one global warming self-indulgence.
• My family’s safety comes first. It’s not my fault that the safest cars the auto industry makes are gas guzzlers. When they make a really safe small car, I’ll drive it.
• Reversing global warming requires fundamental policy changes. Individual symbolic gestures won’t help. In fact, trivial lifestyle reforms might even postpone the radical changes that are needed. Driving an SUV helps sharpen the contradictions and hasten the revolution.
• It’s too late anyway. This is the last gasp of consumerism. I may as well enjoy myself while I can.

(There are also some people who revel in their own cognitive dissonance. “Yes,” they proclaim to anyone who will listen, “my lifestyle does conflict with my values. I’m such a hypocrite!” This is an acquired taste Festinger seems to have missed.)

How might cognitive dissonance lead to global warming denial?

Here’s one possibility. I believe I’m a good person. I like my SUV. And I keep reading that environmentalists think my lifestyle is destroying the planet. Dissonance! I can reduce my dissonance either by deciding I’m not such a good person after all, or by junking my SUV, or by concluding that the environmentalists are wrong. Which of the three is easiest on my psyche? The third, obviously – so I seek out information suggesting that global warming is an unproved hypothesis. And another climate change denier is born.

Here’s another possibility. I’m a serious conservative, convinced that the free market is the best engine of human happiness ever invented because it harnesses greed to yield an ever-higher standard of living. Many scientists are apparently convinced that global warming is a serious problem. In general I believe in science, but this issue has been championed mostly by liberals, who keep coming up with solutions that require more government regulation, more international cooperation, and a lower standard of living. Dissonance! I can either abandon my conservative ideology or decide that global warming scientists are perpetrating an anti-capitalist fraud. The latter is easier on my psyche. And another climate change denier is born.

Those are only two of many possibilities. Once you start looking for ways in which global warming activism might trigger cognitive dissonance in its audience, you won’t have any trouble coming up with additional scenarios.

It is important to emphasize that global warming opponents are no more vulnerable to cognitive dissonance than global warming activists. Assume for a minute that there is gathering evidence that the global warming hypothesis is a mistake: that greenhouse gases are good for you; that current climate changes are cyclical, natural, and benign; and that there’s no reason to disrupt the pursuit of the good life through material consumption. (That’s not what the evidence says – but do the thought experiment.) Does anyone doubt that this emerging scientific consensus would greatly discomfit the leaders of the environmental movement, and that many of those leaders would resist the new paradigm by any means necessary, from questioning the methodologies of the relevant studies to challenging the competence, integrity, and political goals of the study authors?

Because most current evidence suggests that global warming is a serious problem, cognitive dissonance besets the other side, the contrarians. If the weight of the evidence were to shift, the dissonance shoe would be on the other foot.

Strategic denial and intellectual denial are conscious; people who decide to deny global climate change for strategic or intellectual reasons are accountable for their decisions. But psychological denial goes deeper. When people are propelled by cognitive dissonance into climate change denial, that is fundamentally not their fault. That’s just because they’re human. There’s not much they can do about it.

The important question is what we can do about it. I assume most readers of this column share my view that global warming is serious, and that getting people to take it seriously is important. What are we doing that arouses cognitive dissonance in our audience, propelling people into the ranks of the deniers when we meant to woo them to our ranks? What can we do differently to reduce their dissonance and thus their denial? These are questions that matter when we’re trying to develop climate change risk communication strategies and messages.

Before turning to these questions, I need to introduce the other major source of climate change denial: intolerable emotion.

Intolerable emotion

Cognitive dissonance is aroused when a situation is incompatible with the way we see the world – with our current beliefs, behaviors, or both. Denying the situation resolves the dissonance.

A situation that arouses intolerable emotion (think of it as “emotional dissonance”) also produces denial. Many situations can arouse both cognitive dissonance and intolerable emotion in significant numbers of people. I believe the threat of global climate change is such a situation.

Although there are plenty of exceptions, the sort of denial that results from intolerable emotion tends to be noticeably different from the sort that results from cognitive dissonance. Dissonance frequently leads people to mock the thing that threatens their worldview. We seek out information to support our opinions and behaviors, and then we actively promote what we have learned in order to bolster those opinions and behaviors. Festinger’s end-of-the-world cultists, for example, proselytized all the more aggressively when it started looking like they were wrong. So if cognitive dissonance is the main source of somebody’s global warming denial, he or she may come on strong. Psychological denial rooted in cognitive dissonance can look a lot like strategic or intellectual denial.

Intolerable emotion, on the other hand, normally leads people to avoid the thing that upsets them too much to bear. If intolerable emotion is the main source of somebody’s global warming denial, he or she isn’t so likely to collect or disseminate evidence for the view that climate change isn’t real or isn’t serious. Even that could arouse too many feelings. Far better not to think about the issue at all. So psychological denial rooted in intolerable emotion can look a lot like apathy.

When somebody says something that people don’t want to hear – and certainly don’t want to have to think about or acknowledge – they sometimes self-mockingly stick their fingers in their ears and sing, “La-la-la-la-la.” This is a very literal representation of the essence of denial. Children do the same thing without the self-mockery, refusing to take in information that makes them frightened, guilty, sad, or otherwise uncomfortable. For example, parents who warn their young kids too emphatically that crossing the street is dangerous, that a truck may come along and squish them, may find that their children now cross the street with their eyes closed – thus avoiding having to see that terrifying truck. (Note that fear appeals are often very useful. They backfire when they’re unbearable.)

Similarly, a classic 1953 study found that high-school students who watched an unpleasant movie about tooth decay brushed their teeth less than students who saw a strictly factual movie on the same topic. The emotion-arousing movie featured graphic close-ups of rotting teeth, lots of sound effects (the whine of the dentist’s drill), etc. Students who saw that version remembered awful images from the movie every time they brushed their teeth – so they avoided brushing in order to avoid thinking upsetting thoughts.

What sorts of emotions are likeliest to give rise to global warming denial? Let’s consider some likely candidates.

Fear

The most obvious example is fear. It is entirely understandable that many people fear the direct effects of global warming. Many people also fear the ways our lives and our children’s lives may change for the worse as society struggles to mitigate or adapt to the effects of global warming. For those who can bear these two kinds of fear, the fear helps motivate precautionary action. But for those who find their fear unbearable, global warming denial is an escape.

From Helen Caldicott’s anti-nuclear “bombing runs” to endocrine disruptors, from fallout shelters in the 1950s to duct tape half a century later, history provides many examples of fear-motivated denial. It would be surprising if a threat as objectively awful as global climate change didn’t have a denial problem.

To see how unbearable fear leads to denial, think about women’s fear of breast cancer and its role in breast self-examination. A significant percentage of women do not routinely check their breasts for potentially cancerous lumps. Why not?

• For some it’s awareness; they don’t know they should.
• For some it’s training; they don’t know how.
• For some it’s efficacy; they doubt they could do anything useful about a lump if they found one. (And if they live in the developing world, they may be right.)
• For some it’s apathy; they’re insufficiently worried about breast cancer.

But for many women in the developed world, the main problem is denial. Far from being apathetic about breast cancer, many women are terrified about it. In order to avoid intolerable fear, they must avoid thinking about breast cancer; in order to avoid thinking about breast cancer, they must avoid checking for lumps.

This isn’t peculiar to women. Denial of fear similarly keeps many men from thinking about prostate cancer, many smokers from thinking about lung cancer, etc. In each case, denial also keeps us from taking action to reduce the risk.

Denial of fear may keep us from taking action in an emergency as well. Many people imagine that the big psychological problem in emergency situations is panic. But crisis communication professionals know that panic is actually quite rare in emergencies. Denial is one reason why panic is rare. (Resilience is another.) People on the verge of panic will generally trip an emotional circuit-breaker and go into denial instead. That’s far from optimal; people in denial don’t take appropriate action. But at least they don’t take wildly inappropriate action, as people in the grip of panic do.

How can we help people bear their fear so that it won’t flip into denial (or, less commonly, escalate into terror or panic)? In our 2003 column on “Fear of Fear,” Jody Lanard and I offered a list of strategies. Among the important ones:

• Give people things to do.
• Give people choices among things to do – that is, things to decide.
• Encourage love, camaraderie, and community involvement. People can tolerate more fear when they’re protecting others they care about.
• Encourage anger (where appropriate). People can tolerate more fear when they’re fighting back.
• Be a role model – show that you are bearing your own fear.

Then we wrote:

Most importantly, treat other people’s fear as legitimate…. “It’s natural to be afraid, I’m afraid too” is a much more empathic response to public fear than “there’s nothing to be afraid of.” If we want people to bear their fear, we must assure them that their fear is appropriate.

Many people are afraid of global warming, afraid of the way it may change our lives, and afraid of the societal and lifestyle changes the battle against global warming may necessitate. For some, these fears are hard to bear, and global warming denial is thus an alluring alternative. Typically, global warming activists work hard to stimulate global warming fear, searching endlessly for a right words and images to scare people into action. But what are we doing to help people bear their fear? What more could we do?

Guilt

In the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, global warming guilt may be as common as global warming fear.

Like fear, guilt can motivate action if it’s bearable. But some of us may feel unbearably guilty about our consumptive lifestyles, our enormous carbon footprints. More guilt than we can bear can lead to global warming denial.

Psychologically sensitive environmental activists understand that excessive guilt is a path to denial. In a short 2001 article in The Ecologist on “The Psychology of Denial: Our Failure to Act Against Climate Change,” George Marshall writes:

[W]e can intellectually accept the evidence of climate change, but we find it extremely hard to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity. Indeed, the most powerful evidence of our denial is the failure to even recognise that there is a moral dimension with identifiable perpetrators and victims. The language of “climate change,” “global warming,” “human impacts,” and “adaptation” are themselves a form of denial familiar from other forms of human rights abuse; they are scientific euphemisms that suggest that climate change originates in immutable natural forces rather than in a direct causal relationship with moral implications for the perpetrator.

Marshall is eloquent on the nature of global warming denial, particularly the denial of moral responsibility. But having described guilt-induced denial magnificently – and very early in the game – he has nothing much to say about how this phenomenon should influence activist communications. He rightly points out that “denial cannot simply be countered with information,” describing environmental campaigners as “living relics of Enlightenment faith in the power of knowledge.” And I have no quarrel with his proposal to “create a large and vocal movement against climate change” that would provide social support for people to get involved instead of remaining bystanders. But how should we address the denial itself? Like many activists, Marshall might favor some sort of tough love: forcing people to confront their guilt. I want to help people bear their guilt, a very different proposition.

Helping people bear their guilt calls for a subtler approach than helping them bear their fear. You can’t validate their guilty feelings directly, because that’s tantamount to accusing them of what they feel guilty about. For example, parents often feel guilty about their inability to protect their children from disasters. “It’s natural for you to feel guilty for failing to protect your children” is very likely to be heard as “You failed to protect your children!” Similarly, some disaster survivors feel guilty about their relief that they survived; the relief seems selfish when so many have perished. To a guilt-ridden person, “I can understand why you feel guilty, it seems selfish to be relieved that others died and you didn’t” sounds like an accusation: “How selfish to be relieved that others died and you didn’t!”

Since acknowledging guilty feelings too directly can worsen the guilt and thus increase the likelihood of denial, it helps to deflect the acknowledgment. “Sometimes people feel guilty about surviving when others died” is better than “You feel….” or even “It’s okay to feel….” (See the section on “Deflection: You → I → They → Some People → It” in my column on “Empathy in Risk Communication.”)

Deflection is extremely useful when talking about phenomena that your audience may be tempted to deny. It is used a good deal in this column, in fact. I have consciously tried to frame things in terms of what “people” may feel or even “I” may feel … trying to avoid accusing you the reader of a feeling you might not want to acknowledge.

But climate change activists aren’t merely doing an inadequate job of ameliorating people’s global warming guilt. Many are doing everything in their power to arouse global warming guilt. That might be sensible if your audience is apathetic about climate change. But guilt-tripping your audience is the last thing you should do if you’re talking to people who already feel intolerably guilty about their carbon footprint.

If people are in or near global warming denial, and the denial is fueled by guilt, then the risk communication goal should be to help them bear the guilt, and thus to prevent or reduce the denial.

Sadness

Sadness is a third emotion that global climate change often triggers. Sometimes the sadness is so intense that it is hard to bear, and can lead to denial. This is true of the entire sadness “family” of emotions, including depression, misery, and even compassion.

Unlike global warming fear and global warming guilt, global warming sadness is often missed. But we all know people who are moved to tears by the plight of the polar bear, or by the plight of the millions of humans whose homes seem doomed to end up underwater as the seas rise.

As with fear and guilt, sadness on behalf of global warming victims is useful if it arouses people to action. It is harmful if it becomes unbearable and thus leads to denial.

The solution is straightforward. We must acknowledge, validate, and share people’s sadness about the plight of the world’s global warming victims – and thus help them bear their sadness so they won’t trip that emotional circuit-breaker into denial.

But too often, I think, climate change activists aren’t thinking about how to help people bear their sadness. They’re thinking about how to make people sadder. Once again, they’re on target for the apathetic audience, but off-base for the audience that is at risk of going into denial or is in denial already.

Helplessness and hopelessness

As noted above in the section on “Efficacy,” feeling helpless or hopeless can lead directly to denial. It can also exacerbate other feelings that lead to denial, such as fear, guilt, and sadness.

I don’t think global warming activists try to arouse feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, the way they do often try to arouse fear, guilt, and sadness. To the contrary, nearly all global warming messaging asserts that effective climate change action is possible, and offers people things they can do. This is sound strategy as far as it goes. Efficacy messaging is an important way to help overcome both apathy and denial.

The problem is that global warming efficacy messaging often lacks credibility. Activists say that climate change is already happening and is projected to get significantly worse even if the world takes immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They say that the world doesn’t actually seem inclined to do much in the way of immediate action. And then they recommend compact fluorescent light bulbs, small cars, and voting for politicians who at least concede that the problem is real.

There’s an obvious discontinuity between what activists tell people about the enormity of the climate change crisis and what they tell people to do about it. That discontinuity gives rise to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. It also gives denial some cognitive support: “If the activists really thought global warming were as serious as they claim to think, wouldn’t they be demanding much more fundamental changes?”

This is an extremely difficult dilemma to resolve. It is neither effective nor ethical to pretend that the problem is smaller than it is, or that the readily available solutions are more effective than they are. Nor is it wise to push instantly for radical changes (even if radical changes are going to be necessary) without first getting our “foot in the door” with more modest remedies.

Perhaps the best way to cope is with messaging like this:

Reducing global warming will demand major changes, sooner rather than later. Some will be costly and hard on our lifestyles. But let’s at least get started now on the smaller changes, the ones that won’t damage our economy or our way of life … the ones that can enrich our lives and slow global warming all at the same time. For example, we can….

Since fall 2008, the economic meltdown and the election of Barack Obama has led some U.S. climate change activist groups to deploy this sort of messaging more routinely. There is talk now of infrastructure investments that are both recession fighters and greenhouse gas reducers – investments where economic concerns and environmental concerns are aligned rather than antithetical. This is important progress.

We also need to acknowledge and validate people’s feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Activist messaging rarely does that. We arouse the feelings but we don’t usually address them. Every time we tell people what they can do to help fight global warming, we should think about adding: “Yes, it sometimes feels like a drop in the ocean. It is a drop in the ocean, but it’s a start.”

Anger

Climate change activists are not immune to the awful emotions aroused by the issue they are so deeply committed to. They feel the fear, the sadness, and the helplessness and hopelessness (maybe not the guilt). Some burn out. Those who don’t have somehow found ways to bear these feelings without retreating into denial. Perhaps that’s why they keep trying to arouse these feelings in others, even though more and more of their audience may be retreating into denial.

Anger is different. When climate change activists express anger about global warming, they’re not necessarily trying to arouse their audience’s anger. They’re mostly just expressing their own. In fact, their audience may be a target of their anger. (Enraged activists in radical fringe groups sometimes express their anger with violence against their targets. I am not addressing that here.)

Anger is different in another way as well. In other contexts, unbearable anger often leads to denial, just as unbearable fear, guilt, sadness, and helplessness/hopelessness do. Consider for example the victims of domestic abuse, who may deny both that they are abused and that they are (justifiably) enraged. But I think anger rarely leads to global warming denial. People who are angry about global warming tend to be pretty upfront about it. Most activists find their anger eminently bearable.

The effect of global warming anger on its targets is another matter. Bearing the brunt of someone else’s anger is a pretty good reason for denial, especially if the anger provokes feelings of guilt. This is a common pattern I will discuss soon: angry activists guilt-tripping their audience.

How We Provoke Denial

The thesis of this column is that there is an increasingly important audience of global warming activism that isn’t apathetic, but rather is in or approaching denial. The reason this thesis is important – if it’s true – is that the best risk communication strategies for preventing or reversing denial are radically different from the appropriate strategies for addressing apathy.

The rest of this column will discuss how climate change messaging affects audience denial. Activists are mostly trying to arouse apathetic people – and slowly succeeding. How are their messages likely to affect people whose problem is climate change denial rather than climate change apathy?

In writing generically about activist messaging, I am of course painting with a broad brush. The messaging tendencies I will be talking about in the rest of this column – fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, ideological litmus tests for global warming solutions, etc. – are in my judgment widespread … but they’re not universal.

I shared a rough draft of this column with the California health official whose email helped motivate me to start writing about global warming denial. She wrote back with a list of climate change advocacy websites she thought didn’t fit my description. She added:

Many of these campaigns are hopeful and very creative; some are angry (but not so much ideological in the ’70s/’80s sense); many use humor or a cool edginess (that I don’t think is over most people's heads or talking down to them); most are aimed at political action by working with others. Actually I can't say many of them are first and foremost ideological – at least in the things I’ve been looking at – probably because it is somewhat younger activists doing the work…. It would be a shame if you missed these different approaches.

It’s true that the websites she sent me to – most of them, anyway – didn’t seem likely to trigger or deepen people’s global warming denial. Nor did they seem likely to pierce people’s global warming apathy. Most of them struck me as diligently hopeful and more than a little wonky. That’s not a bad tone for a climate change website: assuming your audience is already interested in getting involved and serving up a smorgasbord of ways to do so. I can’t tell from the websites what sorts of outreach the sponsoring organizations are doing to get to people who aren’t yet interested enough to navigate to their websites.

In case you want to check for yourself, here’s the list she sent me. [As of mid-March 2013, three of these eight websites have disappeared – the first, second, and next-to-last. There are of course plenty of new sites devoted to climate change outreach, some more sensitive than others to the issues raised in this column.]

• www.repoweramerica.org
• www.wecansolveit.org
• www.foei.org
• www.iclei.org
• www.cleanair-coolplanet.org
• www.climatecrisiscoalition.org
• www.thisisreality.org
• www.350.org

I remain convinced that far too many activist outreach efforts, in their zeal to arouse people who are apathetic about global warming, backfire badly on people who are in or near denial about global warming. Here’s what I think they’re doing wrong.

1. Fear-mongering: How scary is scary enough?

I am generally a fan of fear appeals. I wrote an entire column with Jody Lanard entitled “Fear of Fear,” diagnosing why officials are excessively afraid to frighten the public and urging them to get over it. When I run seminars on precaution advocacy, I often say that trying to get people to take action about a serious risk without frightening them is like trying to write a novel without using the letter “e”: It’s possible, but it’s a helluva handicap.

Well-designed fear appeals are arguably the single most straightforward way to rouse people to action about a risk.

Thus I am not inclined to criticize global warming activists for scaring their audience. I don’t usually accuse people of “fear-mongering”; people accuse me of fear-mongering.

But the relationship between fear and action is -shaped curve. Most of the time, for most risks, people are insufficiently frightened. Frightening them is useful, even essential. But not if they’re already very frightened. Not if the paradigm is crisis communication rather than precaution advocacy. Not if they’re in denial or getting close to denial. Then frightening them further will only deepen the denial.

How much fear people can tolerate without retreating into denial depends largely on how efficacious they feel. So when people are in or near denial because the situation is so frightening, it helps to offer them things to do, choices of things to do, and reasons to think what they do will matter. Other bulwarks against intolerable fear include love/camaraderie, anger, and role models of others who are bearing their fear well.

Perhaps most important is “permission” to be afraid. People are most able to bear their fear when it is validated. That’s why telling people not to be afraid is the cardinal sin of crisis communication. When people are in or near denial, false reassurance is every bit as harmful as fear-mongering.

In the climate change messaging of activists, it is unusual to encounter sympathetic validation of how scary the situation is. “It is hard for most people – for all of us, really – to stay focused on these very alarming climate change predictions.” Climate change messaging that validates people’s fears about climate change mitigation is rarer still. “Understandably, many people are upset when they hear how our lives and our children’s lives will have to change in order to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and forestall the worst effects of global warming.”

I think more and more people are in or near denial about global climate change. In many cases their denial is grounded in fear that’s hard to bear. Instead of helping them bear their fear, we just keep scaring them.

2. Guilt-tripping: The stupid fight over whether global warming is anthropogenic

Assuming that global temperatures are rising dangerously, is the increase caused by human activity? Or does it have little or nothing to do with us, caused perhaps by sunspots or some other cyclic phenomenon?

Who cares?

The important question isn’t what’s causing global climate change, but what should be done about it. If it’s a serious problem, we should work hard to figure out what, if anything, we can do, and then we should get started doing it – whether the causes are anthropogenic or not.

Obviously, it is useful to understand the causes of a problem when trying to figure out the wisest solutions. But in the debate over global climate change, the tail is wagging the dog. A Google search for the phrase “causes of global warming” yields 357,000 hits; a search for “solutions to global warming” yields only 289,000 hits. These numbers simply make no sense. (Appropriately, “effects of global warming” nets 1,580,000 hits.)

Both climate change activists and their opponents write and talk as if assessing blame were the core of the debate.

It’s true that most supporters of climate change action think human activity is responsible, while those who doubt the problem is serious also doubt it’s anthropogenic. People tend either to buy the whole package or to reject the whole package – and perhaps they would have that tendency even if it hadn’t been sold as a package. Here’s my question: Which part of the package deserves more focus, that global warming is serious and requires action, or that global warming is our fault? And a related question: Which part of the package is likelier to provoke guilt-induced denial, and which part is likelier to gain acceptance without that barrier?

We need to stop imagining that telling people they are part of the problem is the best way to persuade them to be part of the solution.

Climate change activists put incredible emphasis on assessing blame. They blame global warming not just on human activity generally, but on western overconsumption in particular. (The internal combustion engine and power generation from coal are also common targets of activist ire.) How many times have you read comparisons of the carbon footprint of the average American to the carbon footprint of people in the developing world, perhaps linked to the old quotation from Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us”?

I don’t question the validity of the charge, but I strongly question the utility of harping on it. I question the faulty assumption that telling Americans they should feel terrible for consuming so much more than people elsewhere will help Americans decide to consume less.

It’s true that people sometimes refrain from doing bad things in order to avoid feeling guilty. And people sometimes do good things in order to alleviate guilt about bad things they have done. Depending on our upbringing and other factors, we vary in the extent to which we experience guilty feelings as motivational.

But even people who are motivated by guilty feelings aren’t necessarily motivated by messaging that tells them how guilty they should feel. Guilt appeals do not reliably induce guilty feelings. Sometimes they induce anger instead – or denial.

When urging the rest of the world to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, Americans should repeatedly acknowledge that the U.S. is the world’s biggest per capita emitter. Conceding your own guilt is very good risk communication. But insisting on your audience’s guilt is much more problematic.

Anti-smoking campaigners tried guilt-tripping when they went after secondhand smoke. Suddenly the smoker was depicted as perpetrator, not victim: not just stupid to smoke in the first place, but rude and dangerous to blow smoke in other people’s faces. Results were mixed. Passive smoking messages freed nonsmokers to be more aggressive about asking smokers to smoke someplace else; that made smoking less convenient and less socially acceptable, which helped motivate smokers to quit. As a direct appeal to smokers, on the other hand, messaging about secondhand smoke was ineffective. Except for parents worried about their children’s health, very few smokers quit because anti-smoking messaging made them feel guilty about how their secondhand smoke might affect others. Nonsmokers’ anger worked much better than smokers’ guilt.

When smokers felt victimized, they often supported political action against the tobacco industry … and then, thanks to cognitive dissonance, they tried that much harder to quit. But smokers resisted efforts to make them into villains rather than victims. Some tobacco companies capitalized on this reaction. They ran ads sympathizing with beleaguered smokers and depicting them as independent thinkers who refused to follow the herd.

The literature on guilt as a motivator is much scantier than the literature on fear as a motivator. But from the research so far, it looks like guilt and fear share a crucial characteristic: Both are effective until the levels get too high, and then they backfire because of denial.

For sure, people are motivated to avoid (or stop) feeling guilty. At fairly low levels of guilt, that can impel us to take action – to reduce our carbon footprints, for example. And at fairly low levels of guilt, feeling guiltier can strengthen our motivation to act. But at some point, the emotional circuit breaker of denial kicks in. The guilt is too hard to bear. Instead of being motivated to act on our guilt, we are motivated to stop feeling it.

Even before our level of guilt gets intolerably high, we are motivated to resist messaging that harps on our guilt. Guilty feelings can be an effective motivator if the guilt isn’t too strong. But audiences rarely respond well to messaging that tells them directly how guilty they ought to feel. Such messaging makes us ornery. We get angry at the source of the message, and our attitudes and behaviors tend to move in the opposite direction – a phenomenon known as “reactance.”

Here’s what the research suggests:

• Reactance is strongest in teenagers, who really hate guilt-tripping by their elders. (When it comes to climate change, fortunately, young people have the least to feel guilty about … so far.)
• Reactance is weakest in parents (especially moms) who are warned about the harm their behavior could do their children. It’s not clear whether generalized warnings about what “we” are doing to “our children” – by failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for example – are similarly effective.
• Guilt messaging can work if it isn’t overt – if it makes people feel guilty (or reminds them that they feel guilty) without letting them realize that was your intent. Even then, you need to be careful not to arouse such intense guilt that you provoke denial. Overt guilt messaging, where your intent is clear, backfires even when people’s level of guilt isn’t intolerable.
• Anticipated guilt arouses less reactance than actual guilt. “You will feel guilty if you don’t do X” is thus a more effective message than “You should feel guilty because you haven’t done X.”
• Absolution is a much more effective messaging strategy than guilt. Product advertising has been very successful selling absolution for preexisting guilt – for example, telling homemakers they’ll feel less guilty if they use a particular laundry detergent or serve their family a particular food.

If people are already feeling mildly guilty about global warming, activists can usefully tell them how to alleviate their guilt by becoming part of the solution instead of part of the problem. If people are already feeling intensely guilty, activists should steer clear, lest they drive their audience into denial. And if people aren’t feeling as guilty as they should, activists may be able to arouse some mild guilt (so they can then offer absolution) – but they’ll have to be subtle and gentle about it. “Global climate change is your fault, you over-consumptive, SUV-driving pig!” is not a winning message. It leads to anger, to reactance – and to denial.

What matters most for climate change activists is that relying on guilt as a message is a disastrous strategy when used on people who feel horribly guilty already … or on people who would feel horribly guilty if they let themselves feel it, but are protecting themselves from the feeling with denial.

I am indebted to Monique Mitchell Turner , Director of the Center for Risk Communication Research at the University of Maryland, for helping me think through this section. Turner has done a lot of not-yet-published research on guilt as a risk communication strategy. She doesn’t necessarily agree with me that excessive guilt provokes denial; she says that’s an “interesting prediction” that would be “tough to study.” But she agrees emphatically that overt, intense guilt messaging arouses reactance and backfires.

Who really gets inspired by guilt-laden messages about American overconsumption? People who judge themselves not to be big-time consumers anymore, who see themselves as having opted out of the lifestyle they blame for global warming. Many climate change activists fit this description. For them, messaging about the overconsumption of their neighbors (and their audience) doesn’t arouse guilt; it arouses self-righteous anger. Since it feels so good to guilt-trip other people, it can be hard to notice that guilt-tripping usually backfires.

If they wanted to do so, activists could stress that overconsumption is the root of global warming without guilt-tripping the audience. In fact, it is possible to stress overconsumption in a way that reduces guilty feelings, and thus seduces the audience out of its guilt-induced denial. Here’s a message I’ll bet you haven’t heard much:

The way we live has improved more in the last hundred years than in the previous thousand, thanks to technology. What wonderful inventions we have created to nurture our quality of life! And then very belatedly, just in the last two decades, we have learned that some parts of our wonderful technology are contributing to an unintended, unanticipated, horrible outcome – a horrible outcome we call global warming. Who knew? Who could have known? It’s not our fault, it’s nobody’s fault. But now we desperately need to do something about it.

Compare that to the following exaggeration of the conventional message:

It’s you, you greedy, lazy, over-consumptive American! It’s your insistence on living high on the hog that is ruining the world! It’s your SUVs and air conditioners, your total obliviousness to the welfare of other nations and other species. Wake up and mend your ways before it’s too late!

Both messages say that our way of life must change in response to the threat of global warming. The first message blames nobody; it goes out of its way to offer absolution. The second message is angry, self-righteous guilt-tripping. It certainly helps rev up the activist base, but I doubt it works on the target audience – not even the apathetic segment of the target audience, and certainly not the segment that is in or near global warming denial because of intolerable guilt. For that increasingly important audience segment, the first message is going to work much better.

One of the heroes of global warming advocacy, climatologist James E. Hansen, stakes out a position somewhere in the middle. In his speeches Hansen goes out of his way to say that we are not to blame for what we didn’t know – but now that we know, we will justly be blamed if we fail to act. Here’s the last paragraph of a Hansen presentation entitled “Tell Barack Obama the Truth – The Whole Truth”:

Young people realize that they, their children, and the unborn will bear the consequences of our actions or inactions. They do not blame their parents, who legitimately “did not know” what they were starting. Young people have recently worked hard to influence the democratic process. Now they expect the system to take appropriate actions. If that does not happen, surely they will begin to raise their voices louder.

And here is Hansen testifying before the Iowa Utilities Board in 2007. He was asked whether past generations should be blamed for global warming. His answer:

No. They can genuinely say “we did not know.” The blame will fall squarely on today’s adults, if we do not act. We can no longer feign ignorance…. If we allow climate to deteriorate and creation to be destroyed, we will be the generation that knew enough and still had time, but for selfish reasons declined to take actions.

3. Ideology versus regret: Hostility to technological solutions

I played a very small part in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. Nobody was worried about global warming back then. In fact, between 1940 and 1980 global temperatures fell; “global cooling” was a second-tier environmental concern through much of the 1970s. (See this Newsweek article from 1975, entitled “The Cooling World.” )

But plenty of Earth Day environmentalists were unhappy about overconsumption.

Many of the leaders in today’s fight against global warming were hostile to American consumerism before the global warming crisis surfaced. They already hated the oil companies and the internal combustion engine, the power companies and the ever-growing use of coal-fired power plants. There were ample reasons for this hostility, concrete environmental concerns as well as a philosophical attachment to simpler lifestyles. Environmentalism was grounded in a coherent set of values and principles, and in real data about the state of the world. It wasn’t grounded in global warming.

When global warming came along, it constituted yet another rationale for an already well-established ideology.

Today, when environmentalists tell us our lifestyles must change because of global warming, the changes they’re advocating are pretty much the same changes environmentalists were advocating before they were aware of global warming.

That’s why activist messaging is so often ideological, angry, and self-righteous, and so rarely regretful. Try to find a regretful global warming message – not one that regrets what we have done to the planet’s climate, but one that regrets what we must do to ameliorate the damage. Try to find a message that bemoans the “sad necessity” to abandon our SUVs because of their awful carbon footprint. It won’t be easy.

Regretful messaging would probably be more effective, but for many global warming activists such messaging would be dishonest. They see nothing regrettable about the need to simplify our lives and reduce our economy’s reliance on fossil fuels. That’s what they’ve wanted all along.

And it’s what they would want even if the global warming crisis miraculously disappeared. Picture it: Temperatures stop rising. Scientists figure out that the increase was very short-term, that things are back to normal again and there’s nothing to worry about. Would you expect environmental stalwarts to shout hosannas and go shopping for a big car? I wouldn’t.

I get it that climate change isn’t the only rationale environmentalists have for wanting to get rid of SUVs – and for a host of other recommendations. A coherent philosophy and a great deal of technical data underlie the environmental agenda. We’re going to run out of oil even if we do find a way to keep it from heating the planet. Burning coal puts dangerous particulates into the air, not just carbon dioxide. A growing biofuels industry has created a huge new food insecurity problem in the developing world, quite apart from using up more energy than it saves. Suburban sprawl makes us drive everywhere we go, and the result is an epidemic of obesity, not just an increase in greenhouse gases. Everything is connected. Sustainability is a network of interrelated challenges. Global warming may be the biggest of those challenges, but it’s not the only one – and any narrowly targeted “solution” to global warming misses the point.

Okay, fine. But we can’t have it both ways. Is climate change the overarching crisis of our times, requiring huge changes in everything we do (except, strangely, our environmental agenda, which somehow remains virtually unchanged)? Or is climate change a convenient symbol, one of many important challenges that need to be faced simultaneously with an integrated approach? When we’re urging drastic action on climate change, we depict it as unique: not just a piece of our longstanding agenda but a stand-alone planetary emergency. But then someone suggests a climate change solution we don’t like, and suddenly we rediscover the rest of our agenda and insist that such a narrow solution is no solution at all.

Consider how most global warming activists respond to the possibility of a technological solution to the global warming crisis – particularly their contempt for technological solutions that might make it possible to keep emitting greenhouse gases without heating up the planet.

Until his death in 2003, Edward Teller argued aggressively that there were good geoengineering measures available to reduce or counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases. (Yes, that Edward Teller, the man best known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.”) One such measure would be to introduce aerosolized fine particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter some sunlight and heat back into space – exactly what volcanoes do naturally. Teller estimated that this would cost somewhere between one-hundredth and one-thousandth as much as cutting back fossil fuel use to 1990 levels in the U.S. alone. And Teller’s solution wouldn’t require massive changes in lifestyle (at least until we run out of fossil fuels).

From an environmentalist point of view, that’s its fatal flaw. A solution that wouldn’t require massive changes in lifestyle is no solution at all.

Teller’s solution is far from perfect. There is no consensus that it would work at all, or that it wouldn’t work too well and produce a global ice age. At best aerosols would be a stopgap, remaining in the atmosphere for a decade or so, whereas greenhouse gases can remain for many centuries. And fine particulates that settled back down to earth could represent a substantial respiratory health risk. Environmentalists are on solid ground arguing that technological solutions to one problem often cause unanticipated problems of their own. (So do non-technological solutions.)

Still, wouldn’t you expect a comparatively cheap possible remedy for global warming to generate some buzz?

Environmentalists have been amazingly successful in convincing most politicians, journalists, ordinary citizens, and even scientists that the only acceptable way to manage global climate change is to reduce human activities that emit greenhouse gases.

Changing people’s lifestyles is just about the toughest kind of persuasion there is. And environmentalists want to do it on a global scale. There may be no other answer to global warming. We may be stuck desperately trying to talk the world into changing how it lives. But if we’re really hoping to ameliorate the effects of climate change, then any other answer – any answer that’s easier to sell – deserves a close look, even if it has serious problems of its own. By insisting that only the most difficult answer to global warming is an acceptable answer, activists are greatly exacerbating the problem of climate change denial.

Global warming activists aren’t invariably anti-technology. They like solar power and wind power – especially varieties of these technologies that are local, decentralized, labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive, and unlikely to end up managed by multinational corporations. While they may overstate how soon alternative energy sources will be able to replace fossil fuels, they have come up with plenty of prescriptions that could help preserve our way of life while reducing our carbon footprint. That makes it all the more intriguing how seldom they say they’re trying to preserve our way of life while reducing our carbon footprint, and how often they say we must change our way of life or else.

Teller’s proposed solution to global warming is totalistic. A more partial technological solution is carbon sequestration, also known as carbon capture and storage or CCS. Unlike Teller’s solution, CCS has powerful corporate champions, especially the coal and electric power industries. It is at the heart of so-called “clean coal” technology. Most environmentalists hate it.

Long-term environmental thinkers tend to believe the real enemy is coal, not oil. If “peak oil” theorists are right, they note, pretty soon there won’t be enough oil left to fuel the world economy. So if global warming doesn’t kill off the oil industry, diminishing supply will. But we have enough coal to last for centuries – enough coal to fuel all those additional power plants we’ll need if we switch to electric cars.

As usual, industry has grossly overstated the potential of CCS (probably even more than environmentalists have overstated the potential of solar and wind power). Industry ads imply that CCS is virtually ready to roll. Actually, it’s still a largely untested technology, with lots of engineering problems yet to be solved. And even as industry promotes the virtues of CCS, it continues to build facilities that do not use CCS, and that won’t be able to use it in the future without extensive retrofitting.

Despite all that, it makes sense to work on ways to keep greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere. Yes, not producing those gases in the first place is the sweetest solution to global warming. But injecting them deep underground for a few centuries isn’t a bad stopgap measure. It’s entirely appropriate for global warming activists to police the exaggerated claims of CCS proponents. What’s not so appropriate is their contempt for CCS itself.

But it’s not surprising. Some years ago, I consulted for a company that manufactured a low-calorie fat substitute. Junk foods made with my client’s product were significantly less caloric than ordinary junk foods. The company didn’t expect campaigners against obesity and Americans’ bad eating habits to greet the product with wild enthusiasm – but it hoped for at least some tentative interest. Instead, nutrition and obesity activists hated the product on sight. They didn’t want a technical fix, a deus ex machina that magically made junk food less harmful. They wanted the public to eat less junk food.

Much environmental literature about global climate change reminds me of rightwing literature about HIV: It is punishment for the way we live. And so any solution that doesn’t force us to change the way we live is an unacceptable solution. I think people sense this ideological self-righteousness. I think it contributes to our skepticism – and to our denial.

If we have to change the way we live, so be it. But nobody who’s punitively gleeful about the change will be capable of selling it.

4. Whatever happened to global warming adaptation?

Suppose I told you that something horrible was coming, that it was too late to prevent it altogether, but that with concerted effort we might be able to prevent the worst of the disaster. Assuming you took me seriously, you would presumably look to me for guidance on two key questions:

1.What we should do to prevent the worst of the disaster?2.What we should do to get ready to cope with the part we can’t prevent?

Now suppose I gave you lots of answers to the first question – unpleasant answers, but still answers – but kept insisting that your interest in the second question was out-of-bounds. Suppose I kept telling you that it was crucial to devote all our efforts to preventing the disaster and none to adapting to it, even though we wouldn’t be able to prevent it entirely. Wouldn’t you smell a rat?

That’s the situation with regard to global climate change.

Even if we enact an immediate, strenuous, worldwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most experts agree that it’s too late to avoid significant disruption – and of course the longer we wait and the more modest our efforts, the worse things will get before they start to improve. Climate change activists accept this expert consensus. In fact, climate change activists shout it from the rooftops.

It’s a pretty discouraging message – certainly more discouraging than is optimal for purposes of motivating action: “Things are going to be awful whatever we do. Now, let’s do as much as we can so things won’t be as awful.” But that’s not my objection. Telling the truth is an axiom of risk communication, even when the truth is discouraging. For example, I routinely urge public health communicators to admit that there will be another influenza pandemic sooner or later no matter what we do, that when it comes we almost certainly won’t have a vaccine, that when we develop a vaccine we won’t have nearly enough of it, that the measures available in the meantime (like washing your hands a lot) will help only a little … that it’s going to be awful but here’s what we can do to make it less awful.

So I’m okay with global warming communicators deploying the same message (even though I wish they wouldn’t sound so triumphant when they convey the bad news): “Things are going to be awful whatever we do. Now, let’s do as much as we can so things won’t be as awful.” That’s the right message.

Or, rather, that’s half the right message. Here’s the other half: “Since we know things are going to be awful whatever we do, let’s start getting ready now to cope with the global warming we’re not going to be able to prevent.” The second half of the message, the missing half, is about global warming adaptation.

The core question is the relationship between the two halves. Most global warming communicators seem to see the two halves as competitors, almost as mutually exclusive: “we’ve got to do what we can to prevent or mitigate global warming” versus “we’ve got to find ways to adapt to global warming.” I think they’re complementary. And I think the absence of the adaptation piece of the message undermines the prevention/mitigation piece.

I started wondering whatever happened to global warming adaptation when I noticed that a U.S. environmental group client had an elaborate set of recommendations about what governments and citizens should do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but nothing to say about what governments and citizens might do to prepare for the hotter, drier, more variable climate that was inevitably coming.

I suggested that this gap constituted a significant credibility problem (not to mention a huge gap in planning). “A lot of your global warming recommendations were on your political agenda before global warming was,” I told my client. “So people need a reason to believe that you’re really focusing on climate change now, not just using it as another rationale for the same old recommendations. Yet, even though you keep saying it’s too late to avert the problem entirely, you don’t seem to care whether we get ready to survive the part we can’t avert. Where’s your program for creating more tropical medicine centers, or for moving people out of cities that are doomed to end up drought-ridden or underwater, or for beefing up hurricane preparedness?”

The client’s global warming specialists fervently disagreed. They told me that any program for helping society adapt to global warming would weaken the fight for greenhouse gas reductions. “People either prepare for a disaster or work to prevent one,” they said. “You don’t ask them to do both at once. The last thing we want to do is send a message that global warming is endurable. Any work on adaptation would send exactly that message.”

There’s a genuine empirical dispute here. Does talking about global warming adaptation demonstrate the severity of the problem, and thus underscore the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Or does it imply that the problem is endurable, and thus undermine the need for emissions reductions? I think the former. My activist client thinks the latter. I can’t help feeling that there’s something self-righteous and punitive about my client’s position: “People need to be punished for their sins, and they need to change their sinful ways. Why try to help them suffer less from the effects of their sinfulness? That will just give them more excuses to keep sinning.” Nonetheless, I can’t find good empirical evidence one way or the other.

My client is not alone. Most of the environmental movement has operated on the assumption that any serious effort to promote global warming adaptation will undermine the public and political momentum required for global warming prevention and mitigation. Activists concede (privately) that adaptation is essential, that even the most successful prevention/mitigation efforts can only delay and reduce the crisis, not avert it. But they fear that the public and the politicians won’t be willing to sacrifice to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if they feel society is already adapting to cope with global climate change.

I see the merits of this argument, but I’m on the other side. I believe most people won’t take prevention/mitigation seriously until they see the huge sacrifices adaptation will require.

I encountered the same imbalance, even more surprisingly, when I consulted on global warming risk communication for a state regulator in Australia. Largely because it burns a lot of coal, Australia has a very poor per capita carbon footprint. But there aren’t a lot of people in Australia, so its overall impact on global warming is minuscule. Moreover, because of its location and its dry climate, Australia will be more vulnerable to the effects of global warming, and will be vulnerable earlier, than most of the developed world. Bottom line: Australia is far more a climate change victim than a climate change perpetrator.

Nonetheless, my regulator client was extremely interested in figuring out how to reduce its citizens’ greenhouse gas emissions, and much less interested in figuring out how to prepare them to cope with permanent drought conditions. I disputed this choice of priorities on two grounds.

First, I argued that it was a quixotic, foolish, and even dishonorable stance – that Australians would suffer unnecessarily because their regulators were so focused on reducing their contribution to global warming instead of preparing them to endure it. My client replied that it was important to set a good example, as if the U.S., China, and India were sure to sit up and take notice if only Australia led the way.

The other point of contention had more to do with risk communication. Like my environmental group client in the U.S., my regulator client in Australia was convinced that there wasn’t enough political will to make simultaneous progress on climate change adaptation and climate change prevention/mitigation. It was a zero-sum game, my client told me, and any work on adaptation would weaken the momentum toward prevention and mitigation.

I argued to the contrary that serious efforts to get people ready to cope with a hotter, drier, more variable climate are the only thing that will persuade them that it’s coming – and thus persuade them that they ought to do what they can to reduce its extremes. I asked the regulatory agency to imagine going to the state Parliament with an ambitious and expensive climate change adaptation proposal: moving people inland, developing new agricultural strains that require less water, talking Australians out of their backyard flower gardens, etc. Let the Parliament and the public come back with demands for more greenhouse gas reductions, in the hope that some of this onerous adaptation agenda might thereby be avoided.

Similarly, imagine the questions people would ask if major U.S. cities started building tropical medicine centers. More extreme yet, imagine if cities in your area started making plans – concrete plans – to relocate people away from the coasts. Imagine a campaign to resettle the population of Vanuatu in California after Vanuatu is gone.

Excessively moderate adaptation plans might imply that adaptation will be easy, and thus undermine the incentive to take prevention and mitigation seriously. But I think serious adaptation plans build the case for urgent prevention and mitigation.

One of the few times I have seen this question addressed was an April 2008 meeting to assess public attitudes about climate change, sponsored by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. The summary report of the meeting puts the question fairly:

To the extent that climate literacy education has focused on response options the emphasis has been almost entirely on GHG [greenhouse gas] mitigation. A serious national discussion about adaptation to climate change has yet to begin. Some in the public health field have suggested that discussing adaptation strategies inevitably leads people to greater issue concern about mitigation (i.e., as people learn about the consequences of climate change their desire to avoid those consequences grows). This perspective is new; the more common view among informal educators and some scientists has been that splitting the public’s attention between mitigation and adaptation either adds too much complexity to the subject or causes people to give up on mitigation altogether. These hypotheses have not yet been fully tested.

The emphasis on prevention/mitigation over adaptation isn’t just characteristic of the way we talk about climate change. It is characteristic of our policy prescriptions as well. Climatologist Roger A. Pielke, now at the University of Colorado, has been complaining about the imbalance for more than a decade. In a 1998 journal article entitled “Rethinking the role of adaptation in climate policy,” he wrote that “adaptation responses must occupy a larger and more formal role in climate policy.” A decade later, he pointed out at a conference that “Unfortunately, the current nature of the climate debate has them [adaptation and mitigation] as competing policies.”

I don't mean to imply that no one is arguing for simultaneous mitigation and adaptation. In a February 2007 comment on a newly issued report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, President Martin Rees of the (U.K.) Royal Society said: “We need both to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Those who would claim otherwise can no longer use science as a basis for their argument.” The statement figured in a number of blog threads, including one with the wonderful title: “Climate change mitigation and adaptation (both, not versus).”

Another sign that change may be coming: In January 2009, sustainability consultant Alan AtKisson posted an article on his “WaveFront” blog entitled “Climate Change Adaptation: from Big Taboo to Business Opportunity.” He begins by describing a meeting in Stockholm:

First and most importantly, the room was full. Not long ago, a seminar on climate change adaptation would have been a low-profile event. It might have drawn a few dozen people, most of them academics, activists and development workers. Even the topic would have been seen as controversial, even taboo: “Don’t talk about adaptation,” went the argument, “because that will signal that we've given up on stopping global warming.” But as the evidence [grew] that climate change is here, and that adaptation is imperative, that taboo has finally begun to crumble away.

And today, there was a room full of officials, business execs, and consultants like me crammed into a rather small auditorium to hear about “Climate Change Adaptation – Finding the Business Opportunities.”

There are serious climate change adaptation projects underway from California to the Netherlands (which has plans to augment its famous dikes to cope with rising ocean levels). And in February 2009, just as I was finishing up work on this column, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and WWF International announced the creation of the Ecosystems and Livelihoods Adaptation Network to help threatened ecosystems and societies adapt to coming climate changes.

Nonetheless, the main focus of global warming activism remains – by far – prevention and mitigation, not adaptation.

What does all this have to do with denial? Not as much, perhaps, as some of the other sections of this column. The other sections deal with global warming messaging that might work fine on apathetic audiences but seems likely to backfire on audiences in or near denial. But I doubt the neglect of adaptation works on any audience. I think millions of apathetic people won’t start taking climate change mitigation seriously until the advocates of mitigation start taking climate change adaptation seriously.

Activists’ (and regulators’) failure to pay attention to adaptation doesn’t exacerbate climate change denial directly, the way fear appeals and guilt-tripping do. But it contributes to denial in at least two other ways.

First, like the failure to pay attention to possible technological solutions, it reveals the punitive, self-righteous, ideological side of global warming activism. It suggests that activists want people to sin less – but don’t really want people to suffer less for their sins. (The specific sin in question here is greenhouse gas emissions; the underlying sins include overconsumption and our love affair with the internal combustion engine.) That’s probably enough to push an audience that’s running away from intolerable guilt more deeply into denial.

Second, the activists’ failure to take climate change adaptation seriously implies that they aren’t really serious about climate change, that it’s just the rationale du jour for the same old environmental agenda. Whether that’s actually true or not, the absence of an adaptation agenda makes it seem true. For an apathetic audience, this would presumably be a source of skepticism, which is bad enough. But it’s worse for that part of the audience that is in or approaching denial. Remember how cognitive dissonance works. It makes people seek out information to justify their preexisting beliefs and actions. People who are experiencing cognitive dissonance about global warming aren’t listening objectively to the activist spiel, hearing both its strengths and its weaknesses. They’re listening with jaundiced ears, looking for reasons to reject the threatening message. Even weak evidence of hypocrisy would be enough. Activists’ determined unconcern about helping the world adapt to the climate changes that are coming feels like pretty strong evidence.

One of the first things that persuaded me personally that global warming was a big deal was when some environmentalists announced that they were reconsidering nuclear power. It was so important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they said, that even nukes might be acceptable as an alternative to fossil fuels. “If enviros are willing to back off their longstanding opposition to nuclear energy,” I said to myself, “they must really be serious about climate change.”

“If enviros aren’t interested in helping get ready for climate change,” I think many people in or near denial are asking themselves today, “how serious could they be?”

5. Doom and gloom: When bad news is good news

In the 1970s, when I was running an environmental communication graduate program at the University of Michigan, I got interested in the fondness of environmental activists for bad news. Several of my students did research studies to explore the phenomenon. I’m going to describe two of these studies, as I remember them. (I probably remember them as more definitive than they actually were; I last read them about 30 years ago.)

In the first study, a research team put together a collection of photographs. Some showed beautiful natural phenomena: sunsets over the ocean, pristine waterfalls, gorgeous jungle landscapes, cuddly wild animals (“charismatic megafauna,” we liked to call them), etc. Others showed pollution in action: grimy junkyards, belching smokestacks, iridescent oily puddles. A mixture of both kinds of photos was shown to students, some of whom had expressed a commitment to environmental activism and some of whom had little interest in environmental issues. Respondents were asked the extent to which each photo made them want to do something about the environment.

The key finding: Students with strong environmentalist leanings were more motivated by the pollution photographs than the nature photographs. Students without such leanings found the nature photos more motivating; the pollution photos tended to make them want to think about something else instead. My grad student researchers concluded that activists (like themselves) tend to be inspired by the problems they’re fighting against, whereas normal people are inspired by the goals they’re being asked to work toward.

Presumably most of the students in the second group were apathetic about environmental issues, not in denial about those issues. Even so, the ugly photos motivated these newcomers (potential converts) less than the beautiful ones. For any who were in or near denial – who found it unbearable to contemplate such horrendous images of pollution – the ugly photos would have backfired badly.

But the ugly photos were the activists’ favorites.

The second student study focused on a documentary on endangered species entitled “Say Goodbye.” Narrated by Rod McKuen, the movie had exactly the right title. It built a strong emotional case that human greed and indifference would inevitably eliminate more and more of our fellow creatures. It interspersed elegiac passages about how magnificent various doomed species were with accusatory passages about how some of us (the fur industry, for example) were actively evil while the rest of us were unconcerned about the evil and therefore just as bad. It was meant to be depressing, and it was.

The researchers asked fellow students who had just seen the movie to specify whether it made them feel mostly angry or mostly guilty. They also asked respondents how much the movie motivated them to want to do something about the endangered species problem. Those who were moved to anger were more interested in taking action than those who were moved to guilt. A few weeks later, a different researcher revisited the respondents in their dorms and asked them to sign a petition to save endangered species. (“Say Goodbye” wasn’t mentioned.) Sure enough, those who had been angered by the movie were likelier to sign than those who had felt guilty. The researchers concluded that an endangered species movie that aroused more anger and less guilt would be a better recruiting tool for endangered species protection.

Although this second study was interpreted in terms of the motivational power of anger versus guilt, there were really three emotions in play: anger, guilt, and sadness. For virtually everyone who watched it, “Say Goodbye” was a profoundly sad movie. I would wager that viewers with environmentalist leanings readily converted their sadness into anger, and their anger into determination to act. But viewers who were new to the issue probably had a different response. For them, I suspect, the sadness was linked to guilt, and neither was linked to action.

These two student studies weren’t specifically about denial, but they’re not hard to interpret in terms of denial. If I see myself as a foot soldier in the battle to save the environment, then I experience photographs of pollution and a movie mourning doomed species as calls to action. Dramatic evidence of other people’s misbehavior makes me mad. I probably feel some sadness too, but it’s bearable because it’s linked to anger and an action agenda. If I feel any guilt, I can bear the guilt without denying the problem, since I have things to do to remedy the problem and expiate my guilt. Or I can deny the guilt, and still not deny the problem: I remind myself of my environmental credentials and convert the guilt into more anger.

But if environmental issues aren’t my thing, then I’m likelier to find pollution photos and a movie about doomed species depressing and guilt-inducing. Maybe I can bear those feelings. Maybe I even enjoy wallowing in them once in a while. Even so, they don’t tend to rouse me to take action to solve the problem. Perhaps if I had never before thought about such matters, the photos and the movie might shock me into awareness. But if I’m aware already, just uninvolved, then what do the photos and the movie teach me? That the situation is dire, and I’m a jerk for being uninvolved.

If I’m normal, I’d rather not continue to feel depressed and guilty. Those feelings are at least unpleasant, perhaps unbearable. I could escape them by jumping onto the activist bandwagon. But another escape path is less onerous: denial. So I shrug off the photos/movie, and remind myself to try to stay away from such aversive stimuli in future. Or I ridicule the photos/movie – a more aggressive way of not letting the depression and guilt get to me.

Bottom line: Depressing messages motivate environmental stalwarts, but in much of their target audience they trigger avoidance and even denial.

I started this column by talking about Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” I argued that this global warming documentary has the potential to shock unaware people into awareness and rouse apathetic people into concern, but also the potential – too much potential – to push others into denial or more deeply into denial. “An Inconvenient Truth” is in the same tradition as ugly photographs of pollution and depressing movies about endangered species.

What I’m emphasizing now is that committed activists like ugly photographs of pollution and depressing movies about endangered species. They liked Helen Caldicott’s speech about what a nuclear bomb would do to their community. They like “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This is a recurring problem in risk communication. Almost by definition, committed activists – the people who work on campaigns to get others to care about an issue – are very different from the people who don’t care about that issue. Committed activists don’t tend to have good intuitions about what’s likely to interest an apathetic audience. They don’t tend to have good intuitions about what’s likely to push an audience in denial more deeply into denial. And they don’t tend to have good intuitions about who is in their audience: apathetic people or people in (or near) denial.

I believe an increasing segment of the audience for global climate change risk communication is in or near denial. Activists keep missing this shift because they’re activists … and activists get motivated to anger and action by messages that non-activists are likely to find depressing, guilt-inducing, terrifying, numbing, and immobilizing.

When I wrote my Guestbook response about global warming in July 2006, I said that one of the difficulties of motivating people had been the absence of dramatic climate change imagery. The issue was too distant, too abstract. I was paradoxically heartened by stranded polar bear cubs and melting icecaps, because I saw them as powerful tools to arouse the apathetic. They still are. Plenty of people are still having “Oh My God” epiphanies when they encounter vivid images of stranded polar bear cubs and melting icecaps.

But a growing minority may have had enough of climate change messages that are saddening, guilt-inducing, or terrifying – all emotions that tend to induce denial. People in that growing minority don’t need still more awareness-raising and apathy-piercing. They need messages designed to entice them out of their denial and into action. Since activists find repeated “Oh My God” epiphanies energizing rather than denial-inducing, this is a need that activists are virtually programmed to overlook.

6. Trashing the enemy: One-sided versus two-sided communications

Back in the 1990s, the controversy over the seriousness of global warming was still wide-open. There were plenty of high-profile scientists on both sides. Today, the distribution of scientific opinion is much more skewed; the “yes, it’s serious” side has pretty much won the debate. Nonetheless, it remains possible (albeit unlikely) that the winning side is wrong. There are still some experts among the skeptics. And they sometimes claim that they have a lot of silent allies, fellow scientists who share their skepticism but are reluctant to say so for fear of repercussions.

(In fact, both sides argue that they have been subjected to pressure of various sorts. Alarmists accuse skeptics of sabotaging their government grant applications over the last eight years. Skeptics accuse alarmists of creating a hostile work environment in the faculty lounge.)

Today, in short, the global warming controversy is no longer wide-open, nor is it entirely settled. The skeptical position is a minority position. But it does have arguments on its side of the debate – bits of data (factoids) that can be deployed to support the skeptical position, methodological disputes over the evidence (especially the modeling), etc.

Many global warming activists don’t concede that there is still a debate. That’s part of why they like the term “denial” so much. When activists call the other side “global warming deniers,” they don’t usually mean that the other side is having a tough time coming to terms cognitively or emotionally with the reality of climate change. No, they’re being intentionally insulting, invoking a comparison to Holocaust deniers. People on the other side never call themselves deniers; they call themselves global warming “skeptics” or “contrarians.”

As a rule, global warming activists respond to the contrarians’ arguments in one of three ways. Sometimes they ignore them, pretending that the controversy is settled and there is no other side. Sometimes they dismiss them contemptuously, asserting that the controversy is settled and the other side is asinine. And sometimes they rebut them, proving (as best they can) that the controversy is settled and the other side is sadly mistaken.

What they rarely do is acknowledge any validity whatsoever to the contrarians’ case.

The question I want to address is whether this is a wise strategy, especially with regard to its impact on people who are in or near global warming denial.

The research on one-sided versus two-sided communications is extensive. There are situations when it is wise to ignore your opponents’ arguments and simply sell your half of the truth (or your 99% of the truth). And there are situations when it is wise to concede your opponents’ arguments, even if the vast majority of the evidence is on your side.

One of the situations when you should concede the opposition’s piece of the truth is directly relevant to global warming denial: when your audience is actively engaging the opposition arguments already.

Much earlier in this long column, I made the point that global warming denial that’s rooted in intolerable emotion tends to lead people to avoid thinking about the issue at all, whereas denial that’s rooted in cognitive dissonance tends to lead people to seek out opposing arguments. Emotion-based denial typically looks like apathy. But dissonance-based denial can look like scoffing.

When global warming activists put too much stress on fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, and the like, they risk exacerbating emotion-based denial. When activists refuse to concede that climate change contrarians have any valid points whatsoever, they risk exacerbating dissonance-based denial.

People in the grip of cognitive dissonance about global warming are biased in their information-seeking and information-processing. They reliably beat the bushes for information they can interpret to mean that global warming is a foolish fantasy or a liberal plot … or at least a debatable hypothesis. When that’s what people are looking for, it’s not hard to find. They can find it on Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. They can find it in books by “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg. They can find it on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites.

Global warming activists cannot keep cognitive dissonance from motivating a biased search for contrarian arguments. And global warming activists cannot keep that search from succeeding. The activists’ only choice is how to respond to the contrarian arguments: whether to ignore them, dismiss them, rebut them, or even on occasion (when they are valid) concede them.

Ignoring or dismissing the contrarian arguments gives them strength. In fact, the tendency of global warming activists to ignore or dismiss the contrarian arguments may well be the single best contrarian argument left: “The Establishment refuses to engage with our position. What are they afraid of?”

Respectful rebuttal is far superior. But remember: People experiencing cognitive dissonance about global warming aren’t neutrals trying to assess the merits of the debate. Their information-seeking is highly biased; they’re on a scavenger hunt for information that can reduce their dissonance. Listening to your rebuttal will tend to increase their dissonance. So they’re not likely to listen, or at least not likely to listen objectively.

When we talk to people for whom climate change arouses cognitive dissonance, our goal should be to find less dissonance-arousing rhetoric to express our global warming warnings. That could mean going out of our way to voice regret rather than jubilation that lifestyles may have to change. It could mean focusing more on win-wins, ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that can also sustain our economy and our way of life. It could mean championing market mechanisms, not just government programs, as pathways to a reduced carbon footprint.

Above all, I think, it means trying not to sound contemptuous of the contrarian position. The mutual contempt of many global warming activists and their contrarian opponents polarizes the issue. If people experiencing cognitive dissonance are forced to choose up sides, they will probably choose the side that doesn’t arouse so much dissonance – the contrarian side (or at least the skeptical side). A less polarizing approach can help them reconcile the evidence that climate change is serious with the dissonance that evidence is arousing.

Conceding that climate change contrarians may be right about some things doesn’t mean conceding that they’re right overall. Asserting that the overwhelming weight of the evidence is on your side doesn’t mean asserting that there are absolutely no holes in your case or factoids that point the other way. Acknowledging that there is still a debate doesn’t mean acknowledging that the debate is a tossup.

There is still a debate but it’s not a tossup. The contrarians have some points in their favor but the overwhelming weight of the evidence is on our side. That’s what good science says is the truth. And that’s what good risk communication says is strategically wise messaging – especially when talking to people whose cognitive dissonance is luring them into denial.

I understand how hard it is to avoid polarization when advocating such an urgent cause. The sense that we are engaged in a holy war to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late makes it difficult to address the contrarians’ quibbles with anything other than dismissive contempt. But dismissive contempt is backfiring, I think, especially for the growing audience of people experiencing global warming denial rooted in cognitive dissonance.

Here’s an extremely challenging take-home assignment. Granted that you are convinced (and so am I) that global warming is real and serious, make a list of the other side’s sound arguments. If you can’t find any, look harder. Sure, their arguments don’t add up to the convincing case they claim it does. But their arguments don’t add up to zero, either. Gather together the things global warming contrarians say that aren’t lies, that are true as far as they go. Assume that people whose global warming denial is rooted in cognitive dissonance have heard these arguments and taken them to heart. Start building an activist case that doesn’t ignore, dismiss, or even rebut these arguments – that concedes them.

One of the other side’s strongest arguments, in my judgment, is uncertainty. Even today, even in the face of ever-better evidence of global climate change, uncertainty is still the contrarians’ ace-in-the-hole. For those of us who are convinced that climate change is real and serious, there remains enormous uncertainty about how best to address it. And those who doubt that the problem is real and serious can capitalize on our uncertainty, especially if we are unwilling to admit it: “If our leaders can't even figure out how to unfreeze the credit icecap, how can they possibly pick the right ways to respond to global warming? Even if the experts are right about what’s happening, why should we believe they know what to do about it?”

One of the biggest defects in recession-fighting risk communication is our failure to concede that we’re making it up as we go along, that we have no road map, that some of what we’re trying is bound to fail or even backfire. That same defect contaminates climate change risk communication as well.

What about the possibility of a deeper error: that global warming might turn out to be no big deal, that the contrarians might be right after all? Should we still be conceding that too? Or has the time come to declare climate change contrarians out-of-bounds?

Bear in mind that the size of a risk has two components, probability and magnitude. So when we try to convince people that global warming is serious, we have two key messages: It’s likely to happen (risk probability), and it’s likely to be horrific if it happens (risk magnitude).

Back when the climate change debate was wide-open, it was obvious to risk communication professionals that the magnitude argument was a lot stronger than the probability argument. It was a mistake, albeit a common mistake, to pretend or claim that the case for global warming was a sure thing. It was wiser – both more accurate and more credible – to tell people that global warming worst case scenarios were truly horrible and we couldn’t afford to wait for certainty before doing something about the problem.

Warnings about worst case scenarios are usually like that. Three quick examples:

• If you’re thinking about whether to buy flood insurance, a wise insurance salesperson doesn’t insist that your home is bound to get inundated. Instead, the agent reminds you how awful it would be to have your house flooded out.
• George W. Bush was unwise to launch the invasion of Iraq by saying he was certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He would have been wiser to say that the possibility was too dire to tolerate.
• Pandemic preparedness advocates shouldn’t try to convince people that an influenza pandemic is imminent. Nobody knows when the next pandemic will come. We’re on much solider ground basing our argument for preparedness on the hundreds of millions who could die in a worst case.

I’ve written a whole column about “Worst Case Scenarios,” so I won’t belabor the point here. See especially the last section, entitled “Postscript for Sources that *Like* Talking about Worst Cases.”

In the last few years, as the alarmist side of the global warming issue has gained intellectual and political strength, activists on that side have pretty much stopped saying we can’t afford to wait till we’re sure. Now they mostly say we’re sure.

Of course people who are sure should say so. I’m not advising a strategic pretense of uncertainty if you’re certain. And I’m definitely not advising pretending that the evidence is weaker than it is. But it’s crucial to remember that key groups in your audience are not so certain. Some of them – especially those experiencing cognitive dissonance – may be hanging onto their uncertainty for dear life, and may see your claims of certainty as dishonest and unscientific. So even if you’re telling people you’re certain, I would point out that they don’t have to share your certainty to support your action agenda.

I’d tell them something like this:

The evidence of a serious global warming problem gets stronger every year. Today only a few scientists disagree that urgent action is needed. Of course there are still some holes and uncertainties in our case, and the minority who disagree have a case of their own. Do we know for sure that only urgent action stands a chance of preventing the world from getting hotter and hotter, until melting icecaps flood our coastlines, wars are fought over access to water, hurricanes become ever more frequent and more powerful, and tropical diseases are routine throughout Europe and North America? Personally, I am pretty sure of these predictions. But if you’re not so sure, consider this: By the time even the few remaining skeptics are convinced, by the time we’re all absolutely certain about the looming effects of global climate change, it will be too late to do much to mitigate those effects or to manage them. If we’re smart, we won’t wait. We will take action now.

I like the tone of this excerpt from climatologist Mario Molina’s 2005 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources:

While there is a growing scientific consensus around the science of climate change, there is of course much that we do not fully understand about the timing, geographic distribution, and severity of the changes in climate – and the economic, environmental, and social impacts of these changes – that will result if heat-forcing emissions continue to increase. However, not knowing with certainty how the climate system will respond should not be an excuse for inaction. Policymakers are frequently, indeed usually, in the position of making decisions in the face of uncertainties…. Most people buy car insurance even though they don't know with any degree of certainty what their individual risk of being in a car accident might be, just as most doctors would advise an individual with a history of heart trouble to choose low-fat foods and exercise despite the many complex and usually unknowable factors that go into determining any individual person's risk of having a heart attack.

If we apply the same logic in setting goals for limiting the risks associated with future climate change, it becomes very clear that our current course now places us far outside the kinds of risk thresholds we typically apply in other areas of public policy. Put another way, there is now an overwhelming consensus that failure to limit greenhouse gas emissions will produce a risk of significant adverse consequences that is far higher than we find acceptable in other arenas. When facing a substantial chance of potentially catastrophic consequences and the near certainty of lesser negative effects, the only prudent course of action is to mitigate these risks. And let us be clear – when we speak of potentially catastrophic consequences in this context we are talking about devastating impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity; severe flood damage to urban centers and island nations as sea level rises; significantly more destructive and frequent extreme weather events such as droughts and floods; seriously affected agricultural productivity in many countries; the exacerbation of certain diseases; population dislocations; etc.

This passage doesn’t sound like Molina lacks confidence that global warming is serious – yet it focuses not on how certain he is, but rather on how foolish it would be to wait for certainty before taking action against such horrific possibilities. In Molina’s shoes I would go a little further: I would concede a few of the contrarians’ best arguments. But unlike so many climate change activists, Molina isn’t implying that there are no respectable contrarian arguments left.

At its worst, the activists’ tendency to avoid giving respectable contrarian arguments their due keeps company with a parallel tendency to advance less-than-respectable arguments of their own. Probably the most common example of this is attributing specific weather events (and sometimes disease outbreaks) to global climate change. Such debatable and unprovable attributions are all too easy for the other side to rebut. And the rebuttals are all too easy for people experiencing cognitive dissonance to seize on as reasons why they can’t trust global warming activists and therefore needn’t take global warming seriously.

It is possible to capitalize on a teachable moment without going beyond the science. In an article entitled “Should We Talk About the Weather?” science journalist Chris Moody offers this advice:

My own view is that while hurricanes can and even should be used to discuss global warming, it must be done with rigorous fidelity to the current state of scientific understanding – something that’s hardly easy to achieve when scientific understanding on this topic is a moving target. Nevertheless, using a language that emphasizes risk rather than certainty – and, of course, avoiding the causal attribution of any individual storm to climate change – generally insulates against criticism. For instance, regarding an eerie, record-breaking storm like 2007’s Category 5 Cyclone Gonu, I might say something like this: “Scientists predict that hurricanes should worsen due to global warming … and when you see a seemingly unprecedented storm like Gonu, doesn’t it at least make you worry that they’re right?”

As I write, Australia is suffering its worst drought, heat wave, and bushfire disaster in decades. The Australian media are full of stories attributing the situation to global climate change, as well as stories decrying that attribution as irresponsible, exploitive fear-mongering … and stories carefully staking out the middle position that climate change will probably make such extreme weather conditions more common but cannot be blamed for any specific instance.

Every time we give in to the temptation to attribute some awful weather event to global warming, we trigger credible counterclaims that we are ignoring science and fostering fear. We also “give permission” for contrarians to similarly misuse their own examples, as in this March 2008 New York Times article: “Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell.”

Three Simple Points

Despite the length of this column, its basic recommendations can be summarized in three simple points:

Whenever you’re trying to persuade people to take global climate change seriously, consider the possibility that the barrier you need to overcome may not be apathy, but rather psychological denial. If your persuasion efforts routinely backfire – that is, if people seem to get more apathetic when you start telling them why they should be getting more concerned – it’s almost surely denial.When you suspect denial, try to figure out what kind. Are there deeply held beliefs or patterns of behavior that your global warming advocacy is challenging, leading to cognitive dissonance and a concerted search for evidence that you’re wrong? Are your messages arousing intolerable levels of fear, guilt, sadness, helplessness, or other emotions, leading people to avoid considering the issue at all?Once you think you know what kind(s) of denial you’re up against, change your messaging to seduce people out of their denial. At a minimum, try to avoid messaging that seems likely to exacerbate global warming denial:

• Avoid fear-mongering.
• Avoid guilt-tripping – such as harping endlessly on the charge that global warming is anthropogenic.
• Avoid coming across as an ideologue, more committed to changing people’s lifestyles than to addressing global warming – and therefore as hostile to technological solutions.
• Avoid focusing on climate change mitigation to the exclusion of climate change adaptation.
• Avoid taking pleasure in bad news – venting your anger and self-righteousness in ways that add to your audience’s guilt and sadness.
• Avoid arguing a one-sided case that fails to acknowledge that climate change skeptics have some decent arguments too.

Finally, a crucial reminder: Don’t get so preoccupied with denial that you forget about apathy. And, in fact, don’t imagine that apathy and denial are all there is. Some people are still unaware that global warming is an issue they should be thinking about; some have acquired misinformation that keeps them from getting involved; some are on our side already and need support to do even more than they’re doing now.

Denial is one aspect of climate change risk communication. I believe it is important, growing, and neglected. But it’s not the whole ball game.

Climate Change

Risk Communication Dialogue

How to tell if skeptics are “in denial”;

Parsing the motives for global warming denial

– and for global warming support;

Strategy versus sincerity in global warming persuasion

(and in persuasion generally)

by Stephen L. Brown, Peter M. Sandman,

Steve Long, Betty K. Jensen, and Ron Law

Excerpts from the RISKANAL listserv, March 24–25, 2009

(plus some follow-up offline correspondence)

[Omitted here, but mentioned below, are earlier posts by Stephen L. Brown, Jim Dukelow, and Tony Cox regarding the psychology of global warming “denialists.” Global warming is sometimes referred to as “AGW” – anthropogenic global warming.]

From: Stephen L. Brown

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 24, 2009

…. In my original post, I speculated that there was a strong correlation between conservative/libertarian politics and being a skeptic about AGW, while a liberal political bent was common in the most vocal advocates of AGW, and asked why. Jim [Dukelow] did not dispute the correlation, and opined that the “denialist community” showed “hostility to regulation of industry and commercial activity” and overlapped the anti-evolution crowd. Perhaps Jim did not intend so, but I thought he implied that corporate greed in the energy and related industries that would be most targeted by proposed AGW mitigation strategies was behind most of the “denialist” activities. I’m not going to get into the anti-evolution issue, as any correlation would more likely (in my opinion) be a result of conservative/anti-evolution association and not causal.

My core hypothesis is that conservatives and libertarians who are suspicious about most large-scale, government-imposed interventions are uncomfortable with the fixes proposed, seeing them as interfering with free markets and imposing high costs on the current populace, especially in the developed countries. Certainly the magnitude of the costs and their influence on the current quality of life can and will be debated, but it seems to me virtually certain that these fixes will make MY quality of life poorer in the short run. I also hypothesize that most of the opposition to the fixes is not driven by greed but instead by ideology, although I would acknowledge that the legitimacy of self-interest is an important component of the conservative/libertarian credo. (I apologize to those who distinguish libertarian ideas from other ideas usually considered conservative; I’m focusing on the areas where these terms overlap.)

The next hypothesis is that being uncomfortable with the fix makes people more likely to dispute the existence of the problem. Knowing that appeals to the gospel according to Friedman are not going to sway the liberal AGW activists, the “denialist community” is encouraged to question the existence of the problem. I’m not saying that this behavior is a conscious strategy, but I think it an easy way of shifting the dialogue from politics to science, which is supposed to be less emotional. It may be especially true for those of us who think of ourselves as scientists, but I see it in the “lay” public, too.

An aside on the issue of “denialist” vs. “skeptic” raised by Tony Cox. I think Tony was objecting to the pejorative tone of “denialist,” which connotes to me someone who just doesn’t want to believe what (s)he at heart knows to be true. I too doubt that such a description fits all of the people who I lumped as “skeptics,” especially when I assign at least a small probability that AGW could be wrong. On the other hand, I think some of the “skeptics” are in denial to the extent they tend to discount evidence for AGW, often because of opposition to proposed fixes….

But this behavior surely applies to the supporters of the AGW science and mitigation proposals. They can find all kinds of issues with data sets and interpretations that argue against AGW, while approaching those that argue for AGW with little skepticism. Here the liberally minded folks tend to invoke the precautionary principle, consciously or not. Because it is possible the polar bear will cease to exist outside zoos, the populations of low-lying islands will be threatened, water supplies will diminish in places where storage in snowpacks is important, and so on, it is important for them to assume the worst and argue for action. Otherwise they would feel guilty about not doing enough to protect future populations of humans and ecological resources who are not able to protect themselves.

I also hypothesize that the pro- and anti-AGW forces are influenced by the phenomenon I think of as, “if you don’t like the messenger, shoot the message.” My conservative/libertarian friends seemed to become hardened in their AGW skepticism as soon as the Al Gore movie appeared. After all, who would trust the message of an airhead liberal? The liberals, on the other hand, distrust any message they see as coming from the venal cabal of the energy industries, their toady consultants, and the right-wing journalists who take their money.

Both sides of the AGW debate are also subject to the bugaboo of us all: a tendency to support a position more strongly than justified by the available information because of our previous history of support. It’s just plain embarrassing to admit we were wrong.

Now that I have offended pretty much everyone, let me close with an exhortation to try and separate arguments about the what of AGW from the what to do about it.

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

Re the recent dialogue over climate change “denialists” and especially Steve Brown’s comment yesterday, it is worthwhile distinguishing three reasons for questioning global warming:

Intellectual denial is the position of climate change skeptics and contrarians. Some members of this group have reviewed the evidence and decided that the case for a global warming crisis is weaker than the majority of experts now say it is. Others just smell a rat. Their intuition tells them that the crisis is overblown, and that the expert consensus to the contrary may be just an artifact of herd mentality or political allegianceStrategic denial is the position of those who may privately believe that climate change is real and serious, but have reasons for pretending otherwise – paid spokespeople for organizations that have a vested interest in denying the significance of climate change, for example, or people whose social set looks askance at lefty activism. Strategic denial is rarer than we usually imagine. Those with ulterior reasons to deny (or affirm) the significance of climate change usually manage to convince themselves that they’re on the right side.Psychological denial is the position of people so upset or so hopeless about climate change they can’t bear to think about it: people “in denial,” not “deniers” or “denialists.” Psychological denial often masquerades as intellectual denial for those who are experiencing it. To climate change activists it often looks like strategic denial.

Even more often, psychological denial is mistaken for apathy. People in or near denial will tell you they’re just not interested. But unlike apathy, denial is unconsciously motivated. If I’m really “just not interested” in your issue, that’s apathy – your issue didn’t make my list. If I can’t bear to get interested, if the issue threatens my sense of how the world works or arouses emotions I cannot tolerate, that’s denial.

For members of this list who are concerned about climate change and hopeful of arousing similar concern in others, this distinction may be crucial. The appropriate messaging for apathy and the appropriate messaging for denial are in some ways antithetical. If the diagnosis is apathy, the treatment is to get me interested, to arouse more concern. If the diagnosis is denial, trying to arouse more concern will backfire, propelling me more deeply into denial. The treatment for denial is to help me bear the concern I’m already feeling.

I have posted an essay on my website on “Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial” The essay argues that climate change apathy is certainly still important but diminishing, whereas climate change denial is probably still small but growing. It outlines the two sources of climate change denial with the greatest impact: cognitive dissonance and intolerable emotion. And it discusses six things activists do that exacerbate denial:

• Fear-mongering
• Guilt-tripping – including what I call “the stupid fight over whether global warming is anthropogenic”
• Ideology-based hostility to technological solutions
• Neglect of global warming adaptation
• Over-emphasis on bad news
• Trashing the “enemy” and all arguments that question the validity of the climate change hypothesis

I’m not sure if my essay has a constituency – on this list or elsewhere. Climate change skeptics and contrarians are likely to misread it as claiming that they’re all in denial. It has nothing much to offer them anyway; it’s aimed at the other side. But the other side – climate change activists – may take offense at all the risk communication sins it accuses them of committing. Nor is it a good read for people in denial; telling people in denial that they’re in denial tends to push them more deeply into denial. As for the genuinely apathetic, this l-o-n-g essay is sure to increase their apathy!

For those who decide to give it a look anyway, I would welcome comment, whether on this listserv or on my website Guestbook.

Please note that my own belief that global warming is real and serious is grounded neither in evidence nor in faith. I am simply playing the odds, betting that the expert consensus will turn out right (as it usually does) and the contrarians will turn out wrong (as they usually do). I’m also inclined to think that the cost of mistakenly taking climate change seriously, though high, is not as high as the cost of mistakenly neglecting the problem.

From: Steve Long

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

Interesting post and essay.

But, it leaves me in an uneasy position. I still don’t seem to be able to communicate with the people who have data or models or logical arguments, because they ALL seem to be assuming that I am, in some way, dishonest and trying to trick them with my questions and logical inquiries. Maybe an article that helps people who are trying to be objective cope with a highly politicized debate in a constructive manner is more what I need.

With respect to the essay that you did write, I have an observation. Your main purpose appears (to me) to be to help people get THEIR points across by better understanding how they are being perceived by their “opposition.” I have had some experience with your approaches before, and noticed that there can be a down-side to taking your advice if it is not done in a rather skillful manner. Essentially, the “opposition” discovers that they are being talked to in a manner that has been carefully crafted to persuade them, using psychological insights about them. And they take that as an indication of dishonesty, which, in some cases, it is. I once had a boss who had a small plaque that said “Sincerity is the key to success – once you learn to fake that, you have it made.” And, he was good at faking it, for a while. But, once his technique became known, his reputation began to precede him, and he was done.

So, getting back to my dilemma, how do I get people to stop using “techniques” on me and actually engage in a logical assessment of the situation and possible courses of action? I am afraid that your essay will cause the activists to merely PRETEND to consider things like mitigation, coping and uncertainties in the human species’ ABILITY to stop climate change. And the denial people of various types will be thinking “Aha, you are trying to use Sandman’s techniques, but you clearly don’t have an open mind.” I have seen too much of that type of behavior in other politicized debates.

So, can you give us some pointers on how to get back to intellectually honest discourse from the place that we now find ourselves? It seems to me that would require us to actually BE intellectually honest, rather than just fake it. So, maybe a course in how to recognize intellectual dishonesty in ourselves?

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

You’re worried about the relationship between sincerity and strategy. I think you are right that strategy without sincerity doesn’t work for long – and can backfire badly when people realize there’s nothing real underneath the strategic packaging.

And you’re right that my stock-in-trade as a risk communication consultant is strategy. So there is a basis for your concern that when people like me offer strategic advice on how to be more “persuasive” to clients who are contemptuous of their stakeholders and unwilling to take their concerns seriously (but want advice on how to pretend to take their concerns seriously), we may be helping neither our clients nor the world.

With that on the table, let me say (sincerely) two things on behalf of communication strategy.

First, sincerity without strategy is probably preferable to strategy without sincerity, but it’s far from optimal. Often my clients really do want to establish a more respectful dialogue with their critics, but they’re not good at it. In fact, they’re often really, really bad at it.

Ego and ideology get in the way of good risk communication far more than self-interest does. It is commonplace for companies and activists to adopt postures of arrogance, intransigence, or defensiveness toward their critics even when those postures stand in the way of achieving their own goals (whether the goal is return-on-investment or movement-building). They sincerely want to achieve their goals. They are sincerely (though perhaps reluctantly) willing to change how they address the concerns of critics if that’s the best way to achieve their goals. But ego and ideology are making it harder for them to see that this is so. Strategic consulting can help.

Second, strategy can frequently lead to sincerity. In the dynamics of change – both individual change and institutional change – rhetoric usually changes first. Behavior changes next and attitudes change last. This is true of people or companies newly interested in reducing their carbon footprints. And it is true of climate change activists newly interested in proselytizing more respectfully.

Improved external communication can thus be internally subversive. That’s why speechwriters and communication consultants are more powerful than their clients realize. If I can convince either side in a controversy to adopt a posture of transparency, responsiveness, and perhaps even empathy toward opponents – insincerely, for purely strategic reasons – I stand a good chance of nurturing a dialogue that will in fact be more transparent, responsive, and empathic … and ultimately of nurturing attitudes to match.

It’s easy to find instances of “hypocrisy” when people or organizations are in the middle of this change process, when their behavior hasn’t yet caught up with their rhetoric, or their attitudes haven’t yet caught up with their behavior. Labeling and attacking the hypocrisy can short-circuit the change. To facilitate the change, it’s better to take people and organizations at their word, to hold them accountable for living up to their rhetoric (and to give them a little time to do so).

From: Steve Long

To: Peter M. Sandman

First, let me clarify that I have attended some of your seminars, read some of your papers, and taken your message in a positive manner. I have been somewhat successful in improving my abilities to talk productively with “opposition” types because of what you have taught me. But, I was working at a federal government agency at the time, and also watched some disingenuous uses of your techniques, too.

Actually, most of the time, inside and outside the agency, I found that people did not change in the way they treated me until they had an opportunity to see ME change. If I made a mistake and acknowledged it, or took one of their points and incorporated it into a revised position, or even just changed my approach to provide a win-win opportunity, I could see people stop and reevaluate their relationships with me. But, those opportunities are not very frequent because I have already considered a lot of things in forming my opinions. And, it is not something that is a good idea to fake.

So, most of the time, I just had to contend with people ASSUMING that I was an intransigent opponent who needed to be bashed instead of engaged at an intellectual level.

That is why I was suggesting to you that a course in being more introspective about our own positions would possibly be helpful for highly politicized debates like global warming. I think some of your messages already provide some introspective insights for those of us who are inclined to see them. But, I am hoping that your expertise would allow you to provide some means for making at least some of the people who are NOT so introspective still begin to ask themselves things like “Why am I so sure that I know enough to be correct about my position?” Typically, if they can answer that question rationally and without copping out with a reference to some “respected” other, then they are in a better position to be persuasive to others. I think that is a good “hook” for you to use to get them to look inside themselves some more.

From: Betty K. Jensen

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

Two comments:

Since you list and describe three reasons for questioning global warming, I wonder if you came up with equivalent reasons which would explain those who believe in global warming.You state that “I am simply playing the odds, betting that the expert consensus will turn out right (as it usually does) and the contrarians will turn out wrong (as they usually do).” It is not quite certain which side of the issue has a greater group of experts.

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

Can I identify some reasons why people support the global warming hypothesis? Good question. What’s sauce for the goose…. Here’s a first crack at a parallel list to my partition of global warming deniers into “intellectual,” “strategic,” and “psychological” varieties:

Some people are “intellectual supporters.” They are convinced by their review of the evidence – or by other people’s reviews of the evidence, which they have decided they trust – that the risk is real and serious. Or they are convinced that the risk is likely to turn out real and serious, and that it requires prompt action even though there is some chance the action may turn out unnecessary or harmful in the end.Some people are “ideological supporters.” They hate the internal combustion engine, the multinational corporations, the focus on growth and consumption in Western society, etc. They hated these things before global warming came along. Now global warming is both another reason to hate them and a possible vehicle to defeat them.Some people are “constituency supporters.” Everybody they know seems to be taking climate change seriously, and they fear they could lose stature in their crowd if they didn’t take it seriously too. This may lead them to hide doubts of which they are fully aware; more typically it leads them to repress any doubts of which they might otherwise be aware. (The former is analogous to strategic denial, the latter to psychological denial.)

As with my climate change denial taxonomy, these three categories are not exhaustive and not mutually exclusive.

Some of this is at least implicit in the essay I referenced in my earlier comments, available at http://www.psandman.com/col/climate.htm. The last half of the essay is mostly about the ideological supporters, and my judgment that they are badly mishandling climate change advocacy. You might want to read some of it.

As for your second point, I actually thought pretty much everyone agreed that the distribution of expert opinion is highly skewed. Even those who argue that this is more a reflection of political correctness than of evidence-based conviction seem to agree that it’s so. Climate change contrarians would seem to be conceding as much when they call themselves contrarians. But you’re quite right that if I were to learn that the consensus is shifting, or that I was wrong about it in the first place, this would lead me to hedge my bets. I am backing the favorite, not doing my own assessment of the data.

From: Ron Law

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

With respect, may I add number 4?

Some people are “opportunistic supporters.” They see a whole new industry from which to make … not unlike the plastic telephone card a few years back where one-off cards fetched $100,000 plus on the open market. The ETS system being proposed is a brilliant opportunity for traders to make a lot of money. Selling carbon credits in Norway to industry at the bottom of the planet (assuming of course that the northern hemisphere is at the top … that is a man-made concept) does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions … but it is good bu$ine$$ for traders.

From: Betty K. Jensen

To: The RISKANAL listserv, March 25, 2009

I notice that a group that is missing from your description of those supporting global warming theory is a group analogous to those in strategic denial.

“Strategic denial is the position of those who may privately believe that climate change is real and serious, but have reasons for pretending otherwise – paid spokespeople for organizations that have a vested interest in denying the significance of climate change…”

I suspect that many among those supporting global warming theory are supporting it because of the large financial support available for such research and related work.

From: Stephen L. Brown

To: Peter M. Sandman, March 25, 2009

Your essay touched on my points more thoroughly than I, and with more documentation. I didn’t try to read it all, but got through a lot of it.

I guess I personally must be somewhere between the intellectual skeptic and the person denying through “intellectualization.” It’s not clear to me how either I or someone else could determine which were the case. Is there a test?

The only areas of your piece that I might quarrel with concern the issues of morality and guilt. I am one of those who are indeed angered by what I see as the environmentalists’/activists’ need to assign blame and their attempts to instill guilt. Perhaps that is my own attempt to avoid feeling guilty, but it could also be because I don’t feel guilty and don’t accept the blame for the real and alleged harms that are their causes. Although I understand that environmental and other damages have occurred, I think they are rarely the result of moral turpitude but rather mistakes or side effects of attempts to make life better. Sometimes the net of environmental damages outweighs the net of societal goods, but that is not always the case and, in my opinion, mostly not the case. The very word guilt implies that one has committed an offense, which seems to me an inappropriately harsh term for wanting to enjoy the benefits of energy consumption, in the case of AGW.

The activists have the right to their ideological beliefs, but I don’t see those beliefs being the result of provable moral superiority. The folks who are disputing AGW think they have the moral high ground because they advocate “freedom,” “personal choice,” and associated catchwords of the conservative/libertarian canon, and are not interfering with the right of each person to make his or her own choices about using energy, etc. In reality, I think society has no choice but to try balancing the conflicting value sets of all people through a flawed political process that is not advanced by accusations of blame.

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: Stephen L. Brown, March 27, 2009

You raise two issues:

The distinction between people who have genuine intellectual objections to the global warming hypothesis and people who are intellectualizing their psychologically motivated denial of the global warming threat.The distinction between a denial-induced negative reaction to guilt appeals (because you feel guilty) and straightforward irritation at guilt appeals (because you have nothing to feel guilty about).

In both cases, the bottom-line answer is the same. You are right that it’s hard to tell the difference.

And there is a real risk that the concept of psychological denial can become just another rhetorical weapon that backfires when global warming activists try to deploy it. Accusing people of being “in denial” is almost as insulting as accusing them of being “deniers” or “denialists” – in my terms, accusing people of psychological denial is almost as insulting as accusing them of strategic denial.

As psychiatrists know all too well, you can’t just tell somebody he or she is in denial. Even if you’re right, it won’t help. Telling people in denial that they’re in denial reliably pushes them more deeply into denial. Psychiatrists can spend years slowly helping their patients get to the point where they can get along without a particular area of self-deception, and therefore can afford to see through their own previous denial.

When I wrote “Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial,” my intended readers were climate change activists, not people in denial about climate change. I wanted to help activists consider the possibility that some of their communication strategies were backfiring on some of their target audiences. I wasn’t writing for the target audiences.

It’s not obvious how open climate change activists will be to my urgings that they consider psychological denial when they design their messaging. They tend to divide the world into four groups with regard to climate change:

People who are already converts.People who are ripe for conversion.People who are too apathetic to listen, and need to be aroused before they can be converted.People who have ulterior reasons for refusing to be converted (strategic deniers).

I want them to acknowledge two more groups:

People who genuinely disagree on the merits (intellectual deniers).People who can’t bear to let themselves agree, who have a strong cognitive or emotional need to avoid the issue or to be on the other side (psychological deniers).

My essay focuses on #6. If I’m reading you right, you wonder if a lot of people I classify in #6 might really be in #5. Activists think a lot of people I classify in #6 and you classify in #5 are really in #4.

How can we tell who’s right – especially given that pure cases are rare, and almost everybody’s motives are mixed?

The classic test to distinguish denial from apathy is to see how people respond to efforts to arouse concern. Apathetic people should become more concerned in response to messages that urge them to become more concerned. At worst, the messages may fall flat. If the messages boomerang, leading the audience to become less concerned instead of more, odds are the problem was denial, not apathy. (The other possibility is that the messages were really, really bad.)

In principle, the same test should work to distinguish genuine intellectual objections (intellectual denial) from intellectualization (unconsciously motivated psychological denial masquerading as intellectual denial). If I give you a sound argument and you reject it, you must be in denial … if not strategic, then psychological.

The problem with this reasoning is the difficulty – if not impossibility – of judging objectively whether the argument you rejected was actually sound.

When climate change supporters and climate change deniers debate, each typically thinks at least some of the other’s arguments are specious. And in fact both sides are right in thinking so. We all use specious arguments – sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, most often in a middle zone where we have papered over the flaws in our argument and then allowed ourselves to forget that that’s what we did. This is itself a kind of psychological denial, I think. We know we’re right, so we convince ourselves that we’re not misleading anybody when we avoid acknowledging certain facts that might suggest we could be wrong. It’s those inconvenient, anomalous facts that are misleading! So in self-deceptive good faith we construct partly specious arguments on behalf of a position we genuinely believe to be true. Elsewhere I have called this “misleading toward the truth.” Both sides do it – but of course the other side is misleading toward the “wrong” truth. So we all judge our opponents’ specious arguments by a much tougher ethical standard than our own. Soon enough we forget that our own arguments were specious at all.

Climate change deniers can certainly point to genuine flaws in the global warming case. The existence of those flaws doesn’t really help us determine whether the denial is intellectual (grounded in the flaws), strategic (grounded in self-interest), or psychological (grounded in cognitive dissonance or intolerable emotion).

One of the core principles of risk communication is that our risk perceptions are more a product of “outrage” (how upsetting the risk is) than of “hazard” (how dangerous it is). When outrage is low, people resist the data that hazard is high. When outrage is high, people resist the data that hazard is low. What exactly do I mean by “resist the data”? For some people, especially those without a lot of education, resisting the data means mostly ignoring the data. When you’re done explaining the science, they’ll simply say, “Well, fine, but I still think….” The risk perceptions of more educated people are just as outrage-motivated, just as immune to data – but more educated people don’t feel they can just ignore the data. Their response after you’re done explaining the science is likelier to be something like this: “I see four methodological flaws in your study….” The flaws are really there, but they’re not why the speaker is unpersuaded.

A position that is denial-motivated, like one that is outrage-motivated, will normally represent itself as grounded in the merits.

If you think the global warming case is strong, you will naturally have trouble accepting that anybody’s denial is intellectual … even if you concede (under pressure) that the case has some flaws. If you think the case is weak, on the other hand, you will naturally tend to assume that the denial is intellectual … even if you concede (under pressure) that you might also have some strategic or psychological reasons for leaning that way.

Or to put it a different way, people who accept the global warming hypothesis tend to imagine that there could be no intellectual reasons for rejecting it. And people who reject the global warming hypothesis tend to imagine that they have nothing but intellectual reasons for rejecting it.

I’m not a postmodernist. I don’t believe that truth is “constructed.” Truth exists. But truth is hard to ascertain. And the more controversial the issue, the harder it is to figure out what’s true, and to be sure your judgment about what’s true is grounded in the merits of the case, rather than in strategic considerations or psychological pressures.

It can’t be a coincidence that most people who have long hated the internal combustion engine, the multinational corporations, and the consumerist society think global warming is real and serious, while most people who have long hated government intervention and self-righteous leftists think it isn’t. The few exceptions – the libertarians who are reluctantly persuaded about global warming and the liberals who are reluctantly skeptical – are perhaps the only ones who can be trusted to judge on the merits.

I particularly like what you say about guilt. You offer three quite different reasons for rejecting (angrily) the activists’ global warming guilt-trips:

• Sometimes undesirable environmental outcomes are more than balanced by desirable outcomes in other venues. Pulling millions of Chinese out of poverty, for example, isn’t a trivial reason for emitting more greenhouse gases.
• Even in cases where the harm outweighs the benefit, guilt requires bad motives, not just bad outcomes. There’s arguably no moral turpitude in “wanting to enjoy the benefits of energy consumption” – certainly there was none until very recently when the question of serious impacts on climate began to be raised.
• There are many ethical frames in play here – not only environmental responsibility, but also freedom (to name just two). Global warming activists aren’t just pretending a debatable scientific question is settled; they are also pretending a complex ethical quandary is simple.

I agree with all three points. I would add a fourth:

• Some people do feel guilty about global warming, and some are suppressing feelings of guilt because they find them unbearable. Guilt-tripping these people will only push them more deeply into denial, costing global warming activists supporters they could have won with a gentler messaging strategy.

From: Stephen L. Brown

To: Peter M. Sandman, March 31, 2009

Reading your thoughts on “Climate Change Risk Communication” and the subsequent exchanges has stimulated me to revisit and in some cases rethink or expand on yet other related speculations. Perhaps this is all part of intellectualizing my denial of the more disturbing possible consequences of AGW, but even if so, perhaps some of the thoughts are valid nonetheless. My brain hurts when I try to sort out all the possible motives.

This time I am again writing you one-on-one rather than posting to RISKANAL, feeling that the average list member may be tired of this topic while you may still be interested. Warning: This, too, is l-o-n-g. My feelings won't be seriously injured if you don’t read much of it. While all of the following are related ideas in the sense that associations in my mind led me from one to another, they are not especially coherent, and may well represent some need on my part to tell SOMEONE – vent? – rather than just churn internally.

In no particular order:

Guilt

I think your premise in the article was that some subset of the AGW dissenters (another word for skeptics or deniers) believed at some level that AGW was indeed real and serious yet found themselves not doing much about it, and therefore felt guilty. The pain of the guilt then made them either avoid thinking about AGW entirely or intellectualize to come up with some reason not to change their behavior.

This made me think about the concept of guilt, about which I have already made a few comments.

Suppose my mother had a Ming vase. If the folks who were moving her to the assisted living facility knocked it over, I would feel regret that the vase was broken, but certainly no guilt. If the vase were broken because my son was rushing to give my mom a hug, my feeling of personal responsibility might be triggered, but not by much. If my son were practicing soccer in my mom’s house, I would feel worse because I probably should have done something to corral my son. If I knocked over the vase while helping the movers carry something out, I would also feel bad, but I doubt I would identify the feeling as guilt. If I were participating in the soccer game, I would feel considerably worse because I surely should have been more careful. Maybe that feeling could be called remorse. If I deliberately broke the vase because I was angry with my mom about something and later felt bad about it, that would definitely qualify in my lexicon as guilt.

Somehow, in my mind, guilt implies some degree of intent, or at least disregard for the interests of others. Remorse is also associated with wrongdoing, but in my mind has less implication of intent. Perhaps this is just semantics; some people, at least, would deny AGW to avoid feeling bad, whether the feeling was remorse or guilt. On the other hand, given your interest in communications, it may be better to identify people as feeling remorseful rather than guilty.

To put this more personally, it seems to me rather likely that polar bears will decline in number due to AGW and possibly become extinct in the wild, and I would be quite sorry about this situation. (I may never see a polar bear in the wild, but I like the idea that they’re around. I think the economists say that they have “existence value” for me.) So I should be willing to give up some of my current consumption to lessen my subjective probability that the polar bears will disappear, and I think I am. But it appears that I am not willing to stop using this computer because it consumes some energy. So it is for me not a matter of “whether” but of “how much.” As others on RISKANAL have suggested, those who assign any probability that AGW is real and bad will generally accept the cheaper and less draconian fixes, like energy conservation. I drive an SUV, but it is a CR-V, not an Escalade. (Of course, I have to admit that choice is driven not by AGW but by the fact that I am a frugal person in general.) The point here is to what extent should I feel guilty about the polar bears, as opposed to remorseful or simply regretful? Does it matter that in AGW, it is pretty much everyone who is in some part responsible? In the psychological world, does guilt have any gradations, or is it like virginity?

A final set of thoughts on this subject: How much does it matter whether I am thinking about wrongs that have already occurred or ones that might occur in the future? To use the vase analogy, is there a difference between feeling uncomfortable that I’m letting my son practice soccer in the house (knowing that the vase may get broken, even if it is not very likely, but also being unwilling to stifle his joy) and feeling regretful or remorseful that the vase did in fact get broken by an errant soccer ball? Should I feel worse about the demise of the Monteverde Golden Toad, which some folks blame at least in part on AGW and for which, if true, I have at least in some small way been responsible, or about the possibility that the polar bear will be gone in another few decades? Is it worse that I did cause some harm or that I might cause some harm if I don’t mend my ways? How much does it depend on whether the wrong is highly probable vs. marginally possible? On whether the harm is imminent or not? Within my lifetime vs. decades or centuries away? (In the nuclear waste arena, the debate swirls about wrongs that would be unlikely to occur for millennia.)

Cassandras and Pollyannas

For some time, I have been thinking about the variations in sociopolitical worldview that drive so many of our disputes about environmental issues (among others). I’m not alone by any means, and have seen a variety of takes on the subject. Applying labels probably not only oversimplifies the situation but also can be a source of conflict outside the real issues.

Nevertheless, I have come to characterizing some of the voices in AGW and other environmental debates as Cassandras or Pollyannas. In case it’s not obvious, the Cassandras are the ones I see as taking an overly pessimistic view of almost all environmental “threats,” seeing impending doom in a wide variety of human activities, including especially the deployment of technology, while the Pollyannas are overly optimistic about the results of those same activities. (In constructing this discussion, I discovered that the word “Cassandra” also implies that the people so labeled feel they can do nothing about their predictions of doom, but that wasn’t in my thinking when I started it. I haven’t yet found a better label.)

The labels are pejorative to the extent they suggest that the people labeled are inappropriately pessimistic or optimistic. Most people use “optimistic” as a compliment, while to me “Pollyanna” implies too much disregard for the downside. I see many of the most vocal AGW dissenters as Pollyannas. They tend to argue that because technology has so obviously improved the average person’s quality of life worldwide (a premise with which I would largely agree), other technologies will also improve conditions more than they will harm them. These folks discount the possibility that life as we know it may disintegrate if AGW continues unabated, a premise that is embraced by the folks who are talking about “tipping points” (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html?_r=1). But I see the latter as Cassandras (narrow definition) because they see the probability of disaster as being higher than justified by the available evidence.

I am wondering:

• Are these just labels I use to justify my disagreement with their positions?
• If such labels do describe something real, does “Cassandraism” in one arena imply similar attitudes in another? E.g., if one regularly sees environmental doom in deployment of technology, does (s)he also see bad consequences to be likely from, say, a change in governmental powers? My initial reaction here is no, because it seems to depend on ideology; the technological Pollyannas seem more likely to be Cassandras about stronger governmental programs and vice versa.
• Is there a wide spectrum of Cassandraism and Pollyannaism, or is it more or less bimodal?
• Has any rigorous study of these characteristics and their psychological associations been conducted?

I am also a bit worried about the “Peter and the Wolf syndrome.” If the Cassandras call wolf about too many issues that turn out to be of little real concern (meaning that any harm is limited to a few people or environmental resources), will the issues with huge potential for disaster be discounted? Will the Pollyanna viewpoint be amplified? This may be part of the reason that AGW is not getting as much action as the activists would like. (Conceptually, I would like to see a probabilistic risk/cost/benefit decision analysis of AGW that would take into account not only the most dire possible consequences but also the most favorable benefits, all with assigned probabilities of occurrence based on available science. But it would probably be impossible to get the players to agree on any set of consequences, probabilities, and cost/effectiveness inputs.)

Resistance to change

Just a digression here. One of the problems I have with the most ardent AGW activists is what I view as an unreasonable resistance to change per se. As you noted, global cooling has already been a minor issue, and I’m reasonably certain that if our problem was too much reflective particulate rather than too much carbon dioxide, the same folks would be just as outraged. If you’re against both AGW and AGC, then you must have in mind some intermediate global temperature that is just right – or you simply resist change.

If it’s the former, how do activists decide whether the temperature was just right in 1850 or 1900 or 1950? Why not 10,000 BC? If it’s the latter, why is change so threatening? (Some will tell you it is not the fact of change but the pace. There is some validity in that, but it is not totally convincing, either.)

On the opposite side, the dissenters seem too resistant to changes in the U.S. preference to rely on free markets in dealing with problems – to changes in the dominant economic paradigm.

I haven’t stumbled across any literature dealing with this perception of mine. Perhaps it has been studied and dismissed.

Denial

Your piece identifies two sources of psychological denial: cognitive dissonance and unbearable emotion. I gather that these are well known in the psychological literature, and I remember hearing about the former decades ago. Both descriptions seem to me plausible descriptions of how people deal with certain kinds of issues. Here I’m only asking how much they apply to AGW specifically. My guess is that the cognitive dissonance one is dominant. If I personally am indeed intellectualizing my denial of AGW severity, then cognitive dissonance would be a good reason. I don’t want to cut back my lifestyle drastically or lobby every level of government to intervene, so I adjust my assessment of how likely and how serious the impacts of AGW will be to fit my inaction.

To me, the intolerable emotion description seems more suited to something like the Holocaust deniers. If your father was a Nazi, then it would be horribly upsetting to entertain the notion that he was involved in perhaps the biggest atrocity of all time, even if only by not speaking out against it. I can well understand that one way of dealing with that pain would be to deny the existence, or at least the extent, of the Holocaust.

Somehow I have difficulty imagining someone having the same emotional reaction to AGW, especially when the worst consequences are all uncertain and in the future. Was your identification of this source of denial simply a hypothesis, or is there already some observational evidence that it is in operation? Of the folks you believe to be in psychological denial about AGW, how many would be in the cognitive dissonance category and how many in the intolerable emotion category? Has anybody done fMRIs on a group of people to see if their fear/guilt/sadness centers become active when asked to think about AGW? Or maybe these centers haven’t even been identified as yet.

The human element

It is quite clear to me that the AGW issue wouldn’t draw much controversy if the “A” weren’t the first initial. If the observed warming trend could be fully explained by the solar cycle and natural geologic and biologic events on earth, I doubt that anyone’s knickers would be in a knot. Maybe a few folks would be arguing about whether a technologic intervention should be entertained to stave off the projected impacts. I’m guessing that the activists and dissenters might switch sides, with the current activists resisting any human-mediated intervention.

For comparison, let’s look at two other issues that could be on center stage.

The first is asteroid impact – which is known to have occurred in the past, as recently as the 1908 Tunguska event; which has a very recent near miss; and which is virtually certain to happen again, with possible consequences ranging up to mass extinction. There is still some controversy over the role of the K-T impact on the dinosaur extinction, but if we counted noses the way we are doing with AGW, I think it would take the “blame.” Now clearly it is not human behavior that is causing asteroids to whiz by, and so it could be argued that modifying human behavior is not even relevant. But it is plausible that we could spend bucks on figuring out how to prevent or ameliorate impacts (see the movies “Asteroid” and “Deep Impact”) or be prepared to deal with the consequences (shelters, protected stores of genetic material). Except for a few zealots, however, this issue isn’t even on the OTH radar. I think the activists are uninterested because there is no human to blame.

The second is the decline of the amphibians, especially the frogs. Here it is pretty clear that the proximate cause is a parasite. There is less agreement about whether pesticides, global warming, or other human activities have had a role in potentiating the infestation by the parasite. The amphibian issue is therefore not off the activists’ list of issues, but it certainly is far from the top, in spite of the fact that disappearance of an entire order or even class of vertebrates is possible. From the standpoint of ecologic damage, I would think this more important than the impacts of global warming. It is more like the K-T event. Perhaps the issue isn’t higher on the list because, although the activists can find a plausible human-related culprit in the pesticides, it is not clear that reduced use would do much to help the frogs recover.

The AGW dissenters have the opposite image: too wedded to the right of humans to control and exploit their environment. I think this tendency is present to some extent because of correlations with religious views. How much it influences the dissenters’ take on AGW is not clear to me.

I could be wrong about the importance of the human element; if I am right, why is it so? Perhaps in the case of asteroid impact, the AGW activists are true Cassandras: They feel incapable of doing anything to prevent it occurring or even lessening the impacts. If it’s the parasites and not the pesticides endangering the frogs, maybe it is some Gaian faith in the virtue of Mother Nature, as opposed to the essential corruption of the human condition. I haven’t read a lot on this hypothesis.

To close this thread, I’ll return to something you said to the effect that the activists were already prepared to blame the energy companies for AGW because they already hated them for their environmental sins and their promotion of the consumer mentality (you actually said “philosophical attachment to simpler lifestyles”). I would propose that they also already hated those companies because they made profits. Time after time I have read an environmentalist diatribe that includes allegations that big corporations are deliberately ignoring concerns about the environment and other aspects of human welfare because of their pursuit of profits. Interestingly, they do not as often attack specific individuals, and almost never the stockholders that are the ultimate recipients of the profits after the executives have taken their piece. (I happen to agree with the activists that corporate executives are overpaid relative to their contributions to net human welfare, but that is a long story that I will refrain from telling here.) I speculate that going easy on the stockholders may have something to do with the fact that many activists depend on diversified mutual funds for their retirement plans.

Envy may have something to do with the resentment of the rich – I seem to remember that most folks are not particularly upset by people with a net worth twice as much as themselves, but are upset when the difference gets to about three times. I may have the numbers wrong, but the idea is that you can’t easily imagine someone being worthy of the larger amount, but can formulate a scenario in which your own net worth would double. So I think a good deal of the environmentalist credo is a displacement of outrage about monetary success.

To finish full-circle, I wonder whether environmental activists feel guilty because they are still vastly richer than the beggars of Calcutta and yet don’t donate everything they own to improve the condition of those beggars. If so, what is their mode of denial?

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: Stephen L. Brown, April 3, 2009

I find a lot of your speculations fascinating. As you point out, there may be data supporting or rebutting some of them. But we have moved a considerable distance from my field of risk communication (where I do try to keep up with the research), so I’m not much help figuring out where you’re on target, where you’re off-base, and where you’re advancing a new thought. I’ll confine my response, therefore, to four of the many questions you raise – the four where I have, if not data, at least a strongly felt speculation of my own.

Feeling bad about nonfeasance

Whether we call it guilt or remorse (it’s more than mere regret), the point is that many people do feel bad about global warming – not just about the problem, but about their failure to do as much as they think they should in response. The guilt/remorse is attached to the nonfeasance. Moreover, at least some people, some of the time, feel more guilt/remorse than they can comfortably bear. So they go into denial. I don’t know how many people feel guilty about not doing enough to address global warming, and how many are in denial in order not to feel guilty. But I suspect both numbers are climbing.

“Guilt” accurately describes some of what I feel when I contemplate my own consumptive lifestyle and my carbon footprint. And perhaps “denial” explains why I don’t contemplate those things too often. Denial may also account for why I haven’t done more volunteer work on climate change risk communication – a failure that also arouses some guilt when I let myself think about it. And what about all those books and articles on global warming that I keep not reading? I can make a case that they’re boring, but at least part of the truth is that they’re guilt-inducing, and that I’d rather feel momentarily guilty because I didn’t read them than feel perpetually guilty because of what they taught me.

So I think global warming guilt and denial to avoid global warming guilt are probably focused not on the past, but on the present and future. Caring without acting makes people feel guilty; feeling guilty makes people want not to care.

We’re all Cassandras; we’re all Pollyannas

It is well established, I think, that most people tend to be Cassandras about some kinds of risks and Pollyannas about others. I wrote the following paragraph in a 1994 encyclopedia entry on “Risk Communication”:

Risk-aversion, risk-tolerance, and risk-seeking are often assumed to be enduring traits of character (in individuals and in cultures), but the variations are more impressive than the consistencies. There is no great surprise in encountering a sky-diver who is terrified of spiders. Concern about personal risks (like cholesterol) shows only modest correlations with concern about societal risks (like industrial effluent). When the domain of “risk” is extended even further, the correlations may disappear or even reverse. Quite different groups lead the way in concern about environmental risks (global warming, toxic waste dumps), economic risks (recession, unemployment), and social risks (family values, violent crime). Cultural theories of risk try to make sense of these patterns; one such theory attributes them to distinctions among hierarchical, entrepreneurial, and egalitarian cultural values. Depending on the hazard under discussion, in short, we are all both over- and under-responders to risk.

In a June 2008 Guestbook response, I made the same point in a more personal way, noting that in the environmental realm I find it easier than most people to shrug off the “outrage” component of a risk and focus on its “hazard” component – and thus to accept expert reassurances that a low-hazard high-outrage risk isn’t worth worrying about. But not in some other realms:

For health and environmental risks, I usually … decide where most of the experts stand – and that’s where I stand too…. I am unusual – statistically weird – in that I find this fairly easy to do. Most people are more responsive to a risk’s outrage than I am. And most people are less comfortable than I am playing the odds – that is, relying on the mainstream experts while knowing that once in a while they’ll be mistaken or dishonest. My atypical risk response is probably why I became interested in risk perception and risk communication issues in the first place.

That’s for health and environmental risks. In other risk venues I am oversensitive to outrage and totally impervious to expert reassurance. For example, I avoid situations that pose a high risk (in my mind) of social embarrassment – sports and dancing come immediately to mind – even though I know the real hazard to my reputation or self-esteem is very low.

At least in the U.S., the evidence is solid that the political left tends toward global warming alarmism, while the right tends toward global warming skepticism. You have pointed out some of the political values that may account for this relationship, including attitudes toward the free market, capitalism and profit, big government, consumerism, etc. More broadly, I think the right tends to be Cassandra-like about the risks of social interventions (believing that societies are fragile and vulnerable to the unanticipated consequences of social engineering) and Pollyanna-like about the risks of technological interventions (believing that ecosystems are robust and that any unanticipated consequences can be dealt with when they arise). The left has the opposite tendencies. More broadly still, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky developed their “Cultural Theory” of risk (referenced briefly in the excerpt from my encyclopedia entry) in a 1982 book entitled Risk and Culture that you might find interesting.

Some of this is more a result of historical accident than of fundamental values. It’s not obvious to me, for example, why the left cares more about polar bears than the right, while the right cares more about fetuses than the left. But it is perfectly obvious that most people know which side they’re on. Our decisions to take action on behalf of polar bears or fetuses are at least as influenced by constituency loyalties as by underlying values – and more influenced by either than by scientific data.

How common is global warming denial?

You ask whether I have observational data showing that people, and how many people, are in denial about climate change.

I haven’t got any persuasive proof I’ve been holding in reserve, waiting to spring it on people who doubt my denial hypothesis. As I say in the column/essay, the best indicator of denial is a paradoxical response to evidence and argument: When information that usually makes people more concerned about a risk seems to be making someone less concerned instead, it’s a good bet that denial is at work. That happens often enough with regard to global warming to make me think that climate change denial is a phenomenon that matters. But no, I haven’t got anything resembling definitive proof, much less a quantitative estimate. The evidence of climate change denial is considerably weaker than the evidence of climate change.

People on both sides of the climate change debate have written to tell me they find my hypothesis unconvincing. Global warming activists naturally tend to get a bit defensive about my charge that they’re pushing people away by fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, ignoring technological solutions, ignoring adaptation, and the rest. Global warming opponents tend to get equally defensive about my suggestion that they might have been pushed away by these things – that their opposition could be grounded more in psychodynamics than in intellectual conviction.

So are they evincing “denial denial”? Are global warming opponents running from the idea that they’re in denial, and global warming activists running from the idea that they’re exacerbating denial, because these ideas arouse cognitive dissonance and/or intolerable emotion? Conceivably. But I can’t prove that either. The paucity of my evidence certainly constitutes grounds for “denial skepticism.”

You also wonder how often I think global warming denial results from intolerable emotion versus cognitive dissonance. Your hypothesis is that dissonance would be the likelier of the two causes; you think climate change isn’t certain enough or imminent enough to arouse feelings so strong they have to be denied. I suspect both causes are common – that’s why I discussed them in such detail – but once again I have no data. It’s worth noting, but far from definitive, that several of the messaging sins I accuse climate change activists of committing (fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, etc.) are more directly relevant to the emotional causes of denial than to its cognitive causes.

How important is the “A” in “AGW”?

The speculation in your email that I found most fascinating was that climate change activists and their opponents might well switch sides if it became clear that climate change was natural rather than anthropogenic. (We’ll leave aside the question of whether people are part of nature.) It’s fun to imagine the right urging a massive Manhattan Project effort to refashion the world to our liking, while lefty environmentalists insist that it’s wrong to meddle in natural processes. Alternatively, you suggest that without humans to blame the climate change issue would be minor, like the threat of as asteroid collision and the decline of the frog population.

In my column/essay, by contrast, I called the fight over whether global warming is anthropogenic “stupid.” I argued that what matters is whether we can solve the problem, not whether we caused it.

It is certainly true that in order for a problem to become high-profile, a case needs to be built that people ought to take action on that problem. Without things to do and reasons to do them, apathy is the rational response. And yes, showing that the problem is anthropogenic is one way to build the case for action: “You broke it. You fix it!”

But there are other ways to build the case that action isn’t just feasible but called for, perhaps even ethically obligatory. The case for intervening to stop genocide, for example, isn’t grounded in blame. Neither is the case for rushing to the aid of earthquake victims. Yet people do feel these obligations – many people feel them strongly enough to take action, and many others feel them strongly enough to experience denial.

In risk communication, the distinction between “natural” and “industrial” is on every list of the dimensions that determine whether people over- or under-react to a risk. It’s much easier to get your audience worried and involved if you’ve got somebody for your audience to blame. But risk communication doesn’t teach that it’s good strategy to blame your audience itself. To the contrary, anger is a demonstrably stronger motivator than guilt (or remorse, if you wish). Activists are thus on stronger strategic grounds when they blame multinational corporations for global warming than when they blame human overconsumption. A blanket indictment of overconsumption works best on the minority who consider themselves anti-consumption exceptions, who experience the indictment as a reason for anger, not for guilt.

It is easiest to motivate action with a third party to blame. Which comes in second, nobody to blame or only your audience to blame? I’m not sure, but I think I’ll go for nobody. Blaming your audience is asking for denial.

The main problem with asteroid collisions as an issue, I think, isn’t that there’s nobody to blame; it is that the issue is extremely abstract. When astronomers can tell us that a particular asteroid is headed our way – complete with a touchdown location, an arrival date not too many years off, and a color photo of the asteroid – people will take interest, just as they do in the disaster movies you mention. Excessive abstraction was the main problem with global warming too, until polar bears, melting icecaps, and the like came to our rescue. It is still the main problem with global warming for many who remain apathetic. But today lots of people experience climate change as real and emotionally compelling, which helps them get involved – while others (I believe) experience it as so real and so emotionally compelling they can’t bear it and retreat into denial.

Asteroids are too abstract for just about everybody. Global warming is still too abstract for some. It is too upsetting for others, and “just right” for still others.

What about your second example, frogs? The only time the decline in amphibian populations has looked like it might become a top-tier controversy was in the 1990s, when some environmentalists suggested that pesticides and other industrial chemicals contained “endocrine disruptors” that threatened irreversible damage in all animal species including humans; frogs were just the canaries in the mine. The sexual implications of the endocrine disruption story were especially compelling, featuring frogs with stunted penises and humans with declining sperm counts. As I mention briefly in my column/essay, both the environmental movement and the chemical industry expected the endocrine disruption issue to rise to the top of the charts. It hasn’t (at least so far) – a fact I attribute to denial. The chemical industry was a terrific villain to blame, but the story was simply too terrifying to think about.

But you’re right: When the endocrine disruption hypothesis went out of favor (at least so far), the decline of the amphibian population lost its shot at the big time. Frogs aren’t as photogenic or conceptually cuddly as polar bears (though in practice they are safer to cuddle). There is no longer an obvious human villain to blame; pesticides, habitat disruption, and even climate change are all contributors to the problem, but the principal culprit appears to be a parasite. Perhaps most important, as you point out, it’s not clear just what action we can take to Save the Frog. Without anyone to cuddle, anyone to blame, or anything to do, the prognosis for amphibians is grim. I don’t see any denial problem here, just apathy.

From: Stephen L. Brown

To: Peter M. Sandman, April 10, 2009

Here I go again, still finding that your responses both enlighten and stimulate more thoughts. You are welcome to stray out of the psychology/communications realm as much as I intrude into it. I think my only formal education in psychology was a survey course taught by Ernest Hilgard in maybe 1955. However, I do know Baruch Fischhoff and Paul Slovic and have read some of their stuff, including doing a review of one of Paul’s books.

I transitioned from a physics education to risk assessment via speculating about the consequences of nuclear war before anyone had defined risk assessment as an occupation. Now, in retirement, I find myself especially interested in how people process information (and disinformation) about risk. I also am fascinated by nuances in language, as you may have surmised, and by questions of philosophy.

Nonfeasance

So I start with your use of “nonfeasance” in connection with AGW guilt.

Usually, nonfeasance is restricted to official duties or legal requirements, which suggests to me that you are talking about guilt related to a failure to perform a duty. I suppose you mean a duty to protect other people and the non-human environment, whether or not at the expense of one’s own wellbeing. Presumably, sociopaths are at one end of a spectrum of concern for others, while Mother Teresa types are at the other. Most of us therefore find the selfishness of a sociopath morally repugnant, but can scarce believe the selflessness of the other extreme. Just how far along that spectrum we lie probably determines what degree of selfishness we see as immoral and how much duty we feel to do the right thing. Both of course depend on our belief that our actions or our inaction will lead to bad consequences for others, which in turn requires us to believe both in a scenario of harm and in our ability to influence it to some degree.

So I would hypothesize that denial via guilt affects most the people who are most selfless, not the ones found more often on the political right. By contrast, denial via cognitive dissonance could occur if one believed that the scenario would be bad for oneself but did nothing about it.

Belief

A digression on belief. I often use that word to describe what I think to be true and useful in directing my decisions. While I agree with you that objective truth exists outside my belief system, I also think that nobody knows the whole truth about anything and must make his way through belief. We are all to some extent blind men feeling the elephant.

In my world, belief is also graded. I believe very strongly in the laws of physics, probably due at least in part to my education. I might say that I am 99.999+ percent sure that the laws governing electricity and magnetism are true. I said on RISKANAL back in 2006 that I would give global warming 99 percent and AGW 95 percent but that I was completely uncertain (50 percent) “whether the net consequences outweigh the net costs of intervention.” I suppose if these subjective probabilities are above 50 percent, I am a believer. Note that my beliefs can change as new information comes to my attention. When I first heard about continental drift (now known as plate tectonics), I didn’t believe it (p < 20 percent). Now I do (p > 99 percent). Like you, I often rely on the current balance of opinion from experts, but I also test the assertion against my own set of observations and against theoretical considerations. For example, I’m a doubter that statins should be routinely prescribed to protect against cardiovascular disease, although it is my sense that a preponderance of the experts lean that way.

Sensitivity

You write: “I avoid situations that pose a high risk (in my mind) of social embarrassment – sports and dancing come immediately to mind – even though I know the real hazard to my reputation or self-esteem is very low.” We need to get you into a twelve-step program to work on your dancing issues. Or maybe find some data demonstrating that your dancing does indeed suck.

But seriously, folks, I found your discussion of Pollyannas and Cassandras enlightening and on-point.

The Human element and outrage

After I sent my last harangue, I started to expect that you would respond by bringing up the issue of outrage, which plays a prominent place on your website. In retrospect, it seems obvious that outrage isn’t directed to anything but humans (or at least shouldn’t be, even though I am frequently angered by the perversity of inanimate objects). So I went and read a few of your paragraphs on outrage posted on your website.

If I understand you correctly, the danger from a hazard perceived by an individual is amplified if that person can generate some outrage toward someone or someones identified as causative. You actually write RISK = HAZARD + OUTRAGE. I assume you don’t mean this in any literal sense, as you would have a problem with units. I think you mean something like this: Methyl ethyl chickenwire (MEC) as presently used is estimated by risk assessors (with admittedly crude tools) to cause about 10 cancer deaths per year in the United States. Lightning causes perhaps 80–90 deaths per year, yet a lot of people are more concerned about MEC than about lightning and would vote to regulate MEC but not to spend money on research regarding personal lightning rods. Or maybe it just means that those folks want to punish the profiteers at MEC Inc. via the regulations, and don’t have anyone to punish for the lightning deaths. (I remember reading once that people don’t necessarily think that the risk assessors are wrong, they just see the putatively avoidable deaths from MEC as worse than the natural, understandable deaths from lightning.)

In your response to my earlier piece, you said, “Alternatively, you suggest that without humans to blame the climate change issue would be minor, like the threat of an asteroid collision and the decline of the frog population.”

Just to clarify, I didn’t use the word “minor,” although I was asserting that the public perception of AGW dangers wouldn’t be as great if the warming weren’t seen as anthropogenic. Using the outrage equation metaphor, the hazards of AGW, asteroid impact, and amphibian extinction might be roughly equivalent, but the outrage is zero for the asteroids and low for the amphibians. (Note: American risk assessors use “hazard” differently than I think you do in the equation.) No, I don’t have access to the oracle that knows the true consequences of those three hazards, so I’m just hypothesizing the equivalence.

Asteroid impact

I was struck by your use of the word “abstract” in connection with asteroid impact. I’m not sure which usage you were employing, but I want to emphasize that to me, it is less abstract than AGW in the following sense.

The Tunguska event was almost surely caused by an object from space; whether one calls it an asteroid or a meteorite is really not important. If it had landed in the middle of New York City, it would likely have caused a death toll that would have made the twin towers look trivial. And it happened only 100 years ago. The K-T event was 60 million years ago, but was much larger and led to mass extinctions much beyond those projected for AGW. A reasonably large space object hit earth last year, and there was a near miss only a few weeks ago. NASA probably has photos of that one. I doubt if there are any astronomers that discount the possibility or severity of a big impact. It is true that we don’t have enough data to form a very precise estimate of the probability of a major impact in the next century, but I am confident that if humanity survives long enough, it will have to deal with this issue or die. That doesn’t mean that I am personally an asteroid activist. It is one of those low-probability high-consequence hazards that basically get discounted to the point of inaction because of the time scale.

Actuarial risk estimates versus model-driven risk estimates

Another aside. Asteroid impact is like lightning strikes and automobile accidents to a risk assessor because they are all actuarial risks. At least in principle, we can use data on the frequency of past events to predict the risk of future events. We can with high confidence say that there will be about 45,000 motor vehicle fatalities next year. By contrast, predicting the number of cancer deaths from MEC is completely model-driven, because (in my hypothetical example), a cancer caused by MEC can’t be distinguished from one caused by something else, so there is no observational basis for an actuarial analysis.

AGW is somewhere in between. It is a one-off event with no actuarial data to use, and all of the predictions of future harm are essentially model-driven (climate models plus various theory-driven extrapolations of consequences). But we do have actual temperature records and lots of evidence that something is going on – glaciers and sea ice disappearing, trees blooming earlier, ecological changes and extreme weather events that may or may not be the result of the warming trend. The folks who are truly AGW denialists seize on the model issue as a reason to disbelieve the predictions, arguing that the models have not been sufficiently validated, and so on. Often they are the same people who have no trouble accepting an economic model with assumptions that haven’t been evaluated, à la the financial meltdown. In reality, I think everyone relies on models to direct their choices, whether those models be quantitative or conceptual. As George Box said, all models are wrong but some are useful.

Endocrine disruptors

We seem to agree that the amphibian issue, however large the true hazard, hasn’t been amplified as much by outrage as AGW and other hazards that are easily blamed on humans in general and corporations in particular. I also acknowledge the psychological importance of charismatic megafauna (polar bears) on the value side of the equation. Most of us just find ourselves caring more about the bears than the frogs, even though the latter may be more important for the stability of the ecosystem. And because it is the humans that make the decisions, it is our value structure that ultimately determines what we do.

You noted that the amphibian collapse was thought by some in the 1990s to be caused by industrial chemicals that were “endocrine disruptors,” and you went on to speculate that the reason this concern fell out of favor was denial triggered by the overwhelming fear of what they might mean for humans as well. My speculation is different. Although I served on a committee with Theo Colborn and found her a fine person and exceptionally sincere in her beliefs about these chemicals, I was never persuaded, for a couple of reasons. One was that there wasn’t a majority of biologists climbing on board the bandwagon – in your way of thinking, no expert flow to go with.

Second, a lot of it just didn’t fit with my mental model of how things work. Lack of a dose-response relationship, for example. No explanation why massive intake of phytoestrogens was OK. I, an admitted non-biologist, said more about this in my RISKANAL comments on bisphenol A. So my take is that the issue subsided (but obviously hasn’t gone away) because it is more like homeopathic medicine than like DDT and raptor eggs. But maybe I’m just in denial, too.

Now I want to touch on a couple of items that aren’t directly in the thread of our discussions, but popped into my mind because of something that was.

How to manage hazards amplified by outrage

I’ll introduce this by talking about how decision analysts (often also Friedman economics devotees) approach the whole issue of responses to alleged hazards. The basic idea is to try to estimate the probabilities of various outcomes from some hazard, assign values to them (usually in monetary units), estimate the costs and effectiveness of various proposed remedies in the same units, consider the influence of uncertainties in all of the preceding, and take into account risk preferences (e.g., how much more do we want to avoid a catastrophic loss than a number of smaller losses adding up to the same value).

When you see things in this light, the best decision is the one that minimizes expected economic loss or maximizes expected economic gain within the constraints of risk preferences. Of course, a key question is gain or loss to whom. When decision analysts do the work for a corporation, it is usually its interests than dominate. When it is for the USEPA, it is supposed to be for the public interest, some aggregate of the interests of all the U.S. population. Although decision analysts will usually admit that their models may turn out to be incorrect, they rely on the assumption that errors will tend to even out if there are no persistent biases in the assumptions and methods. This kind of thinking leads people like Tony Cox to decry “concern-based regulation” that devotes resources more or less in proportion to what you call outrage instead of in proportion to what you call hazard. In other words, Tony more or less rejects the outrage portion of your equation. (I may be misreading Tony entirely. If so, I apologize.)

I tend to agree with Tony that including outrage leads to bad decisions in the sense that the usual measures of gain and loss (e.g., lives saved vs. dollars spent on mitigation) are distorted by considering outrage. If we increase the price of apples because of concerns about Alar, and Alar turns out to cause virtually no harm to kids eating Alar-treated apples, then we have decreased society’s welfare, not increased it. You don’t have to have a selfish profit motive to want to avoid that outcome, or to want society’s resources to be applied where they will have the most bang for the buck.

On the other hand, I also recognize that there is value in reducing outrage and fear. If a lot of people think Alar might be very bad and are angry with the manufacturer, then banning it might be of some value to their senses of security and justice. Decision analysts would find it difficult to deal with this aspect of decision-making because it is not clear how to monetize outrage.

Maybe here is the place where your specialty of risk communication can do a lot of good. Find ways to reduce the outrage component without distorting the cost-effective application of resources to the worst hazards. I don’t mean just trying to convince people that their outrage is somewhat counterproductive. Perhaps there are ways to punish the perps and reduce fear without significant damage to the efficient allocation of resources.

Normative versus descriptive

If I’m correctly diagnosing the motives of Tony Cox and others like me who are suspicious of concern-based regulation, we share a feeling that the government (and people in general) should focus on the “actual” risks (hazard, in your equation) and discount the outrage component. This position is normative – how we would like things to be. But clearly it is not descriptive. People do feel outrage, and directly or indirectly through the government include its consideration in decision-making. We suspicious ones feel frustrated that the public does not see the superiority of our normative position.

Picking up on your “symmetry” arguments, the liberal environmental activists also hold normative positions that are not congruent with the descriptive picture of society. They tend to think that people should be more concerned about the environment (whatever that means to each one) and less about their own welfare. Corporations should provide products and services that are free of hazard and be unconcerned about profit. Presumably, they are also frustrated when those things don’t happen.

I have a hunch that these folks are more likely to hold a normative position that is unrealistic, but that may be just my cognitive dissonance kicking in. Clearly we have been able to move closer to some liberal normative positions like “we all should be color-blind” in spite of what I guess to be an evolutionary xenophobia that hasn’t entirely been lost.

(Random thought: Are the creationist/intelligent design folks in denial about evolution because it threatens their mental model of God?)

I’ll close this missive with what I call the normative fallacy. It occurs when someone cannot perceive that the descriptive does not conform with his normative. He then starts to believe that his normative is the descriptive.

Again we have some symmetry. The doctrinaire libertarian’s normative position is that the unfettered invisible hand of the free market should create the greatest good for the greatest number. (Wow, Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith!) When confronted with the descriptive reality that the market doesn’t work out as well when there are externalities, unequal access to information, etc., he starts seizing on anecdotes to prove that it does and blames any failure of the market on its not being free enough. On the liberal side, I couldn’t immediately come up with an environmental example. I’m pretty sure that our founding fathers meant “All men are created equal” to be a normative position, while some of the current crop of social activists seem intent on rejecting any information suggesting that it is not descriptive.

I think you can tell that I enjoy this exchange, but I will not pout if it withers.

From: Peter M. Sandman

To: Stephen L. Brown, April 11, 2009

I’m going to let it wither, at least for now – not for lack of interest but for lack of time. But I did want to respond first to your closely connected final two sections.

We clearly agree that outrage does in fact influence risk management decision-making, both by individuals and by societies. We share the same descriptive judgment. But we have different normative judgments about the proper role of outrage. Let me quote from the same 2008 Guestbook answer I quoted on a different point earlier in this dialogue:

This emphasis on outrage rather than just hazard isn’t foolish. It reflects our shared understanding that outrage matters. We want to live in a world where we decide for ourselves which risks to accept; where we don’t have to endure the anxiety of facing highly dreaded risks; where institutions behave morally, tell the truth, and are responsive to our concerns. These outrage components – voluntariness, dread, moral relevance, trustworthiness, and responsiveness – are not alien, Martian values. They are our values. By making these values part of what we mean by risk, we are insisting that society take these values seriously in its decisions about risk policy and risk management.

My Guestbook answer goes on to give a hypothetical example I use often:

Imagine that every ten years or so a sniper climbs up onto an overpass with a high-powered rifle and shoots and kills a passing motorist. Then he’s good for another decade. Finally, after 30 years and three deaths, he is caught and brought to trial. Here’s his defense: “During the 30 years during which I shot and killed three passing motorists, thousands of people died on our nation’s highways as a result of drunk driving, not wearing their seatbelts, poor highway design, and poor automotive design. Sniping is an infinitesimal part of the highway death toll. In picking on me, a mere sniper, the government is distorting the public’s understanding of the real priorities of highway safety. The money the government is spending catching me, trying me, and imprisoning me could save far more lives if the government made the rational risk management decision to let me continue killing a mere one person per decade, and reallocated the money to repainting the lane markers on highways.”

My hypothetical sniper is right on the data. Nonetheless, no jury would vote to acquit. Even after they study the data, normal people support spending more money per life saved catching and punishing snipers than repainting lane markers.

I believe that outrage plays a legitimate role in risk decision-making, and that concern-based regulation is therefore legitimate as well.

Nonetheless, I share your judgment (and Tony Cox’s judgment – and the judgment of many of my clients) that concern-based regulation misallocates resources to insignificant hazards, and thus costs lives. I would rather see resources misallocated than see people’s outrage flouted or ignored; if there are no alternatives, resource misallocation is not too high a price to pay for democratic responsiveness.

But there are alternatives. One of the main things I do as a consultant is try to help my clients reduce technically unjustified outrage by acting more decently. That breaks a vicious cycle whereby stakeholders mistakenly think a hazard is serious because the company is acting like a jerk, and the company feels entitled to act like a jerk because the hazard isn’t serious. “Stop acting like a jerk,” I tell my clients. “Listen to people’s concerns. Apologize for mistakes. Tell the truth about emissions. Share control over decisions. Share credit for improvements. As your stakeholders’ outrage declines, their inclination to overestimate the hazard will decline with it.”

I think this is what you were asking for when you suggested that risk communication could “find ways to reduce the outrage component without distorting the cost-effective application of resources to the worst hazards.” As I end almost every seminar on outrage management:

The proper response to a serious hazard is to fix the hazard. The proper response to a serious outrage isn’t to ignore it, and isn’t to fix the hazard. It is to fix the outrage. Don’t expect a vapor recovery system to make people less angry and upset, any more than you would expect an apology to make people less endangered.

In the natural history of most risk controversies, industry and government start out by ignoring public outrage about a small hazard – which reliably exacerbates the outrage. Then they marshal hazard date to prove that people are foolish to get so upset – which reliably exacerbates the outrage. Then they question the motives underlying people’s complaints – which reliably exacerbates the outrage. Finally, having exhausted all the remedies they can think of, they reluctantly and resentfully take steps to reduce the small hazard. And then they blame this misallocation of resources on the public’s outrage … instead of attributing it to their own failure to address the outrage in the first place.

For more guidance on better ways than hazard reduction for addressing outrage, let me refer you to the columns, articles, and Guestbook entries listed in my Outrage Management Index.

What do I think regulators should do about low-hazard, high-outrage risks when all efforts to address the outrage have so far failed? In extremis, does over-managing the hazard help get the outrage under control? And if so, is it worth it? I grapple with these thorny questions in a long essay entitled “Because People Are Concerned: How Should Public ‘Outrage’ Affect Application of the Precautionary Principle?” You may enjoy it.

But what’s crucial to understand, I think, is that this problem would arise far less often if companies and agencies took outrage management seriously. Concern-based regulation isn’t the optimal response to technically unjustified concern. It’s a better response than indifference or contemptuous “education” of the concerned public – but the optimal response is what I call outrage management.

From: Stephen L. Brown

To:Peter M. Sandman, April 16, 2009

I've decided to fling out one more set of thoughts before I (probably) will let it wither, too, even though I was surprised how many different ideas cropped up after reading your latest response.

You hit it on the button when you said we have different normative judgments about the proper role of outrage. After boring down through layers of factual observations, theories to fit them, interpretations of data, and so on, it is so often the case that any residual arguments are about normative positions and values.

A couple of thoughts here.

First, I'd like to probe your judgment that the emphasis on outrage rather than hazard is legitimate. I now remember reading some of these thoughts before, whether directly attributable to you or from other sources. I think I had more reservations then than now after this exchange, but I still have some.

You seem to have two lines of thought here.

Outrage as a motivator of deserved punishment

One is that outrage is justified by the misbehavior of companies, so punishment is required. At least that is what I inferred from the sniper example, which in itself is congruent with my moral sense. However, it also seemed to me to imply that you equated the behavior of the sniper with the behavior of corporations regarding risk issues – that you put them at the same level of immorality. I’m guessing you really did not intend to do so, as the sniper is clearly shooting with the intent of doing harm, whereas I doubt that even the worst industrial villains have such an intent. Furthermore, in my experience, the natural history of a risk controversy starts out with an allegation of harm which the alleged perpetrator does not recognize to be true even when it is.

Note: I do not object to using a simplified example – even a reductio ad absurdum – to illustrate a point. In fact, I like to do so myself, because I think it helps both me and the listener clarify some issues. In this case, it illustrates that we all have a suite of values, some of which are in conflict (at least in specific cases) with others. Here, our desire for justice trumps our desire to use human resources efficiently.

So a better metaphor for the early stage may be a hunter who shoots deer to keep them from overpopulating an area; he also sells the venison. Someone who is already angry with the hunter because he killed Bambi’s Dad alleges that once every ten years, one of his bullets strays and kills someone. He asks for proof. If the accuser finds a body with a bullet that ballistics evidence shows is from his gun, and the hunter keeps on firing in the same old way, then yeah, there’s reason for outrage and a response that doesn’t optimize hazard reduction efficiency.

Suppose that instead the accuser can’t come up with such actuarial proof but instead offers a model of statistical errors in aiming and estimates of the frequency that people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think it would be the rare hunter who would immediately say, “Okay, I see what you’re saying. I’ll stop.” Instead, he might hire a consultant to examine the model for deficiencies, of which there will almost surely be some. Because the hunter doesn’t want to think of himself as a bad person, he tends to believe the consultant, not the accuser, and continues hunting.

The accuser’s outrage gets amplified because she thinks the original model is OK. So she starts looking for other evidence to support her suspicions, and in almost every case can find something, even if she has to ignore some evidence to the contrary. If the allegation was indeed correct, the weight of evidence will start shifting against the hunter. He will probably still resist accepting the findings, partly because he wants to continue hunting and partly through denial based on guilt or cognitive dissonance. It is about here that I think outrage becomes clearly justified. If the hunter goes on to mount a disinformation campaign (as seems to have happened in a few instances like the tobacco companies), punishment is clearly justified.

What I’m worried about here is that the degree of outrage seems often to be incommensurate with the degree of misdeed. A finding of manslaughter because of negligence is not the same as a finding of first degree murder because of premeditation. I think that environmental fervor can blur such distinctions, and keep people from recognizing that the activities they find objectionable also produce benefits (venison, herd thinning) that are widely shared in society. Perhaps you have had more opportunities to see sniper morality in corporate executives than have I. (Interesting that the outrage seems rarely to be directed to specific individuals but instead to some sinister THEY who run the corporations.) I realize that I may have completely misunderstood you here, but if so, you might consider reworking your sniper example.

Outrage as a social evil to be mitigated for its own sake

Your other line of thought I find easier to accept. I think you are suggesting that the resources devoted to fixing the hazard should be commensurate with the magnitude of the hazard, but that we also need to devote resources to fixing the outrage. That’s a point that I seem to have missed earlier and that now makes sense. I am reasonably comfortable with the idea that corporations and government should both try to be more understanding of public outrage and to manage it with the objective of reducing it to levels appropriate to the degree of harm and moral turpitude involved. I would only suggest that there is some symmetry here too; the concerned public needs to understand better that companies are not as single-mindedly profit-seeking as is generally believed, that it is not possible to recognize every unintended consequence and fix it appropriately, and that most (not all!) corporate executives think they are behaving ethically and providing society with value that vastly outweighs the costs of those unintended consequences. Because you talk about the ineffectiveness of guilt trip messages in risk communication, you probably have already said something to this effect, but I haven’t stumbled across it.

My other thought is still incubating and entails speculations about communication that you have probably already mulled over somewhere. It seems to me plausible that communication designed to get people to know one another better would help in reducing outrage. If the environmental activists can come to understand that the motives of “polluters” are not intrinsically evil, and if (as you emphasize) industry can recognize where outrage comes from and when it is (at least with respect to some moral codes) justified, then it might be easier to come to a compromise on which problems are too small to bother with, which should be addressed by balancing costs and benefits, and which are so severe as to require a ban or voluntary suspension of activities. (Curious how the connotation of “pollution” differs from that of “emissions” or “residuals,” etc.)

But I’m also wondering whether that hypothesis is true. When you get to know someone (of whom you are initially suspicious) really well, can you actually find more faults to confirm your suspicions? When you get down to the values level, do you find that you and the other person value physical goods, justice, equity, freedom, etc. vastly differently, enough so to be even angrier with that person? Maybe it’s situation-dependent.

Again, I’m in an area where my store of data is small. The only personal observation supporting the pessimistic hypothesis is a perception that communication via blogs and similar threads of conversation (like this one) is leading us to more political polarization, not less. My libertarian friend seems to be getting most of his “information” from the right-wing fringe, and seems to be becoming more likely to hold positions that I find extreme, simply because their rhetoric reinforces his existing tilt. My most liberal friends seem to gravitate toward Mother Jones and similar sources, which I also find unconvincing. (Disclosure: I think of myself as moderate or independent politically. I almost always vote Democratic and had no problem in voting for Obama, but I wouldn't consider voting for Ralph Nader.) Maybe my Mother’s caution never to discuss politics or religion with anyone you wanted to keep as a friend was right on. Or maybe I’m confusing communication with propaganda.

I’m not expecting a reply to any of these latest thoughts, although you are certainly welcome to respond. If you do, I hope I can suppress any desire to have the last word. It certainly is not necessary to add any of this to your website, although you have my permission to do so.

I'm not sure why I was so motivated to have this conversation. I suppose I have some hubris in thinking that I might have some insights that would actually improve the functioning of our society in the areas of discussion. However, I realize that even getting them onto your site will probably not reach very many people. But the conversation has at least allowed me to sharpen some of the arguments that usually just circulate around my own brain as some kind of fugue, something that might not have happened without an actual person on the other end.

Worst Case Scenarios

by Peter M. Sandman

Your doctor says you have a suspicious looking lump and she wants to run some tests. Your plumber says he’s not sure how much wall he’ll have to take down to find and fix that leak. Your boss says there may be more layoffs on the way.

Only time will tell how bad these pieces of bad news really are. While you endure the uncertainty, there is a key question you may or may not want to ask: “What’s the worst that can happen?”

What determines whether you want to know the worst case scenario? Part of the answer is utilitarian – whether there are decisions you need to make or actions you need to take to prepare for the worst. Do you need to spruce up your résumé in case you’re laid off, or look for a loan to pay the plumbing bill, or (the true worst case) put your affairs in order? But there’s also an emotional and characterological side to the answer. If the issue isn’t especially emotional for you, you’ll probably want to know the worst case. But if you’re pretty frightened already, you may not want to know; you may not want to have an all-too-vivid image of pending disaster to live with. Or you may be living with vivid images already; you may figure the truth can’t be worse than your imaginings; you may want to prepare yourself mentally for what might (or might not) be on the way.

And what if the worst case is extremely unlikely? It probably won’t happen anyway. Does that make you less afraid of knowing … or less interested in knowing?

Now put yourself in the shoes of your doctor, plumber, or boss. Should s/he tell you the worst case scenario whether you want to know or not? Wait for you to ask? Raise the issue proactively and ask if you want to know? Decline to tell you even if you ask? Tell you, but in language so technical and unemotional you don’t realize how bad it could be?

Not complicated enough? Add some more factors:

• Maybe the source of the information is also the source of the problem – it’s not your doctor, plumber, or boss, but the management of a nearby factory telling you how bad the emissions might get.
• Maybe your information source is the government agency responsible for fixing the problem or preventing the worst case – and the agency hasn’t decided yet what to try.
• Maybe you’re already outraged that the problem exists in the first place.
• Maybe you don’t trust the information you’re getting anyway.
• Maybe the source already has a reputation for pooh-poohing serious risks – or, conversely, for exaggerating trivial ones.
• Maybe good answers simply aren’t available. Maybe how bad the worst case scenario might get and how likely it is are both hotly debated guesstimates.

Communicating about worst case scenarios, in short, is a can of worms. But wait! It gets worse.

Worst case scenarios are one of relatively few risk communication challenges that apply to all kinds of risk communication. I distinguish risk communication situations according to how serious the risk is technically (“hazard”) and how frightened, angry, or otherwise upset people are (“outrage”). If you conceptualize the worst case scenario problem as coping with unnecessarily fearful people fixated on vanishingly unlikely possibilities, it’s a problem of outrage management (low hazard, high outrage). If you conceptualize the problem as helping rightly fearful people keep their fears in perspective as they climb the ladder from normal conditions to what may turn into a real emergency, it’s a problem of crisis communication, or at least pre-crisis communication (high hazard, high outrage). And if you conceptualize the problem as alerting unduly apathetic people to possible catastrophes in time to take preventive action, it’s a problem of precaution advocacy (high hazard, low outrage).

When Monsanto tries to decide whether or not to mention the remote possibility that genetically modified corn could precipitate an eco-catastrophe; when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security notches its terrorism index from yellow to orange and tries to explain why; when Greenpeace warns that global warming might someday inundate the world’s coastal cities and island nations with seawater; when your local factory talks about what’s stored on site that could explode or your local health department talks about an infectious disease outbreak that could turn into an epidemic … they are all addressing the complex dilemma of how to communicate about worst case scenarios.

Magnitude versus Probability: The Tradeoff and the Seesaw

As traditionally defined, risk is the product of two factors: magnitude (also called consequence, how bad it is when it happens) multiplied by probability (or frequency, how likely it is or how often it happens).

In mathematics, of course, it doesn’t matter whether you multiply a big number by a small number or a small number by a big number. You get the same answer. Mathematically, high-magnitude low-probability risks and low-magnitude high-probability risks are equivalent. Consider a technology that has one chance in a million of killing ten million people. The “expected” number of deaths from this technology is 10. That is, it has the same risk as another technology with one chance in a thousand of killing ten thousand people, or a technology with one chance in ten of killing a hundred people, or one that’s absolutely certain to kill ten people. They all have an “expected mortality” of ten. From a technical perspective, they are equal risks.

If you think like a mathematician, in other words, you are equally concerned about a one-in-a-million chance of killing ten million people and the sure death of ten people. But no one, not even mathematicians, thinks like a mathematician. Normal people figure a technology with one chance in a million of killing ten million people will probably kill nobody but just might kill ten million people. The number ten has nothing to do with it!

Worst case scenarios are by definition high-magnitude risks; they’re the worst thing that can happen. They are almost always low-probability – the worst that can happen doesn’t happen very often. So they are mathematically equivalent but not “humanly” equivalent to alternative scenarios that are not so bad but a good deal more likely.

So which is “humanly worse,” the improbable worst case scenario or the likelier not-so-bad scenario? It depends.

In particular, it depends on which of the two characteristics of the worst case scenario people are thinking about, its (high) magnitude or its (low) probability. Conceptually, there is nothing incompatible about high magnitude keeping company with low probability; it’s the norm, not the exception. But they are psychological antagonists. High magnitude means you should take precautions. Low probability means you should shrug the problem off. So most of us have trouble focusing simultaneously and equally on the two. We pick one. If we choose to focus on magnitude, then even a vanishingly unlikely scenario is unacceptable, because it’s so awful. If we choose to focus on probability, then even the prospect of worldwide catastrophe is tolerable, because it’s such a long shot.

So what determines which one we choose to focus on?

Part of the answer is prior outrage. If I’m already fearful about the technology in question or angry at you for imposing it on me, I am primed to focus on its high magnitude. “So what if the research says genetically modified foods probably won’t cause widespread ecological disaster. It’s possible. There are still unanswered questions. How dare you take any risk at all with the future of the ecosphere!” But if I’m apathetic, in denial, or feeling hopeless, then focusing on the low probability gives me my rationale for not getting involved, not taking precautions. “The experts haven’t found any proof that genetically modified foods are dangerous to the environment. Most of them say the risk is probably low. There’s always some alarmist throwing around doomsday scenarios!”

The other main factor is the risk communication seesaw. People are often ambivalent about the high magnitude and low probability of a worst case scenario. And when people are ambivalent, they tend to focus on the side of their ambivalence that isn’t getting enough focus elsewhere in the communication environment. So if you’re out there warning me how awful that worst case scenario really is, I tend to respond that it’s too unlikely to bother with. If you’re trying to reassure me about how unlikely it is, on the other hand, I tend to respond that it’s too awful to bear.

Highly outraged people and determinedly apathetic people, of course, aren’t on a seesaw. They see the worst case scenario the way they see it, and it doesn’t matter much what anybody else says. But people in the middle are riding a seesaw. They tend to take the seat you leave vacant. They may not stay in that seat – they’re still ambivalent, after all – so this use of the seesaw is mostly a short-term strategy. But its short-term effects can be stunning.

A spectacular example of the seesaw principle at work has been the Risk Management Plan (RMP) regulation administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Under RMP, manufacturing facilities are required to figure out the worst possible accident they could have – and then tell their neighbors about it. Managements that insist the risk is low-probability, “so unlikely it’s not worth worrying about,” usually find their neighbors insisting worriedly on its high magnitude. Often they end up in contentious negotiations over what steps they must take to reduce that one-in-a-million catastrophic risk down to zero. Managements that appreciate the possible uses of the seesaw, by contrast, keep their focus on the risk’s high magnitude: “If this happens and this happens and this happens, just look how many people we could kill!” After a stunned half-minute staring at the plume map, someone raises his or her hand and asks, “But isn’t that really unlikely?” “Well, yes,” the smart company replies. “But just look at how many people we could kill!” The typical community audience soon piles onto the calm seat of the seesaw, uniting behind the principle that the company should grow up and stop wasting everybody’s time with these vanishingly unlikely worst case scenarios.

One key to communicating about a worst case scenario, then, is to ride the seesaw. Provide information about both aspects of the risk, its low probability and its high magnitude. But put your focus, paradoxically, where you don’t want your stakeholders to put theirs. If you want to keep people calm, your core message should be: “Even though it’s really unlikely, look how awful it is.” Then stakeholders can use your low-probability information to argue back, “Yeah, but it’s really unlikely.” If they’re a little less alarmed then you want them to be, on the other hand, switch seats on the seesaw. “Even though it’s really awful, look how unlikely it is,” you should assert, leaving your stakeholders to respond, “Yeah, but it’s really awful.”

For a more stable outcome, you need to teach your stakeholders to bear their ambivalence, rather than just picking one half or the other. This is the hardest and most desirable way to use the seesaw. Your goal is to get stakeholders to pay about equal attention to both aspects of the worst case scenario, so they keep its high magnitude and its low probability in mind at the same time, balancing on the fulcrum of the seesaw. Your best shot at accomplishing this is to pick your seat first. Then after your stakeholders are well-ensconced in the other seat, slide toward the fulcrum from your end; with any luck they will make a parallel move from their end. The closer you both are to the fulcrum, the easier it is to switch sides periodically, each of you reminding the other of whichever half of the ambivalence is being neglected. Don’t do this if you think it’s too manipulative. But remember, you are “manipulating” people toward the complex, hard-to-hold-onto two-sided truth.

But that’s the advanced course. For starters, just try using the seesaw when you have a worst case scenario to communicate. Tell people both how unlikely it is and how awful it is – but put your focus where you don’t want their focus to be.

Sometimes there are seesaws within seesaws, complicating things considerably. In 2002–2003, for example, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were trying to figure out how to talk to health care workers about the option of getting a smallpox vaccination. The obvious seesaw (obvious to public health people, anyway) was the high magnitude versus the low probability of vaccine side effects. I think they handled that seesaw quite well, emphasizing that the vaccination worst case was awful even though it was unlikely. But there was another seesaw at work, a more complex one: the high-magnitude low-probability risk of getting vaccinated and suffering a serious “adverse event” versus the high-magnitude low-probability risk of not getting vaccinated and facing a smallpox attack unprotected. Health care workers pondering whether or not to roll up their sleeves generally weren’t told about that other worst case scenario, the one that might result (for them and the nation) if a smallpox attack were to materialize. I think this contributed substantially to the small number of volunteers for smallpox vaccination. (See the section on the seesaw in my column on “Smallpox Vaccination: Some Risk Communication Linchpins.”) But that’s the advanced course too.

The Temptation to Withhold Worst Case Scenarios

Why communicate worst case scenarios at all?

My clients are often trying to reassure their stakeholders, and are understandably reluctant to talk about potential disasters. (Activist groups and others trying to warn the public are obviously happy to talk about potential disasters. They have different problems. See the Postscript at the end of this column.) Their reasons boil down to three: People don’t need to know the worst case; people might panic if they knew it; and it’s purely speculative anyhow.

“People don’t need to know.”

The first reason makes sense – but only very rarely. Here are the technical specifications for a situation where people really don’t need to know:

• There are no precautions you want them to take, nothing they ought to do to get ready in case the worst case happens.
• They don’t need any psychological preparation either – no emotional rehearsal; they’re as ready as you want them to be.
• You don’t need their advice, their cooperation, or their support (for a budget increase, for example) to get your own organization ready to cope.
• If you did tell them, there is nothing they would want to do or say or even feel (nothing at all, not even something you would consider futile or unwise).
• If the worst case materializes, they will agree in hindsight that there were no precautions they needed to take, no psychological preparations they needed to make, nothing they needed to say to you – in short, that you were right not to tell them.
• They’re not already aware of the worst case, waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering why you’re hiding the truth.
• No one else will tell them, and they won’t find out on their own – or, if they do, they won’t mind that you didn’t tell them.

In my judgment, these tech specs are very rarely satisfied. Usually there is something people ought to do to help get ready for a possible crisis, or at least in hindsight they’re bound to think there was. And usually they have an inkling already of what might go wrong, and there are critics and whistleblowers all too delighted to spill the beans.

“People might panic.”

The second reason, that people might panic, holds even less water than the first. What crisis management experts mean by panic is emotion so ungovernable it leads to behavior damaging to oneself and perhaps also to others. By that definition, panic is rare – and panic just because somebody was candid about a high-magnitude low-probability risk is virtually unheard of. Panicky feelings are common enough, though usually temporary. But people almost always manage to react sensibly to the prospect of a future crisis. (And time to get used to that prospect makes it easier, not harder, for them to react sensibly to the crisis itself, if it happens.)

Of course what people think is sensible may not be what a government official or corporate executive hoped they’d think. People may think a particular worst case scenario is less acceptable than you think it is. They may take precautions you didn’t recommend; they may demand that you take precautions you don’t want to take. That’s not panic. It is disobedience and disagreement. (For more on the mistaken supposition that people are panicking or about to panic – which I sometimes refer to as “panic panic” – see Sandman and Lanard, Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness … and Why It Terrifies Officials.)

When my clients worry that people might panic about a worst case scenario, in other words, either they’re worrying about something that almost certainly won’t happen (genuine panic) or they’re worrying about something that isn’t panic – that people might disobey or disagree. Usually, this boils down to a worry that people might take the risk more seriously than you want them to. True enough, they might. But as a matter of principle, that’s not a reason to blindside them; it’s a reason to level with them – so they can base their decisions and actions on their own judgment rather than being stuck with yours, and so they can urge you to take their opinions into consideration. And as a matter of practicality, it’s not a reason to blindside them either. People are likeliest to reject your advice and challenge your plans when they feel you have been less than candid with them. So if they’re already aware of the worst case, talking about it is the best way to preserve your credibility. If they’re likely to find out later, talking about it is the best way to preserve your credibility. And of course if it actually materializes, whether you blindsided us all or warned us this might happen will be central to your ability to lead us through the crisis.

Paradoxically, talking candidly about worst case scenarios is likelier to reassure people than to frighten them (far less panic them). More often than not, they are already pondering what might go wrong, imagining the worst and wishing there were some way to get it out onto the table and get the facts. Of course some stakeholders may be shocked to find out what could happen, and some activists may grab hold of the issue as a juicy new bit of ammunition. But the most common reaction when you come out of the closet with your worst case is a sigh of relief. Often it’s not as bad as people imagined. Even if it is, the other shoe has dropped at last; now they have company in their worrying and the reassurance that you’re not ignoring the problem.

Almost a decade ago, the U.S. chemical industry was fretting about new government requirements to discuss worst case scenarios with factory neighbors. So the National Institute for Chemical Studies did some research on how such discussions impacted local communities. The study found that advising plant neighbors what to do in the event of an emergency that spread off-site, and telling them what plant and community emergency responders would do in such a case, tended to calm their fears, not exacerbate them. Talking about the worst case actually led to reduced public estimates of its likelihood.

People simply don’t tend to overreact to honest information about high-magnitude low-probability risks. There may be a brief period of “overreaction” as they get used to the idea. But a public that has adjusted to the possible worst case is more stable than a public that doesn’t know about it yet – and more calm than a public whose worst case worries are solitary, secret, and uninformed.

“It’s wrong to speculate.”

As for speculation, the notion that you can talk about risk without speculating is self-contradictory. Risk is bad things that might happen; speculation is talking about what might happen. (See Lanard and Sandman, It Is Never Too Soon to Speculate.) So if you’re going to do risk communication at all, you’re going to speculate.

Interestingly, companies and agencies routinely speculate anyway. Sometimes they do so irresponsibly – usually by sounding overconfident or over-optimistic or both. Sometimes they do so responsibly, incorporating worst case scenarios and stressing that they’re far from sure. From hurricane forecasting to market forecasting, speculative communication is everywhere; a significant percentage of every newspaper and newscast is about what might happen. Then a new situation comes along where those in charge feel uncomfortable speculating. For whatever reason (their own fears, pressure from outside, nervousness about the public’s reactions), this time they don’t want to mention the worst case scenario. Suddenly they insist that “one should never speculate” – as if they hadn’t been speculating all along.

The temptation not to mention worst case scenarios isn’t confined to corporate “bad guys.” Government officials face the same temptation, and are about equally likely to succumb to it. And the underlying motives aren’t always self-serving. Whether they work for companies or for government agencies, most risk managers really don’t intend to keep the public in the dark about serious risks, not even potentially serious risks that are highly unlikely. They’re willing enough in principle to inform the public. What intimidates my clients is the fear that they may wake the sleeping giant and then have to deal with it. They feel they can deal with the risk okay; they don’t want to have to deal with an aroused, interested, opinionated public. If they could only inform people without having to listen to them….

Again and again, I find that my clients have an unarticulated mental model of the ideal public: uninterested and uninvolved unless told to do something, then blindly obedient. The typical factory management wants its employees to follow the prescribed precautions and pay attention at safety trainings and drills, but not to ask awkward questions about why the flare looked strange yesterday or what’s in the solvent that smells different. It wants its neighbors to be as apathetic as possible about possible plant hazards, but still poised to evacuate or shelter-in-place or do whatever they’re told to do if something bad actually happens. Similarly, the local health department wants everybody to use DEET and get rid of old tires and other potential breeding grounds for mosquitoes – all without getting unduly exercised about West Nile Virus and demanding a more active (or less active) spraying program. And the Department of Homeland Security wants Americans to pack their go kits and call an 800 number if they see anything suspicious – but not to criticize the precautions that have and haven’t been taken at airports, stadiums, power plants, and other potential targets.

In other words, risk managers want a public that is simultaneously paying no attention and ready to act. This weird combination of apathy and risk tolerance on the one hand, preparedness and obedience to precautions on the other, simply can’t be achieved. Getting people ready to take care of themselves means telling them the truth about what might happen, worst case scenarios and all. An unavoidable side effect is that they will have their own opinions about how best to prevent and prepare for the risk in question.

The Temptation to Downplay Worst Case Scenarios

Quite often my clients look for a compromise. They don’t withhold the worst case scenario entirely, but in one or another way they downplay it.

The downplaying can take several forms. One common approach is to mention the worst case scenario once or twice in a low-circulation technical report, or even in a news release, so it’s on the record – and then stop talking about it. With a little luck maybe nobody will pick up on it much. Repetition is a key signal to journalists and stakeholders that something is important. If you don’t repeat it, they may not notice it, or may not realize its importance.

Another strategy is to say it, even to say it often, but without much drama. If you phrase the worst case technically enough, maybe reporters and the public won’t know what you mean; if you phrase it boringly enough, maybe it won’t quite register. Surprisingly often, even in real crisis situations, journalists and the public do miss the point when dramatic information is cast in technical language. And sources tend to speak more complexly when they’re talking about anxiety-provoking worst case scenarios. Some of this is unconscious; your own anxiety makes you hide behind big words and fancy sentences. Some of it is intentional.

At the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, for example, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials were worried (mistakenly, as it turned out) that a hydrogen bubble in the containment might explode and cause a meltdown. When they shared this possibility with journalists, they did it in such polysyllabic prose that reporters thought they were denying it, not acknowledging it. The story got out anyway, because a source back at NRC headquarters alerted an Associated Press reporter that this was a terrifying prospect, worthy of aggressive coverage. Until then reporters at the accident site missed it, even though sources at the site had said it … sort of.

The level of technical jargon was actually higher at Three Mile Island when the experts were talking to the public and the news media than when they were talking to each other. The transcripts of urgent telephone conversations between nuclear engineers were usually simpler to understand than the transcripts of news conferences. They said things to each other like: “It looks like we’ve got a humongous amount of core damage” – then made the same point to the media in phrases so technical that not one reporter got the message.

Three Mile Island was a big story; it dominated newspapers and newscasts for weeks. If reporters and the public can miss the scariest aspect of a big story, then obviously when the story isn’t so big it’s quite easy to miss the significance of a mildly framed worst case scenario. This strategy – issuing dry, for-the-record warnings that are easily missed by technically ill-trained journalists or ignored by a busy public – is a compromise. As the situation unfolds, you get both the benefits and the drawbacks of an uninvolved public: less support and preparedness than you might like, but less interference and anxiety than you might fear. If the situation abates without a crisis, the gamble will have paid off, and you will have avoided looking like the boy who cried wolf. If a crisis materializes, on the other hand, people will be less prepared than they might have been, and inevitably they will feel, with some justice, that they weren’t properly warned. At that point you will be able to point to your prior statements in mitigation, as evidence you didn’t actually suppress the relevant information. If you’re wise you will also admit you didn’t push the information as hard as you could have.

If you’re really wise, I believe, you might consider a different strategy in the first place, and amp up the intensity of your worst case communications.

I have been talking about downplaying the worst case scenario as a conscious strategic decision, and sometimes it is. News releases about minor risk controversies, for example, often go through three or four drafts (and occasionally through many more). Typically, the actual information doesn’t change all that much from draft to draft. What changes is the tone. When internal reviewers object to a particular passage as too alarming, the information isn’t usually removed – it’s just rephrased. The release that finally goes out is technically truthful about the worst case scenario, but so steadfastly unemotional that it bores readers instead of alerting them. The very phrase “worst case” is sometimes removed on the grounds that it might alarm people, leaving behind a hyper-technical description of the worst case without even an explicit acknowledgment that it’s bad.

As a risk communication consultant without much technical expertise, one of the main things I do is read such drafts carefully, figure out what they mean, and then propose rephrasing them so they sound like what they mean. I don’t know enough to catch my clients when they’re lying. I catch them when they’re telling the truth in misleading ways. Then they get to decide whether or not to change their language to match their meaning.

One of the things I have learned from this process is that quite often the “strategy” of downplaying the worst case scenario isn’t really a conscious strategy. Phrasing awful possibilities in unemotional language comes naturally to my clients. They don’t think they’re trying to mislead. They’re being “professional.” When I suggest different language that highlights the scary truth their language is obscuring, their first reaction is that my version is somehow inaccurate. It takes a while for them to accept that the two mean the same thing, that the only difference is whether the audience is likely to get it or miss it. Only then can they make the conscious decision whether they want the audience to get it or miss it.

Even if you want the audience to get it – even if your conscious goal is to alert people to the worst case scenario, not just to get it onto the record – it turns out that “blowing the whistle” on a worst case that hasn’t happened isn’t so easy. The best way to get the job done is by mobilizing the anger component of outrage, not just the fear component; it’s much easier to get people alarmed about a risk if you can get them enraged at the people responsible. Second best is to pull out all the emotional stops: quote people who are terrified, find some heart-wrenching video footage, paint word pictures of what the worst case will be like if it happens, etc. Activists can do all that. If you work for a public health agency, on the other hand, you probably can’t. So you may wind up downplaying the worst case when you really wanted not to.

Over the past several years, for example, the world has faced an increasingly serious threat from avian influenza (bird flu). Like many other non-human species, birds can get viruses like the flu. As long as humans are immune to a particular bird flu virus, the problem is mostly an economic one for the poultry industry. But if a certain strain of bird flu manages to transmit itself from birds to humans, then obviously there is a human health risk. (That has happened already with the H5N1 strain of bird flu currently prevalent in Asia.) If it passes from one human to another human, the risk is greatly increased. (The experts aren’t completely sure if that has happened for H5N1 or not.) If it passes efficiently from human to human, and has a high human mortality rate, now we’re talking about a possible flu pandemic – that is, a worldwide epidemic that could easily kill millions. (That hasn’t happened yet for H5N1, but it has happened before with other strains of flu, most memorably with the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. And it will happen again, sooner or later.) Humans would have no resistance built up against a flu strain they’d never had before, so until a new vaccine was developed, tested, and mass-produced for the new strain, the death toll could be huge, even in the West. In the developing world it would stay huge, even after a vaccine was available.

One worst case scenario is that somebody, probably a poultry worker, gets the bird flu from a chicken. He or she then passes the disease on to somebody else, probably a family member or a nearby patient in the respiratory disease ward of a hospital. The newly infected person already has a human flu virus (that’s especially likely in the respiratory disease ward, of course). The genes in the two different strains of flu “reassort” (mix and match), producing a brand new flu virus with some of the characteristics of the bird flu and some of the characteristics of the human flu. The worst possible combination: no human resistance, no known vaccine, efficient human-to-human transmission, and a high human mortality rate. That’s the brand new flu that starts riding airplanes and infecting hundred of millions of people worldwide.

Alternatively, the “mixing vessel” for bird flu and human flu could be a pig; pigs live in close proximity to birds and people and have been the disease path from one to the other before. That’s why the revelation in mid-August 2004 that China had identified pigs infected with H5N1 a couple of years earlier was big news to infectious disease experts. Although H5N1 has been wreaking havoc with several Asian nations’ poultry flocks for the last eight months, it has accounted so far for only a handful of human deaths, and no confirmed human-to-human transmissions. But it’s easy to imagine a pig simultaneously infected with H5N1 and some common strain of human flu. One unlucky reassortment later, the world could face a new, virulent flu strain against which people have no natural resistance.

The magnitude of the bird flu worst case scenario is obviously enormous. Its probability is unknown and unknowable. There have been flu pandemics since 1918, but they lacked one or more of the characteristics needed for a perfect storm. So it has been 86 years since the last worldwide influenza disaster. On the other hand, infectious disease experts point out that there have been at least three near misses in the past few years – two avian flu outbreaks and SARS (not a strain of flu, but a different virus that passed first from animal to human, then from human to human).

I talked in June with a Canadian infectious disease expert who said that she and most of her colleagues around the world were increasingly nervous. So far, she said, neither SARS nor avian flu has turned into a massive human catastrophe. Both looked like they might, but each time the catastrophe was averted. She wasn’t sure whether to attribute this to the gargantuan effort put forth by health authorities around the world … or to luck. She stopped short of claiming as a matter of science that the risk of a disastrous human flu pandemic is higher today than it has been before. She’d say only that her hunch was it’s higher, and that most of her peers had the same hunch.

Now, here’s the important question: How much of the information in the previous five paragraphs did you know already? How much of it do you think the typical North American or European newspaper reader knows? How much does the typical Asian chicken farmer know?

If the answers to these three questions are “not much,” then the follow-up question is obvious. Why isn’t this information widely known?

It’s certainly not because of some conspiracy to keep the news secret. The basic information is all out there. On August 18, 2004, I did a Google search using the search terms “avian flu” and “pandemic.” On Google News I got 73 hits – 73 news stories within the previous 30 days warning that avian flu could lead to a human pandemic. On the Web I got 7,510 hits! – including the websites of the World Health Organization, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Health Canada. All these hits mention avian flu and a human pandemic in the same news story or website, if not necessarily in the same sentence. Searching “avian flu” and “1918” did about half as well – Google News had 38 hits and the Web had 3,150 – all stories and sites that mention both the recent avian flu outbreaks and the 1918 human pandemic, though again without necessarily connecting the dots.

So it’s not a secret. But it’s not a big story either, though it got perceptibly bigger after the August 20 announcement that some Chinese pigs had been infected with bird flu.

I very much doubt that the world’s national and international health agencies are trying to downplay the risk of bird flu. They really want the world to pay attention. They want Asian farmers (and North American and European farmers, too) to move quickly to kill diseased flocks, and nearby healthy flocks as well. They want serious quarantine measures to try to keep the disease from spreading to flocks that are okay so far. They want bird handlers protected as much as possible from contact with the disease, and if the handlers get sick anyway they want everyone else – and especially people with ordinary human flu – protected as much as possible from contact with the handlers. To accomplish all this, they want the cooperation of all levels of governments, and of affected people and industries; and they want money from the developed world to help the developing world do the job.

As always, there’s got to be some ambivalence – concern about scaring people, damaging the poultry industry, stigmatizing countries or parts of countries. But for the most part, the world’s health agencies want to alert us. If we’re not feeling especially alert to the bird flu worst case scenario, it’s not because they haven’t tried.

But most of the time their efforts have been a little bloodless. Look at two emblematic language choices. When a chicken flock is found to be infected with avian flu, that flock and all nearby flocks have to be killed – a process that is emotionally and economically devastating to all concerned, not just the chickens. The term most health agencies have used to describe this massacre is “cull.” The second example gets to the heart of the matter, the worst case scenario itself. The word health agencies use here is “pandemic.” The experts certainly know that in a human flu pandemic millions might die; in a serious human flu pandemic, millions and millions will die. Most of the reporters covering the story probably have figured that out by now too. But much of the public probably hasn’t. Health agency spokespeople may have forgotten, or may not realize, that millions and millions of people don’t know what the word “pandemic” really means.

But even for those who know, intellectually, that a “cull” may mean killing millions of chickens and a “pandemic” may mean killing millions of people, the words don’t necessarily conjure up the appropriate images of death and devastation.

We need to be told, graphically and explicitly, that millions of people might very well die, as they did in 1918. We need to be told that the disease would spread like wildfire, and that we would be resorting to quarantines and closed schools and laws against public meetings and other draconian measures – not to stop the pandemic but just to slow it down in hopes of buying time while the experts scrambled to come up with a vaccine. We need to be told that the developed world would be doing triage with its limited supply of antivirals, while the developing world simply wouldn’t be able to afford antivirals at all. We need to be told that figuring out how to dispose of the bodies quickly enough would be a serious problem, as it has been in every other major pandemic. Instead of all that, too often we are told that there is a possibility genetic material might reassort and lead to a human flu pandemic.

An August 18 Google search for “avian flu,” “millions” and “deaths” got me only seven hits on Google News – all of them referring to the deaths of millions of birds, not people. On the Web it’s not hard to find sites that explicitly link the ongoing bird flu outbreaks with the possible death of millions of people, but it’s mostly blogs, not official sites.

Since the current avian flu crisis arose, in short, the world’s health agencies have been candid but not very emotionally emphatic about the public health worst case scenario. In fairness, some agencies and some spokespeople have been consistently more emphatic than others. And in the last week or two, as the crisis appeared to worsen, the emphatic statements have become more common. There are still a few national governments that don’t want to talk about bird flu worst case scenarios at all – not to mention the governments that don’t even want to admit they have birds (or pigs) with bird flu. Most health authorities that talk about bird flu do address the worst case, though they do so in a more muted way than they might.

What’s important to notice is that panic isn’t the problem with bird flu worst case scenarios. Apathy is the problem. People aren’t frightened enough. They aren’t cautious enough or prepared enough.

It is also worth noticing that so far the media have not been sensationalizing the pandemic risk posed by avian flu. Even when they talk about the H5N1 “killer virus,” they don’t tend to dwell much on what life in a 21st century flu pandemic would – “will,” probably – be like. Journalists are likeliest to sensationalize when a risk is dramatic, photogenic, emotionally moving, and geographically convenient … but not all that serious. Real health and safety crises get lots of coverage, of course, but it is cautious coverage; reporters are as fearful as their sources of sowing the seeds of panic. Less serious risks – such as a worst case scenario that isn’t very likely to materialize – are more vulnerable to media sensationalism. Is avian flu too serious for the media to hype? Probably not – if it were, they’d be giving it much more intensive though steadfastly sober attention. No, the problem for Western journalists is that the avian flu story still lacks drama, good pictures, a heartthrob, and a news peg in the West. As of mid-August 2004, coverage in the West has been both sober and scanty.

Most public health authorities are probably ambivalent about their bird flu worst case scenarios; they don’t want to panic people or look excessively alarmist or provoke too much second-guessing and interference, but they do want to alert people and get their support for some serious precautions. A company considering what to say about the worst that might happen if its factory or product malfunctions badly is probably much less ambivalent. It would rather nobody knew; if that’s not possible, it hopes nobody cares. So the temptation to understate the worst case is compelling. But it is profoundly unwise.

For governments facing a possible crisis, underplaying the worst case may be a conscious compromise, or just habit or a professional aversion to evocative language. But for companies facing potentially outraged stakeholders, underplaying the worst case – whether it’s conscious or unconscious – is a desperation move. Because public skepticism tends to be stronger and critics tend to be harsher, understating the worst case is much more likely to backfire on a corporation doing outrage management than on a government agency doing crisis (or pre-crisis) communication.

If your stakeholders are already worried about the possible worst case and knowledgeable enough (or motivated enough) not to miss it, the option of mentioning it in language they’re likely to overlook won’t fly. They’re sure to pick up on any mention at all. Many companies have long and painful experience with what happens when you issue technical reports into which you have carefully inserted all-but-invisible warnings about worst case scenarios you don’t want to discuss but daren’t omit. At the next public meeting, sure enough, a neighbor with no technical training at all starts asking follow-up questions about that alarming paragraph in Appendix H. Even if the strategy works for a while – as long as outrage stays fairly low – a sotto voce acknowledgment of a worst case scenario is a time bomb waiting to explode. When outrage rises and stakeholders start looking for evidence of malfeasance, they will be all the more frightened about the worst case and all the more disinclined to believe your reassurances because you “revealed” the truth so quietly.

Even more often, you have well-informed critics who already know a good deal about what might go wrong at your plant. They are just waiting to see how you handle your communication dilemma. They may be poised to pounce if you ignore it or underplay it. Or they may plan to bide their time until the moment of maximum impact. In such situations, you have no real option but to put the worst case scenario out there in all its glory. Underplaying the worst case is almost as bad as ignoring it altogether.

And if no one knows about the worst case, but there are plenty of hostile opponents and worried publics around, then revealing it in an understated way may be the most damaging of the options. If you keep the worst case secret it might just stay secret, if you’re lucky – that’s a dangerous sort of brinkmanship, but not a sure loser. And if you announce it with drums and trumpets, you at least get credit for candor and the right seat on the seesaw. Revealing it in a hyper-technical appendix to a formal report is in some ways the worst of both worlds. Your secret is out, but your critics still get to claim credibly that you didn’t really tell people. Right now, many health officials around the world think the Chinese government did exactly that by publishing its data about bird flu in pigs in a Chinese veterinary journal, without informing the appropriate international agencies (or even most of its agriculture ministry).

Some ways of communicating about worst case scenarios are simultaneously dramatic and, somehow, calming. One of my industry clients some years ago faced the obligation to tell its neighbors what might happen off-site in a really serious plant accident. It decided to go whole hog. It built its worst case scenarios into a user-friendly computer model, almost a computer game. And then it installed the software in the computers at the local public library. With a few clicks of the mouse people could summon up plume maps complete with mortality and morbidity estimates, then check out which of the worst case scenarios they’d probably survive and which ones would probably kill them. Even I thought the company might be going too far. I was wrong. For the people who chose to play with it, the very interactivity of this computer simulation was strangely comforting. “Hey,” users could be heard whispering excitedly to each other. “This one gets your house but not mine!” The game-like quality of the experience drove home better than any lecture or PowerPoint presentation that the company’s worst cases were indeed horrific … but not very probable.

Public Perception of Worst Case Scenarios

So far I have advanced two fundamental arguments: You’re usually better off revealing the worst case than suppressing it. And if you’re going to reveal it at all, you’re usually better off not downplaying it – stressing its high magnitude at least as much as its low (or unknown) probability, using appropriately alarming language rather than a tone that is reassuring or overly technical, making the point often rather than just once or twice, etc.

I want to end this column with a checklist of guidelines for communicating about worst case scenarios. But first I need to say some things about how the public perceives worst cases.

WARNING: I rarely say or write much about risk perception. My clients are all too tempted already to think their problems are attributable to the public’s stupidity, its foolish tendency to misperceive risks. And their natural response to this diagnosis is to want to ignore or mislead their stakeholders, rather than leveling with them: “If people are going to misperceive what you tell them, why talk to them in the first place?” In general, I think, it is much closer to the truth – and much more conducive to good risk communication – to attribute risk controversies to justified public outrage or to genuine differences in values and interests than to public “misperception.” But sometimes there is no escaping the scientific research on how people (including the people who imagine they’re exempt because they’re experts) perceive risk. This is, briefly, one of those times.

Let’s start with the complicated relationship between mathematical probability and perceived probability – a question explored in depth by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky over decades of research that ultimately won psychologist Kahneman the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. Compare three gambles: (a) one chance in two of winning $100; (b) one chance in two hundred of winning $10,000; and (c) one chance in twenty thousand of winning $1,000,000. Mathematics and traditional economics insist the three gambles have equal value. The “expected outcome” in each case is $50, and if you can get any of these wagers for much less than $50 you should jump at the chance. But almost everybody finds (b) a more attractive gamble than (a), while (c) is either the most or the least attractive of the three. As Kahneman and Tversky explain, “low probabilities … are overweighted,” while “very low probabilities are either overweighted quite grossly or neglected altogether.” Most people would rather keep their $50 than take the first gamble. But many will fork over the money for the second gamble. And there are enough of us greatly attracted to the third gamble to keep the lottery business booming.

The pattern for losses is the same (on this characteristic, though not others) as the pattern for gains. An unlikely worst case scenario seems likelier than it is; a very unlikely worst case scenario either seems much, much likelier than it is or seems impossible.

Not surprisingly, there is a relationship between outrage and how we respond to very unlikely worst case scenarios. If the risk is especially dreaded; if I have no control over what precautions are taken; if it’s your fault; if it’s unfair because I’m getting none of the benefits; if you have lied to me about it for years … these and other “outrage factors” dispose me to see that very-low-probability worst case scenario as quite likely.

There is one important exception to this outrage-increases-perceived-probability rule: denial. Fear (and to a lesser extent anger, hurt, guilt, and the other emotions that often accompany outrage) can be hard to bear. And when people cannot bear their emotions, an emotional circuit breaker is tripped and they go into denial instead. So the women who are most terrified of breast cancer may deny their fear, underestimate their chances of getting breast cancer, and “not bother” to check for lumps. At the height of the Cold War, similarly, many people underestimated the probability of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, not because they weren’t concerned but because they found the prospect too awful to contemplate. (For more on the complexities of denial, see the section on denial in my column on 9/11. See also the discussion in Sandman and Lanard’s Duct Tape Risk Communication and Sandman and Valenti’s Scared Stiff – or Scared into Action. Finally, check out Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication.X)

Denial aside, we usually over-estimate the probability of a low-probability worst case, especially if it upsets us. So we are willing to pay more than the math says we should to reduce the probability to zero, taking it off the table once and for all. But we’re unwilling to pay as much as the math says we should to reduce the probability to some number other than zero – an even lower non-zero chance of disaster doesn’t feel like much of an improvement over the already low non-zero chance of disaster we’re fretting about now.

Imagine two equally dangerous diseases. Vaccine A provides perfect protection against one of the two, but doesn’t touch the other. Vaccine B is 50% effective against both. The two vaccines prevent an equal number of deaths. But when Kahneman and Tversky studied situations like this, they found that people would pay substantially more for Vaccine A than for Vaccine B, because it eliminates one of their two worries altogether.

The implications of all this for risk communication are pretty obvious. A worst case scenario that your company or agency risk managers see as too unlikely to deserve much attention is likely to strike the public – especially the outraged public – as deserving a lot of attention. If you fail to address the issue, or address it too casually or hyper-technically or (worst of all) mockingly, that will increase people’s outrage, which in turn will increase their sense that the worst case isn’t all that unlikely – launching a cycle of increasing concern you can’t afford to ignore. Your offer to reduce the risk with additional precautions will alleviate people’s concern less than the math says it should. But the activists’ proposal to eliminate the risk altogether by shutting down the factory or banning the technology will alleviate people’s concern more than the math says it should.

So far we have focused only on the probability of the worst case scenario – and on people’s tendency to over-estimate its probability. Just as important is people’s tendency to pay more attention to the magnitude of a high-magnitude low-probability risk than to its probability.

Some of this is attributable to what Kahneman and Tversky call the “availability heuristic”: Memorable images get more attention than they deserve. Events that are recent, heart-rending, horrifying, visual – that stick in the mind for whatever reason – naturally come to preoccupy us, even if they are (and we know they are) statistically unlikely. For similar reasons they preoccupy the media, which amplify their impact on us through drama and repetition. Will my child get kidnapped the way her child did? Will I receive an anthrax-laden letter the way he did? Will the tornado strike my house too? Many worst case scenarios are psychologically vivid. Even if we manage not to overestimate their probability, we are bound to over-focus on their magnitude.

But this isn’t just a perceptual distortion. Most people feel that high-magnitude low-probability risks deserve more attention than the “risk = magnitude × probability” formula dictates. Consider two power generation technologies. The first is solar power. Let’s assume that solar power kills 50 people a year; they die falling off their roofs while installing or repairing their solar installations. (I am making up the data here.) The second technology is a nuclear power plant, which generates, let’s say, the same amount of electricity as all those solar units. We will assume that the plant has one chance in a hundred of wiping out a nearby community of 50,000 people sometime in the next decade. Now, one chance in a hundred over a ten-year period of killing 50,000 people is an expected annual mortality of 50. Mathematically, in hazard terms, the two technologies have the same risk. Nonetheless, our society (and any sane society) is far likelier to accept a technology that kills 50 people a year, spread out all over the country and all across the year, than it is to allow the Sword of Damocles to hang over a community of 50,000 with anything like one chance in a hundred of wiping them out in the next ten years.

That’s not because we’re stupid, not because we don’t understand the data, not because we can’t multiply, and not because we’re misperceiving the risk. It is because we share a societal value that catastrophe is more serious than chronic risk. The same number of deaths rip the fabric of the universe more when they come all together than when they come one by one in different times and places. Possible catastrophes gnaw at people’s lives; actual catastrophes are intrinsically unfair and hard to recover from. Worst case scenarios, in other words, really are more serious than the magnitude-times-probability calculation suggests.

Once again, outrage matters. In assessing our individual, voluntary risk, we usually pay more attention to probability than to magnitude. The low-magnitude high-probability risk of getting a speeding ticket deters drivers more than the high-magnitude low(er)-probability risk of crashing. But in assessing risks that others impose on us, we are interested chiefly in magnitude. The possibility that something you do might destroy me, my family, even my whole neighborhood is bound to generate a lot of attention – no matter how slim the odds. And of course if it has happened before someplace else, with lots of attendant media coverage, so much the worse.

One of the implications here for risk communicators and risk managers is that you must talk about your efforts to reduce the magnitude of the worst case scenario, not just its probability. As noted earlier, your stakeholders would be happier if you could eliminate catastrophic risks entirely. But assuming you can’t, your efforts to make the risk smaller if it happens may matter more to people than your efforts to make it less likely to happen. I think many of my clients focus excessively on their prevention activities (aimed at reducing probability), and pay too little attention to preparedness (which can reduce magnitude).

A more general implication, obviously, is that you should anticipate the public’s focus on worst case scenarios, and defer to it by putting a lot of your own focus there too. As the risk communication seesaw suggests, this can have the paradoxical effect of reminding people that the worst case is, after all, pretty unlikely.

The comparative salience of unlikely worst case scenarios and likelier but not-quite-so-bad scenarios does vary some from individual to individual, from culture to culture, and from decade to decade. In the U.S., the period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s was a time of unusual focus on chronic as opposed to catastrophic risks. Living forever was the unstated goal; dieting and jogging and health clubs were in. Cancer was the arch-enemy, and neighbors of industrial facilities were more worried about the carcinogens coming out of the stacks than about the possibility that the plant might explode. The U.S. government’s Toxic Release Inventory program, requiring factories to reveal their emissions, was inaugurated in 1986. It was in large measure a response to the Bhopal disaster. Talk about non-sequiturs! The worst industrial accident in history led to a law regulating not accidents but chronic emissions.

A decade later, in 1996, the more normal focus on disasters was reasserting itself, and the U.S. launched its Risk Management Plan program, requiring factories to reveal their worst case accident scenarios. Virtually everything that has happened since then has trended in the same direction – most notably the arrival of the new millennium and the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. “Cancer” is still a scary word, of course, but “disaster” is once again a scarier one.

Back in the 1980s, a chemical plant manager I worked with in Texas used to meet routinely with contingents of neighbors worried about emissions. He would point out the window of the conference room at the sphere in which elemental chlorine was stored. “That’s what I’m worried about,” he’d say. “I’m certainly prepared to talk about the steps our company is taking to reduce chronic emissions, but what keeps me up at night is that chlorine sphere. If that sucker goes, so does half the town.” Back then, people heard him out but stayed focused mostly on the chronic emissions. Today I’ll bet the plant’s chlorine spheres are getting a lot of attention, not just in terms of accident scenarios but as a possible target for terrorism as well.

Worst case scenarios are back.

Guidelines for Communicating Worst Case Scenarios

Here’s a checklist of additional guidelines.

Put the worst case in context by discussing less devastating possibilities.

I am focusing on worst case scenarios because that’s the information my clients are most reluctant to talk about. But obviously the less awful alternative scenarios also deserve discussion. The “best case” may or may not need to be addressed, but the likeliest case certainly does, along with a couple of middling possibilities less devastating than the worst case and less probable than the likeliest case. Obviously there are an infinite number of possible futures. But figuring out which ones to talk about isn’t that tough. Focus mostly on the ones you’re talking about and planning for internally. (And when stakeholders ask about a disaster scenario you’ve been discussing internally, don’t dismiss the question as “speculation”!)

Make it clear that you’re talking about a possible future.

The worst case isn’t a fantasy; it’s a real possible future that may (or may not) justify taking precautions now. But the worst case isn’t a prediction either; it’s what might happen, not necessarily what you think will happen. And the worst case certainly isn’t the current reality. In an emerging situation – which may in hindsight turn out to have been a pre-crisis situation – the right message is typically something like this: “Even though the news is pretty good so far, there may be bad news coming. We hope not, but we should be prepared for the worst.”

Keep risk magnitude and risk probability in close proximity.

As a rule, worst cases are unlikely. People who are focused on the risk’s low probability need to be reminded about its high magnitude. People who are focused on its high magnitude need to be reminded about its low probability. Never say “unlikely” without “awful.” Never say “awful” without “unlikely.”

Don’t understate the worst case.

I’m not talking about language here; we’ve covered that already. I’m talking about which scenario you pick to address. A sure way to get into trouble is to offer people a “worst case” that is actually not your worst case, but something likelier and not so awful. It’s not necessary for reality to turn out more devastating than the direst of your warnings for you to be attacked for understatement. All that’s necessary is for somebody to come up with a hypothetical scenario that isn’t too far-fetched but is nonetheless worse than the one you offered. As noted earlier, you should certainly talk about scenarios that are lower-magnitude and higher-probability than your worst case. But don’t ever give anyone the impression you think they are your worst case.

Don’t take the words “worst case” too literally.

The previous guideline notwithstanding, you probably can’t and certainly shouldn’t focus on the literal worst case. Whatever disaster scenario one conjures up, after all, it is almost always possible to imagine one still worse (and still less likely). The public doesn’t want to hear about invasions from Mars, certainly not about invasions from Mars that occur coincidentally at the same time as your plant accident. We will experience too implausible a worst case scenario as a diss, a mocking reductio ad absurdum. Still, the problem of too extreme a worst case scenario is far less common than one that’s too moderate. Certainly any scenario that your organization has worked on, any scenario you have contingency plans for, any scenario someone inside your organization has argued you should have contingency plans for, is a scenario you should be willing to discuss publicly. If it wasn’t too far-fetched to talk about internally, it’s not too far-fetched to share with your stakeholders. Even if a scenario has never been seriously considered internally, if critics are talking about it, you should be talking about it too. Just steer away from scenarios that are going to sound sarcastic rather than alarming.

Don’t use the absence of a solution as an excuse not to go public.

My clients sometimes tell me they can’t discuss a particular worst case scenario because they don’t have anything to propose to reduce the risk. If you just need a few days to work out your plans, the delay may make sense (unless the prospect is imminent or the stakeholders are impatient). But quite often you simply can’t think of a feasible way to make a particular worst case scenario less likely or less awful. Or, even more often, you don’t think the available risk reduction strategies are worthwhile for such an unlikely risk. Then that’s what you ought to be telling people. Hiding a particular worst case scenario from your stakeholders is a good way to ensure that if they ever find out on their own they will demand that you take preventive action. As the seesaw predicts, if you discuss your worst case scenario openly, without lowballing the risk, you stand a far better chance of convincing your stakeholders that prevention money should be spent on likelier cases.

Don’t use the absence of answers to people’s questions as an excuse not to go public.

One you start discussing a worst case scenario, people may well have follow-up questions about its probability, its magnitude, ways to reduce the risk, etc. You may not have the answers. More specifically:

• The question may be unanswerable.
• It may be answerable, but you may not have collected the data yet.
• You may not want to collect the data ever – because you don’t think it’s worth the effort and expense, or possibly because you don’t want to know the answers.
• You may have the answers in hand but prefer not to share them.

None of these is a good reason to avoid talking about your worst case. If you have the answers to people’s questions, you’ll have to share them. If you don’t, you’ll have to discuss openly why you don’t and whether you should.

Pay more attention to reducing the risk than to measuring it.

What you’re doing to prevent the worst case scenario from happening is more important to stakeholders than your estimate of its probability. What you’re doing to be prepared to cope if it happens is more important than your estimate of its magnitude. Debates over risk estimation are a lot less productive than discussions of risk reduction: what you have done, what you could do, what you don’t want to do, what we want to make you do, what we can do ourselves.

Open your emergency planning files.

As already noted, any risk that’s serious and plausible enough to justify internal planning is serious and plausible enough to justify public discussion. And much of that discussion should focus on the content of your planning. There may be occasional exceptions for reasons of security (especially when your worst case is a terrorist attack), but on the whole your stakeholders deserve to be told and consulted. If you have mortality estimates, so should the public. If you have plume maps, so should the public. If you are trying to decide how much vaccine to stockpile, so should the public.

Treat the allocation of resources as an open question on which your stakeholders are entitled to an opinion.

Worst case scenarios raise two sorts of resource allocation questions: (a) How much to focus on the worst and unlikeliest scenarios, and how much on less extreme scenarios; and (b) for each scenario, how much to focus on prevention (reducing its probability of happening) and how much on preparedness (reducing its magnitude if it happens). There are strong arguments for not over-investing in very unlikely worst cases. Most cars carry spare tires but not spare engines; most homes have band-aids and aspirins but not heart-lung machines. And there are strong arguments for not over-investing in prevention. Too much focus on prevention can deter much more cost-effective strategies of preparedness, leaving us unprotected when prevention fails. These are values questions as much as technical questions. You’re entitled to your opinions, and entitled to express them (though you would be wise to bear the seesaw in mind). So are your stakeholders. Launch the discussion, rather than trying to preempt it.

Acknowledge that risk assessments of catastrophic risks are often extremely uncertain.

Uncertainty isn’t a good excuse for hiding your worst case scenario. But it is a good reason for emphasizing how unsure you are about that scenario. You’re not sure it’ll happen, obviously. You’re not sure it won’t. You’re not sure you’re on target in your estimate of how likely it is, or how bad it will be if it happens. You’re not sure how best to prevent it, or how best to prepare for it in case prevention fails. You’re not completely in the dark on any of these subjects, either. You have some judgments and suggestions and plans to share. You know your audience will too. (For more on ways to talk about uncertainty, see my handouts on Crisis Communication: Avoiding Over-Confidence in Uncertain Situations and on Dealing with Uncertainty. )

Acknowledge that risk assessments of catastrophic risks aren’t especially conservative.

Many risk assessment experts have spent most of their careers assessing chronic risks – for example, how many additional people will get cancer as a result of plant emissions. Methodologies for assessing chronic risks are designed to be conservative, to overestimate the risk as a guarantee against underestimating it. (Note that many activists disagree with this claim.) Methodologies for assessing catastrophic risk – that is, the magnitude and probability of worst case scenarios – are not similarly conservative. Event trees tend to be missing many of their branches; the precise accident that actually happens usually isn’t there. Hundred-year floods occur every decade or so. More generally, things get screwed up more routinely than we imagine they will, and in ways we never imagined at all. The late Aaron Wildavsky argued on these grounds that crisis planners should focus less on prediction and more on resiliency, on being ready to cope with disasters they never imagined. A good discussion of worst case scenarios admits all this. So leave your stock speech on conservativeness home; it doesn’t apply to worst case scenarios.

Don’t neglect risks attributable to intentional behavior.

You’d think that the recent experience of terrorism would have cured us all of focusing our worst case scenarios on accidents alone. But the U.S. regulations requiring companies to go public with their worst case scenarios explicitly exempt intentional acts, whether outside terrorism or sabotage at the hands of a disgruntled employee. There are some genuine security issues here, of course – but there are ways to acknowledge your non-accidental worst cases without giving terrorists a helping hand. And they are worth acknowledging. From Bhopal to 9/11, the most devastating worst cases are often intentional. If you’re doing a good job of accident prevention, moreover, the only disasters left that aren’t exceedingly unlikely may be the intentional ones. Nor can you get away with the claim that other people’s evil actions aren’t your fault. A company is as responsible for preventing sabotage as for preventing accidents; a government infectious disease lab is as culpable if someone steals a microbe as if someone spreads it accidentally. For more on this important topic, see my 1995 article, When Outrage Is a Hazard.

Don’t neglect risks that are someone else’s responsibility.

Corporations and government agencies are far more attuned to the boundaries between organizations than the public is. I once worked with a factory whose actual worst case was a possible explosion in the rail yard next door, where the tank cars of explosive chemicals were stockpiled till needed. Management didn’t want to discuss this scenario, arguing that transportation accidents were the responsibility of the railway company, not the plant. Similarly, government agencies responsible for human health sometimes decline to talk about risk to animals, while the veterinary agencies refuse to discuss possible spread to humans. And city governments sometimes estimate risk as if they had no suburbs. All of this strikes the rest of us as bureaucratic at best, evasive at worst. Talk with your stakeholders about the whole risk, not just the parts in your job description.

Look for opportunities to involve your publics, stakeholders, and critics.

The contemplation of worst case scenarios should not be a spectator sport. Of course, one-way communication is better than no communication at all; it’s worth the effort to tell people what you think even if you’re not going to ask what they think. But it’s obviously better to ask what they think – not only because they may have some good ideas but also because they’re less likely to overreact if they’re not being ignored. For best results, involve your key stakeholders, and especially your critics, early in the process, before you have reached even preliminary conclusions. Ask them to help you decide which scenarios and which risk reduction options are worth assessing, and then ask them to help you plan (and even implement) the assessment process. By the time you’re ready to go public, they should have some confidence in what you found. Then they can help you explain it to everybody else.

Look for opportunities to give away credit.

If your stakeholders and critics have played an important role in helping you think through your worst case scenarios, by all means say so. Even if you did it all yourself, try to give them credit for making you go public. Remember, longtime critics usually can’t afford to say you did the right thing on your own. They have only two possible roles vis-à-vis your worst case scenario efforts (or anything good you do): Either they trash it as inadequate or they take credit for it. The latter is far better for you. The more credit they get for what you did, the less compelled they will feel to criticize what you did. It’s amazing how easily my clients “forget” to give away credit. A crucial precursor of the Risk Management Plan program in the U.S. was the chemical industry’s 1994 “Safety Street” initiative in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. The local activist most responsible for forcing the issue was Pam Nixon. Early plans for Safety Street ignored her altogether, virtually daring her to say it was too little too late. Only at the last minute were the plans amended to acknowledge her role and her much-deserved victory.

Tell people which risks worry you the most.

The easiest way to persuade people to worry less about X is to urge them to pay more attention to Y instead. Telling us which worst case scenarios to worry about works a lot better than telling us not to worry about any. Don’t think this means you can get away with ignoring the scenarios that worry your stakeholders more than they worry you. If we’re worried about X, you have no choice but to address our concerns, and address them seriously. Only if you are doing this well can you get value out of adding that Y actually worries you more than X. You need to pay attention to our “worry agenda,” in short, but you can also share your own.

Pay the most attention to the most concerned people.

Many stakeholders will probably ignore your discussion of worst case scenarios altogether; others will listen, feel reassured, and leave. And some will become fixated. As with any other risk controversy, it is important not to give in to the temptation to ignore the handful of “fanatics,” figuring that if most people are calm that’s good enough. There are three good reasons to keep interacting with your most involved stakeholders, no matter how few and unrepresentative they may be.

• They’re the most interested people, and therefore the likeliest to come up with useful suggestions – scenarios or solutions you never even considered.
• They’re the most worried people (assuming nobody has gone beyond fear into denial), most in need of guidance and reassurance.
• They have an invisible constituency; their less concerned followers and friends are watching to see how well you respond to their concerns.

Tell people about “warning signals” that have occurred.

In the wake of every catastrophe, regulators, journalists, and activists look for warnings that were missed – and nearly always find them. This is sometimes very unfair; we never look for the precursors of disasters that didn’t happen, and what looks like a clear warning signal in hindsight may not have looked like one beforehand. But now is “beforehand.” Small accidents, near-misses, alarming internal memos, and the like are precisely the warnings you should be identifying and discussing. (See my column on Yellow Flags: The Acid Test of Transparency.) If stakeholders are already pointing to such a signal, then you have been doubly warned: warned about the warning. Ignoring it will generate substantial outrage now … and, of course, incredible outrage if disaster strikes.

Tell people about “warning signals” that may occur.

One of the reasons worst case scenarios generate so much anxiety is that they seem to materialize out of thin air; everything’s fine and then suddenly disaster strikes. Sometimes that’s just the way things are. But often there are warning signals you can anticipate, and teach your stakeholders to anticipate. “If the hurricane veers around to the north, then our area will be at risk.” Of course you don’t want to lean too heavily on these signals; there are often false positives (“chatter” without a follow-up terrorist attack, for example) and false negatives (a terrorist attack without preceding chatter). Even so, knowing that if X or Y happens we should gear up for a possible crisis helps us stay loose so long as X and Y haven’t happened. For similar reasons, emergency warning equipment can be a significant source of reassurance. Neighbors who know a siren will sound if there’s an emergency at the plant will tend to stay relaxed until the siren sounds. (Of course if there’s a site emergency and no one sounds the siren, you’re in deep trouble.)

Keep telling people where they are on the “ladder” of warning signals.

Some worst case scenarios come with a clear-cut “ladder” of warning signals – B is scarier than A, C is scarier than B, etc. In talking about avian flu, for example, health officials can identify the rungs on the ladder on the way to a human flu pandemic: bird-to-human transmission, human-to-human transmission, efficient human-to-human transmission, spread to humans in areas where birds are so far uninfected, etc. When another rung is reached, there are four key messages:

• The situation got more alarming yesterday because C happened.
• We were already on guard because A and B had happened earlier.
• Our level of concern will increase further if D and E happen.
• Eventually we will (or in some cases, “may”) encounter a “perfect storm” – we’ll climb the ladder all the way to the top and our worst case scenario will occur – but there is no way to know yet if this is that time. So far we’re only at C.

Tell people what they can do to protect themselves.

Worst case scenarios are as chilling as they are in part because we usually feel so passive. Whether the scenario is likely or unlikely, we’re just the prospective victims, with no role but to wait and worry. So give us a role. Our role in prevention is probably confined to some sort of public involvement process, advising you on what prevention strategies we’d like to see you pursue. But you can probably give us more concrete things to do about emergency preparedness and emergency response. Whenever you talk about what you are doing to prepare for the worst, tell us what we can do; whenever you talk about what you would do if the worst were to occur, tell us what we should do. To the extent you can, offer us choices of things to do, so we can pick the ones that best match our level of concern and our need for action. “Shelter in place,” for example, is an awfully passive action recommendation; people find it incredibly frustrating to be told to stay put while the plume passes overhead. Even when it’s the right thing to do technically, can’t we at least pack a go kit or tape our windows while we wait?

23. Avoid euphemisms.

We have already discussed the temptation to make your worst case scenario sound less alarming than it actually is by using hyper-technical language. Euphemisms are part of the same temptation – calling an explosion a “rapid oxidation,” for example. Or recall the now-famous first description of the Challenger disaster; NASA called it a “major malfunction.” Key words in most worst case scenarios are “kill” and “death.” If you’re modeling plant accidents, for example, you probably have plume maps complete with LD-50s (half the people in the shaded area would die). Hand them out. And then explain them vividly, not euphemistically: “Look how many people would die!”

Don’t blindside other authorities.

Preventing, preparing for, and responding to disasters are usually collaborative activities. You’re part of a network of emergency responders, police, firefighters, hospital officials, regulators, politicians, etc. (Things are worse for the World Health Organization; it’s part of a network of countries, and can do only what its member states permit it to do.) When you go public with your worst case scenarios, it affects the rest of your network too. This isn’t an excuse for not going public – but your partners deserve some forewarning and a chance to prepare (and perhaps a chance to join you in the communication rollout). Three mistakes are especially worth avoiding (though sometimes they are unavoidable):

• Telling the public things you haven’t yet told your partners – or things you told them but they missed or forgot.
• Telling the public things your partners should have been saying but haven’t said.
• Telling the public about inadequacies in your partners’ emergency planning.

Be prepared to make concessions.

It is theoretically possible to go public with your worst case scenarios and your plans for coping with them, hear out your stakeholders, and not encounter any suggestions worth taking. But it’s not likely, and it’s not credible. The growing obligation to talk about worst case scenarios is part of the growing democratization of emergency planning. People expect the communication to be two-way, and they expect the communication exchange to yield real changes in your plans. One important corollary: Don’t solve all the solvable problems before you communicate. Just as you don’t go into labor-management negotiations and immediately put your best offer on the table, you shouldn’t go into worst case scenario discussions with your best and final answer to catastrophic risk already in hand. Instead of struggling to have the best possible emergency planning before you communicate, start communicating now – and let us help you improve your emergency planning.

Postscript for Sources that Like Talking about Worst Cases

An underlying assumption in this column has been that sources prefer not to talk about worst case scenarios, and do so only if they feel they must. Most of the time that’s an accurate assumption for corporations and government agencies. But it certainly isn’t true of activist groups. And there are exceptions even among corporations and government agencies. Like activists, competitors have incentives to over-stress worst case scenarios, not to ignore them – A tells prospective customers what might go wrong if they do business with B. The same goes for those in the business of selling protection, from private guard services to insurance companies to physicians. And of course government agencies are also sometimes in the business of selling protection – for example when they’re trying to persuade people to get their vaccinations or wear their seatbelts. Or consider the issue of whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. decision to march on Baghdad. Criticism of the U.S. intelligence agencies has focused on what looks to be excessive and over-confident emphasis on worst case scenarios that justified the war and ultimately turned out false.

Greenpeace, Zurich Insurance, the local health department, and the CIA, in other words, are all organizations that don’t need to be urged to pay enough attention to how bad things might get. How bad things might get is their stock-in-trade. What have I got to say to them?

First of all, overstating risk tends to lead to a lot less public outrage than understating risk. There are certainly exceptions. The Iraq-related criticism of U.S. intelligence is one, though even there the attacks have been at least as angry for underreacting to the threat of Al Qaeda as for overreacting to the risk of Iraqi WMDs. And whole industries, sometimes even whole countries, get angry when public health experts issue worst case scenario warnings that cause economic damage. But in general, people are more forgiving when warnings turn out to be false alarms than when bad things happen and they feel they weren’t adequately warned. And people are usually more tolerant of a warning they suspect is over-the-top than of a reassurance they suspect is downplaying the dangerous truth.

This fact really irritates my corporate clients. It seems profoundly unfair to them that activists exaggerate with impunity both the magnitude and the probability of worst case scenarios, while companies are in deep trouble if they’re caught minimizing those scenarios. It’s not that people don’t realize activists exaggerate, by the way. In surveys, people routinely acknowledge that activists overstate risks. It’s just that they don’t mind; they think activist exaggeration is a useful way to get problems attended to. But when companies play down those same worst case scenarios, that’s dishonest and dangerous.

This asymmetry is fundamental and universal. It’s a kind of conservativeness. When a smoke alarm goes off even though there’s no fire, that’s a fairly minor problem; when there’s a fire and the smoke alarm didn’t go off, that’s a big deal. Similarly, we “calibrate” activists to go off too much rather than not enough. It is possible to get into trouble for over-warning people – especially if the warnings seem intentionally misleading and the cost of having paid attention to them is especially high. But it’s a lot easier to get into trouble for over-reassuring people.

It follows that organizations whose raison d’être is protecting people and warning people are going to be under a lot of pressure to overstate the worst case – with comparatively little counter-pressure to avoid doing so. By contrast, organizations that are reluctant to discuss their worst case scenarios have to balance competing incentives. The managers of a factory, for example, would rather not admit what might go wrong, but they know they’re vulnerable to criticism if they don’t. And as previously discussed, the World Health Organization has reasons to want to emphasize bird flu worst cases and reasons to want not to. But organizations like Greenpeace and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency face incentives that are all in the same direction. Their mission, their personal preferences, their ideology, and their aversion to criticism all lead them to want to make sure nothing bad happens that they didn’t warn someone about first. If they warn about bad things that don’t actually happen, that’s usually a much smaller problem.

I don’t see any practical way to change all this. Greenpeace and the CIA, the insurance industry and your doctor, are all likelier to overstate a worst case scenario than to neglect it. That’s probably for the best, all things considered.

But how they overstate the worst case scenario matters. In particular, I want to argue two closely related points: that warnings should not overstate the probability of the risk, and that warnings should not overstate the confidence of the people issuing the warning.

Consider three entirely different horrific scenarios: Saddam Hussein (when he was still in power) acquiring nuclear weapons, terrorists launching a massive smallpox attack on the United States, and global warming leading to huge temperature changes and worldwide death and dislocation. All three are (or were) high-magnitude, low-probability risks. The cases for regime change, smallpox vaccination, and the Kyoto treaty were all three grounded in precaution, in the judgment that it makes sense to take steps to prevent awful outcomes even if they are unproved – in fact, even if they are fairly unlikely. Insisting that those outcomes were proved or likely, when the data showed only that they were possible and exceedingly dangerous, was not good risk communication.

As with virtually all worst case scenarios, less extreme versions of these three were all likelier than the worst cases that tended to get most of the attention. Iraq’s government clearly had a history of using chemical weapons, for example; a localized smallpox outbreak (resulting from laboratory carelessness) isn’t as improbable as a massive attack; global warming will surely have real impacts on agriculture, health, and ecosystem succession. Warnings that focus on these more moderate predictions are entitled to claim higher levels of probability and higher levels of confidence.

But it’s often hard to motivate action, especially political action, by warning about small dangers. And it is arguable that the best reason for taking action in all three situations isn’t (or wasn’t) the higher-probability, higher-confidence, lower-magnitude scenario. It’s that low-probability, low-confidence, high-magnitude worst case. This is the very essence of the precautionary approach to risk: Disastrous possibilities don’t have to be highly likely to justify preventive action. And if hindsight shows that the disastrous possibility was never really possible after all, that doesn’t necessarily cast doubt on the wisdom of the precautions. You couldn’t be sure beforehand, and so your precautions that turned out unnecessary made sense at the time.

So it is justifiable, I believe, for the advocates of precaution to stress the worst case – to dramatize it; to emphasize it; to argue that we need to take steps now to prevent it. Even if these communications look overwrought to opponents, and even if they turn out mistaken in hindsight, fervent warnings about high-magnitude low-probability risks are legitimate.

But it is not legitimate to pretend that the worst case is the likeliest outcome, or that you are confident it is going to happen. Be as vivid as you want about the high magnitude of the worst case, but be straight about its low probability and the intrinsic uncertainty of predicting the future.

I have to acknowledge a significant problem with this recommendation – a problem grounded once again in the research of Kahneman and Tversky. People tend to be risk-averse about gains; the vast majority would rather have a $100 gift than a one-in-ten chance at a $1,000 gift. But we are risk-tolerant, even risk-seeking, with respect to losses. The same vast majority will roll the dice on a one-in-ten chance of having to pay $1,000 rather than accept a certainty of paying $100. It is hard to get people to gamble on gains, and hard to get them to buy insurance against losses. The argument implicit in all worst case scenario warnings is that we should take a voluntary hit now – a war in Iraq, a smallpox vaccination program, laws against greenhouse gases – in order to prevent a worse outcome that may never happen anyway. That’s a tough sell, and Kahneman and Tversky tell us why.

But there are ways of overcoming our natural tendency to take the chance of a possible future loss rather than pay a smaller but unavoidable price now. Insurance companies, for example, often represent themselves as selling peace of mind; you’re not buying protection against disaster so much as a good night’s sleep. Activists often emphasize blame, morality, trust, and similar outrage factors; you’re not just protecting yourself, you’re getting even with the bad guys who dared to endanger you.

Furthermore, it is often possible to decide whether you want your stakeholders to think in terms of gains or losses. Let me give you an the example that Kahneman and Tversky made famous. This is slightly heavy going, but it’s worth it. (If you don’t want to struggle, skip to the end of the indent.)

Assume a disease that is expected to kill 600 people. Now give the authorities a choice between two responses: One drug will save 200 for sure; the other has a one-in-three chance of saving all 600, and a two-in-three chance of saving nobody. These are statistically equivalent, but most people pick the first option (72% to 28% in one study). The reference state is 600 dead people. We have a choice of two gains, either saving 200 lives for sure or gambling on maybe saving them all. We’ll take the sure thing. We are risk-averse about gains.

Now reframe the problem. If one drug is adopted, 400 people will die. If the other is adopted, there is a one-in-three chance that nobody will die, and a two-in-three chance that 600 will die. Now the reference state is nobody dying. We have a good shot at preserving that desirable status quo. People greatly prefer that over a sure loss of 400 lives (78% to 22% in one study). We’re risk-seeking about losses.

Even doctors react this way. In fact, we react this way even when given both problems at the same time. We figure out that the two sets of choices are equivalent. We realize that there isn’t any rational reason for responding differently to “saving 200” than to “letting 400 die” – but we remain committed to our choices. Kahneman and Tversky write: “In their stubborn appeal, framing effects resemble perceptual illusions more than computational errors.”

The implications are manifold. “Discount for cash” (gain) goes over better than “surcharge for credit card users” (loss). A gamble to keep Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from acquiring WMDs (to prevent a loss) goes over better than a gamble to bring democracy to that country (to achieve a gain). And as Kahneman and Tversky wrote in 1984: “A physician, and perhaps a presidential advisor as well, could influence the decision made by the patient or by the President, without distorting or suppressing information, merely by the framing of outcomes and contingencies.”

Especially relevant to worst case scenarios is this research finding: Our tendency to be risk-averse about gains and risk-seeking about losses gets weaker for very extreme values. Lotteries are popular because very small costs are seen as tantamount to zero – so a very small probability of a huge payout is attractive. And insurance against disastrous outcomes is easier to sell than insurance against more moderate (but likelier) outcomes – hence the popularity of saving money with higher deductibles.

The bottom line here: A really, really bad worst case scenario can overcome people’s tendency to gamble with losses, and can thereby motivate precautionary action. A worst case scenario that’s not so bad is much tougher to sell. Whether motivating precautionary action is a desirable or undesirable outcome depends, of course, on your assessment of the risk … and on your propensity to gamble or not gamble with disaster. But even exaggerated claims about risk magnitude don’t necessarily backfire on the exaggerator. If the disaster doesn’t happen, that doesn’t prove you were wrong. It doesn’t even suggest you were exaggerating. You never said disaster was likely; you said how terrible it could be.

By contrast, exaggerating the probability of the worst case, or your confidence that it will happen, has a distinct downside for the exaggerator. It works; it raises the alarm and makes people likelier to act. But when the worst case doesn’t materialize, we feel misled and mistreated.

Outrage at confident warnings that turned out to be false alarms isn’t as great as outrage at confident reassurances that left us naked when disaster struck. But it’s still real. Ask the Club of Rome (“Limits to Growth”) people what happened to their credibility when their doomsday predictions of the 1970s didn’t materialize. Or ask the U.S. intelligence agencies what happened to their credibility when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

And it’s completely unnecessary. Warnings may have to be graphic and dramatic to be effective, but they don’t have to be cocksure. They’re more effective as warnings, not less, if they’re not proved wrong when the disaster is averted. So tell us how awful things might get – as graphically and dramatically as your ethics and your judgment permit. And keep telling us that the worst case is reason enough to take preventive steps now. But keep telling us also that we could get lucky, that you’re far from sure the worst case is going to happen, that in fact it’s less likely than some milder bad outcomes.

And so we have come full circle. My advice to those who wish to warn us is to acknowledge how unlikely the worst case scenario is, even as they insist that it is too awful to bear. My advice to those who wish to reassure us is to acknowledge how awful the worst case scenario is, even as they insist that it is too unlikely to justify precautions. If both sides do good risk communication, they’re going to come out sounding a great deal more alike than they usually do today.

“Watch Out!” –

How to Warn Apathetic People

by Peter M. Sandman

This column was written as a feature article for The Synergist, the journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association. Though posted on this website in November 2007, it eventually appeared (more or less identical except for copyediting details) in the August 2008 issue of The Synergist, pp. 52–57.

Readers of my columns in The Synergist know that I divide risk communication into three tasks, based on how endangered people are (the “hazard”) and how concerned or upset they are (the “outrage”):

• Precaution advocacy is alerting people who are insufficiently upset about serious hazards. “Watch out!”
• Outrage management is calming people who are excessively upset about small hazards. “Calm down.”
• Crisis communication is guiding people who are rightly upset about serious hazards. “We’ll get through this together.”

Industrial hygienists have need for all three skill sets – but the meat and potatoes of IH risk communication is precaution advocacy: warning apathetic people.

Reality is sometimes a little more complicated than my three paradigms suggest. When employees aren’t wearing their personal protective equipment (PPE), for example, insufficient outrage about workplace hazards is only one of many hypotheses about why. Here are some others:

• They might not have the right gear.
• They might not know they’re supposed to wear it, or how to wear it.
• They might find it too uncomfortable or too geeky to wear. (That would amount to being excessively outraged about the precaution, rather than insufficiently outraged about the hazard. The risk communication task would thus be outrage management, not precaution advocacy.)
• Rather than being apathetic, they might be knuckling under to peer pressure, or to double messages from their supervisor, or to an internal macho voice telling them that wearing PPE is for sissies.
• They might even be so anxious about workplace hazards that they can’t bear to think about them; since wearing the equipment reminds them of the danger, going unprotected becomes a way to stay in denial.

Or they might simply be apathetic about the hazard.

What follows is a checklist of things to do when apathy is the problem. Any one of the 20 recommendations in this article could be expanded into an article of its own. But here are the basics.

1. Keep it short.

Apathetic people have a short attention span. Out in the world, we’re talking about an eight-second TV news sound bite, a 15-second public service announcement, or a one-page flyer. On the job you have a more captive audience. But as every industrial hygienist knows, at an endless, dreary safety meeting you may have their bodies but you don’t necessarily have their minds. A 10-minute presentation is a l-o-n-g presentation on a topic that everybody agrees is boring.

Of course you also need longer messages for more interested audiences. It’s a sin to arouse people’s interest and then not have enough information available to satisfy them. But assuming you have all the info you need for those who are interested, don’t try to cram it down the throats of those who are not.

2. Make it interesting.

Seducing attention is the essence of precaution advocacy. Even your very short messages need to be seductive; extremely successful seduction might even earn you attention for a longer message.

The need to make warning messages interesting is obvious. Yet my clients often talk themselves into ignoring it. “This is pretty dull stuff,” they privately admit. “Nobody’s going to be listening.” And then they shrug and give the presentation anyway. They decide that it’s important to stay dignified, or that everything they can think of to make the presentation more interesting is hokey, or that there’s so much important detail to cover they simply haven’t got time for a limerick or a contest or even an anecdote. This is an incredibly self-defeating mistake. Boring messages are worse than no messages at all.

3. Stay on message.

When people are barely paying attention and may lose interest at any moment, you need to make every word count. Having decided what you think your best shot is, take it! Don’t get seduced into talking about some sidelight.

If the audience you thought was apathetic starts getting interested and asking questions, don’t worry that the questions focus on a sidelight. Shout hosannas (to yourself) and interrupt your message to answer people’s questions and launch a dialogue. But you’re not expecting that. You expect a monologue, and you should stay on message.

This is a good point to pause and note how different these first three precaution advocacy principles are from the principles of outrage management or crisis communication. In a low-hazard high-outrage situation, for example, there is no need to keep your message short; people come to a meeting and stay till midnight. You are not trying to make the topic interesting; people are obsessed already, and your long-term goal is to make the topic boring. As for staying on message, in outrage management listening is a lot more important than talking – and when you finally get to talk, acknowledging your stakeholders’ main points is a lot more important than asserting your own.

A good risk communicator has three toolkits, not one. This article focuses on the toolkit for precaution advocacy only. This is what you do when the hazard is serious and the audience is apathetic.

4. Test your messages.

You’re interested in your topic and your audience isn’t – so almost by definition your judgment about what’s interesting to the audience is going to be unreliable. You know a lot about your topic and your audience doesn’t – so your judgment about what the audience already knows (including what it “knows” that isn’t so) will be similarly off-target. Basically, subject matter experts should always assume that they’re a rotten judge of what messages will work on normal audiences. Don’t guess. Find out.

There may be times when risk communicators need to shoot from the hip. In a crisis, for example, you can’t stop everything while you do an audience survey (although you can do more audience assessment than you think you can, even in an acute crisis). But in precaution advocacy you’re presumably free to set your own schedule, so there’s no excuse for running with untested messages.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got enough time, budget, and expertise to conduct perfect scientific research, with all the right methodological bells and whistles. More often than not you’ll need to cut some corners. A focus group with a “sample of convenience” (e.g., your mother, your kids, your neighbor, your bus driver, and three people you met in the elevator) isn’t as reliable as a random sample survey, but it’s a lot more reliable than your intuition.

5. Plan for a slog.

Precaution advocacy is a slog – a marathon, not a sprint. It often takes a generation for a society or an organization to absorb a new risk or accept a new precaution. Think about global warming and HIV, seat belts and smoke alarms. And think about all the workplace risks that we tolerated for decades before we implemented appropriate remedies – from emissions of suspected carcinogens to loud noises to falling objects. (Yes, even hardhats took a generation to gain acceptance.)

There’s a chance your precaution advocacy efforts may fail altogether. People have lots of things to worry about already, and lots of advocates trying to add to their worry agendas. You may not make the cut. But assuming you succeed, you’re very unlikely to succeed quickly.

Events in the real world, of course, sometimes catch up with your warnings and change the risk communication paradigm overnight. A year before the September 11, 2001 attacks, I participated in a workshop on how to persuade Americans to take the risk of terrorism more seriously. The day after the attacks, the task switched from precaution advocacy to crisis communication; at least for awhile, Al Qaeda had persuaded Americans to take terrorism seriously. Pre-pandemic precaution advocacy will similarly morph instantly into pandemic crisis communication if a severe pandemic materializes.

6. Appeal to needs.

Persuasion theory in one sentence: Identify a need people already feel, remind them of that need as forcefully as you can, and then tell them you have a way to help them satisfy the need. That’s how advertisers sell consumer products: If you use our brand you spouse will keep loving you, or you’ll succeed in your career, or whatever. That’s also how political candidates sell themselves. And it’s how social marketing professionals sell new precautions. Creating needs is much tougher. So look for existing needs you can connect to the precaution you’re advocating.

Start with the obvious one: the need to feel safe. But bear in mind that people have another way to feel safe besides taking precautions. They can simply decide that the risk isn’t worth worrying about in the first place. So supplement your appeals to safety with appeals to less obviously relevant needs.

Hardhats, for example, don’t just protect the wearer’s skull from trauma. They also identify the wearer as a courageous individual who is comfortable in a dangerous workplace – the sort of workplace where you need to wear a hardhat. And with the addition of decals of various sorts, hardhats can become simultaneously a symbol of group membership and a symbol of individuality. When hardhats were first introduced in industrial settings, many employees who resisted appeals to safety were much more responsive to appeals that addressed the need to look and feel courageous, the need to identify oneself with the group, and the need to express one’s individuality.

Decades ago I was involved in a community campaign to persuade people to use the local recycling center. (This was back in the days before government recycling.) The need to be (and feel) environmentally responsible was real, but often weak. We supplemented it with less relevant but potentially stronger needs. We taught schoolchildren to grouse when their parents threw away recyclable materials. We made sure the recycling center volunteers who helped people empty their cars were young, friendly, and attractive. We tried to make the center a place to relax for a few minutes and meet your neighbors. These need appeals helped get people to start recycling. Then – after initiating the new behavior – they often got interested in the environmental benefits of what they were doing.

7. Appeal to emotions – especially fear.

Emotions fuel action. For precaution advocacy the most appropriate emotion is obviously fear – fear that is proportionate to the size of the risk. Trying to motivate precaution-taking without frightening people is like trying to write a novel without using the letter e. It’s not impossible, but it’s a helluva handicap.

For a variety of reasons, fear appeals have gone out of favor. Industrial hygienists sometimes worry that employees will get too frightened – that they’ll panic or freeze up and be unable to function on the job. Or they worry that employees will get desensitized, requiring ever more terrifying messages just to sustain a useful level of fearfulness. Or they worry that employees will find the fear appeals more titillating than aversive; instead of feeling deterred from daredevil behavior, employees might feel encouraged to give it a try.

All these objections have a germ of truth. But the research evidence is unequivocal. The optimal level of fear is the level that provokes appropriate precaution-taking. And most employees most of the time are below that level, not above it.

8. See fear arousal as a competition.

If you suffer from “fear of fear” – that is, if you’re reluctant to alarm your audience – it may help to remember that you’re not going to make people more fearful in general. Fearfulness is a stable personality trait. Most people are pretty much as fearful this month as they were last month. It’s true that catastrophic events like 9/11 really can make us more fearful in general for a while. But an employee safety meeting or even a really scary safety movie is profoundly unlikely to have that effect.

And even for 9/11 the effect was short-lived. The majority quickly settled into the so-called New Normal, somewhat more afraid of terrorism than previously but no more afraid of anything else. In fact, as they reallocated their “fearfulness budgets,” many people actually ended up less afraid of various other risks. Telephone calls to pollution hotlines plummeted in the months after 9/11.

So when you try to frighten people about a particular risk, think of yourself as competing for your slice of the fearfulness pie. Greenpeace wants your company’s employees to be afraid of genetically modified foods. Moral Majority wants them to be afraid of gay marriage. Their doctors want them to be afraid of eating too much and exercising too little. And you want them to be afraid of workplace hazards. Overall, they’re going to be as fearful as they’re going to be. The only question is whether workplace hazards will get their rightful share of the fearfulness.

9. Don’t neglect emotions other than fear.

Although fear – along with its wimpy cousin “concern” – is the 800-pound gorilla in precaution advocacy, other emotions can also play a role.

For example, people are often more inclined to take precautions on behalf of loved ones than on their own behalf. (People are also more willing to take risks on behalf of loved ones than on their own behalf. Whether love motivates risk-taking or precaution-taking depends on many factors, including which one communicators hook it to.) Wellness programs and safety programs both benefit from asking employees what life might be like for their families if they were killed, injured, sick, or disabled. Something like love is also behind the success of IH programs that focus on building a good group safety record or urge employees to speak up when they see a buddy acting unsafely.

Greed is another useful emotion in precaution advocacy. Rewarding employees for safe behavior is a proven way to get more safe behavior out of them. Some pretty complicated psychological processes determine when rewards help build an organization’s safety culture (“I’m doing it so I must believe in it”) and when they undermine the safety culture (“I’m just doing it for the money”). But at least as long as the rewards keep coming, greed is an effective motivator.

10. Give people things to do.

The relationship between fear and action is fundamental in precaution advocacy. Fear motivates action, of course. Why bother to take precautions if you’re not afraid of the risk?

But consider what’s going on in the other direction. For one thing, the possibility of action justifies the fear. Why let yourself be afraid if there’s nothing to be done? And at the same time, the possibility of action also helps manage the fear. We can bear our fear better if we know there are things we can do, and better still once we get busy doing them. The more things you give people to do, the more you can afford to frighten them. If you have nothing for them to do, trying to frighten them is unkind and ineffective.

Precaution advocacy, in short, should be about precautions, not just risks. Even symbolic precautions are better than none at all. But usually you have specific, concrete precautions in mind. Don’t get so caught up in talking about the risk that you neglect to talk enough about the precautions. Sometimes, in fact, it’s easier to motivate precaution-taking first, then teach people about the risk they’ve already started protecting themselves against.

11. Give people choices of things to do.

Offering people a menu of things to do allows them to choose, which leads to a deeper commitment to the precautions they take. So try to surround your list of recommended precautions with two other lists: less difficult ones (“if you think we’re over-reacting”) and more protective ones (“if you think we’re not doing enough”).

Industrial hygienists sometimes resist this advice on the grounds that precautions are either wise or unwise; wise ones, they tell me, should be required, while unwise ones should be forbidden. I don’t agree. People are a lot likelier to actually take the precautions, and keep taking them, if they picked them. At the very least you can offer several different models of safety glasses (for example), so employees can decide for themselves which pair they consider most comfortable or most stylish or most effective.

People’s commitment to precautions tends to be deeper still when they have come up with their own. This has some disadvantages: They might not think of any, or the ones they think of might not be acceptable to the company. That’s why it’s best to offer a range of choices, so that for the most part people are choosing, not merely complying but not inventing from scratch either. Still, you should always be open to good ideas arising from the ranks. And when you do adopt an employee’s suggestion, be sure to say so. See it as an opportunity to increase the group’s buy-in and feeling of control, not as an insult to your leadership.

12. Sequence recommended precautions.

The “foot in the door” principle of social marketing teaches us that if you ask for too much too soon you’re likely to get nothing at all. Ask first for something easy. Once people have made a behavioral commitment, pivot on that first step and ask them to do more.

Here’s where it gets complicated. If you give the impression that the first precaution you ask people to take is enough, taking it won’t motivate much desire to do more – and when you come back later asking for more, people may very well feel misled and misused. Instead of a foot in the door, you could end up with an I’ve-done-enough-already response: “I gave at the office.” On the other hand, if you give the impression that the first precaution is useless, it’ll never happen.

Ideally, here’s what you want people to know about that first precaution:

• that it’s easy;
• that it is nonetheless useful, genuinely worth doing for its own sake;
• that there’s plenty more they can do once they get started; and
• that it will be up to them whether to stop after the first precaution or move on to more demanding ones. (Of course if it’s not going to be up to them, you need to say so from the outset: “This is the first step in a series of precautions management has decided we must take.”)

13. Think in stages.

People adopt precautions in stages:

1. First they’re unaware of the risk.
2. Then they’re aware but unengaged.
3. Then they become engaged; they haven’t decided yet what precautions if any to take, but they’re ready to think about it.
4. Then they decide what to do – but they haven’t actually done anything yet.
5. Then they act on their decision.
6. Finally they decide to keep acting, or even to do more.

Except for trivial precautions that are easier to just do than to pause and think about, we don’t usually skip any stages. So trying to convince somebody to take a precaution who hasn’t yet thought about the risk is premature, and usually a waste of time.

Each transition has its own communication strategies.

• Getting people from unaware to aware is mostly an agenda-setting task, for which media information is well-suited.
• Getting people who are aware to become engaged is mostly about telling them how serious the risk is.
• Getting those who are engaged to decide to do something is more about telling them how relevant the risk is to them personally and what precautions make sense for them.
• Getting people who have decided to act to take action is partly about reminding them (again and again, sometimes) and partly about the foot in the door – convincing them that the recommended first precaution is both easy and effective.
• Getting people who have acted to keep on acting depends mostly on positive reinforcement.

People who have fallen off the track, who have decided not to act, require an entirely different set of messages.

14. Focus resources on teachable moments.

Although the audience for precaution advocacy is typically apathetic, there are moments of interest, sometimes even pretty intense interest. These are the teachable moments, when people are temporarily paying attention. A teachable moment may occur when your issue is in the news, for example, or when it’s featured in the plot of a popular television show. A major accident at another facility or a near-miss at your own is also a teachable moment. Anticipate these teachable moments (or provoke them), and make the most of them.

Between teachable moments, do what you can to keep the issue alive, and work with the minority that is already interested (perhaps as a result of the previous teachable moment). But don’t invest too much effort striking while the iron is cold. Your time is probably better spent preparing for the next teachable moment.

Too often we get this exactly backwards. We’re out there struggling to arouse concern in an apathetic audience. And then when something happens and the audience is concerned at last, we succumb to our fear-of-fear and our panic that people may panic and start putting out reassuring messages. When a teachable moment comes along, capitalize on it!

15. Be alert for a short-term over-reaction.

When people first learn about a serious and scary risk, they may go through a phase during which they over-react. The psychological pendulum swings too far, from apathy to over-alarm. People imagine that the risk is already happening; they become hyper-vigilant, spending far too much time checking for signs of danger; they take precautions that are excessive or at least premature. This is called an “adjustment reaction.”

Adjustment reactions are vicarious rehearsals. They are useful because they help people get ready, emotionally and logistically, for what may be coming. And they normally last only a short time, before we settle into the New Normal – more concerned about the particular risk than we used to be (and better prepared to cope with it), but no longer excessively preoccupied with it.

People are likeliest to have an adjustment reaction when they learn about a possible crisis, such as a plant explosion worst-case scenario – especially if there’s reason to think it might be imminent. Adjustment reactions are less common, though still possible, with regard to chronic risks like emissions. If your audience seems to be going through an adjustment reaction in response to your precaution advocacy, don’t think they’re panicking, and don’t bemoan the fact that they’re temporarily over-reacting. Be glad they’re reacting at all. Instead of regretting (or worse, ridiculing) their adjustment reaction, guide them through it. An adjustment reaction offers you the ideal teachable moment. Use it to inculcate safe work practices.

16. Be alert for signs of denial.

Sometimes people become so upset about a risk that they trip a psychological circuit-breaker and go into denial. (That’s partly why panic is rare; people at risk of panicking normally go into denial instead.) Both apathetic people and people in denial decline to take precautions. But instead of being a genuine absence of concern, denial results from unbearably high concern.

The key difference is how people respond to precaution advocacy. When you say alarming things to apathetic people, they get more alarmed – which is good, because it makes them take more precautions. But when you say alarming things to people in denial, you push them more deeply into denial – which is bad, because it makes them take even fewer precautions.

It is vanishingly rare for precaution advocacy to overshoot, propelling people from apathy right into denial, bypassing concern and fear. What’s not so rare is to misdiagnose denial as apathy – and therefore to prescribe the wrong “medicine”: alarming communications. An employee who claims not to be at all worried about that funny smell, for example, may actually be so frightened that he or she has “switched off” and gone into denial. The most important antidote to denial is validating people’s fears; by contrast, saying “don’t be afraid” to people who are afraid virtually orders them to go into denial. Other bulwarks against denial include offering people things to do, offering them choices of things to do, building their sense of efficacy instead of futility, and appealing to powerful emotions like love and anger.

It’s important to look for signs of denial. Women who don’t check their breasts for lumps, for example, are likelier to be in denial than apathetic. And if so, scaring them about breast cancer will be worse than useless; the core task is to validate their fear and offer them hope that breast cancer can be cured if it’s caught early. Still, people who fail to take precautions are usually apathetic. Denial is a zebra. The horse is apathy.

17. Identify and address persuasion facilitators.

Even apathetic people aren’t blank slates for you to write on. They have pre-existing attitudes and values, emotions, and needs that are relevant to your topic – or that can be made relevant. They may even have some information. A big piece of precaution advocacy is figuring out what already predisposes people to do what you’re urging, so you can remind them of it, reinforce it, and link to it.

Sometimes what predisposes your audience to do what you’re urging doesn’t have much to do with why you’re urging it in the first place. I gave the example earlier (#6) of wearing a hardhat because it symbolizes courage, group membership, or individuality – rather than because it protects against traumatic injury. Many other factors might also predispose employees to wear their PPE: wanting not to be embarrassed; wanting not to be punished; wanting not to get the rest of the team into trouble; etc. Don’t get over-committed to your reasons for advocating the precaution; focus on their reasons for taking it.

18. Identify persuasion barriers – and consider addressing them.

Some of what’s already in the minds of your audience members may predispose them against you rather than for you. For apathetic audiences, reinforcing what’s on your side usually matters more than rebutting what’s working against you. The main thing working against you is the apathy itself.

But it’s always worthwhile to figure out what else is working against you – what pre-existing attitudes and values, emotions, needs, facts, and mistaken “facts” your audience members conjure up when they’re telling themselves why they don’t need to do anything about that particular risk. Then you can decide how much effort to devote to rebuttal. Sometimes it’s wise to remind people of why they have decided they’re not interested, and then explicitly, respectfully, and empathically suggest why they ought to reconsider. I call this playing the “Donkey” game. Other times it’s best to stay focused on the persuasion facilitators and leave the barriers unaddressed. You can’t decide until you know what the barriers are.

19. Express empathy for apathy.

Some of what predisposes your audience against you is simply a disinclination to take on yet another worry and yet another task. Precaution advocacy always means trying to add to people’s burden. Yes, it’s for their own good – but most people feel burdened enough already. The least you can do is show them you know that what you’re asking is burdensome, and you wish you didn’t have to ask.

And think seriously about whether there’s anything you can in good conscience urge people to stop worrying about, any precautions you can urge them to stop taking, to make room for the new burden. Maybe there is new technology at your workplace that renders some longstanding precaution superfluous. Nothing makes a new precaution quite so credible as when it’s offered as a replacement for an old one, rather than as an add-on.

20. Consider an alternative: pre-crisis communication.

Perhaps some in your audience really are burdened enough already; perhaps your issue actually deserves their attention less than what’s already on their plate. Industrial hygienists typically have a long list of precautions they wish employees would take onboard. Just as you have to prioritize what you ask management to do (or let you do), you should also prioritize what you ask of the workforce. Some precautions shouldn’t make the cut.

For precautions that don’t make the cut, the alternative to precaution advocacy may be pre-crisis communication. As the label suggests, this applies only to potential crisis situations, not to chronic risks. It would mean restricting your current messaging to the minimum people need to know now – for example, where to look for more information when the time comes – and saving the rest for pre-planned just-in-time communication if and when the need is urgent.

This is often a very tough call. What should you do about a possible flu pandemic, for example? Should you push your workforce to take precautions now, “using up” some of their precaution-taking capacity that might otherwise be applied to other risks? Or should you hold most of your pandemic messaging until the pandemic looks imminent, leaving your workforce less prepared than it could have been? If you decide to dial up your pandemic precaution advocacy, what will you dial down to make room?