Risk and Crisis Communication

Risk and Crisis Communication:

Building Trust and Explaining Complexities When Emergencies Arise

On June 7, just days after the death of the “great communicator,” former President Ronald Reagan, COSSA held its second congressional briefing, Risk and Crisis Communication: Building Trust and Explaining Complexities When Emergencies Arise, before a standing room only crowd on Capitol Hill. The briefing was cosponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Sociological Association.

Welcoming the audience, COSSA Executive Director and moderator of the event Howard Silver, noted the passing of President Reagan and pointed out that the former president was responsible for the existence of the Consortium. The social science associations decided to respond to his administration’s initial budget proposals to severely reduce spending for social and behavioral science research. That response resulted in the formation of COSSA as an advocacy group.

Twenty-three years later, Silver suggested, the Bush Administration’s science adviser, John Marburger, and many others have repeatedly highlighted the importance of the social, behavioral, and economic sciences to America’s economic and homeland security. In addition, Marburger and the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies have emphasized the importance of communicating warnings about attacks. The NRC report Making the Nation Safer has declared that “warning systems should be carefully designed with respect to who issue the warning, optimal lead time of warning, unambiguous language and moderated emotional tone.” The report also discussed the role of the media in defining the nature, scope, and level of threat in critical situations, in disseminating both reliable and unreliable information, and in calming the population. Further, the recent hearings in New York City conducted by the 9/11 Commission underscored the need to be able to communicate well in a crisis. For these reasons, COSSA invited three distinguished social scientists to discuss their research results relating to these issues.

H. Dan O’Hair, professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma, began by explaining to the audience that “academically speaking, risk communication is the exchange of information among interested parties about the nature, magnitude, significance or control of a risk.” The public, O’Hair noted, generally think of risk as something we can manage. “We manage and hedge against risk in our personal lives,” he explained. For the academic and the practitioner communities, “crisis communication (also known as emergency communication) is organized, analysis, planning, decision-making, and assignment of available resources to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and protect property and the environment when an emergency or disaster occurs.” Distinguishing crisis communication from risk communication, O’Hair explained that the former is about an event that has occurred, whereas the latter is a projection of what might occur.

O’Hair discussed research that demonstrated that the public does not just hear a message and then goes and does exactly what the message asks. They think about it and they analyze it and maybe they will respond to it. O’Hair also talked about two challenges that face risk and crisis communication practitioners and researchers: 1) varying expectations of the public and 2) advances in communication science.

The public, O’Hair explained, has expectations that public officials will communicate with them about risks and about crisis. But, what is it about a selective public that risk and crisis communicators need to know about, he submitted. First, source credibility – Do they trust the individual that is communicating the message? Second, risk crisis source match – Do we have the right person for the right crisis and the right risk? And third, media preferences -- Research since 9/11, he related, has found that the preponderance of people in the public prefer TV news and cable during a crisis event. After the outrage has subsided, however, they turn to other media sources (Internet, newspapers, and interpersonal communication) to seek information and verify their perceptions and emotions felt initially. What is needed, O’Hair explained, is the development of advanced models for understanding how the public comes to trust risk and crisis sources and how they use risk and crisis information.

Regarding advances in communication science, the second challenge, O’Hair related that over the past 10 – 15 years there has been an explosion of communication science research that is specific to how public officials communicate to the public, hoping to evoke some kind of response. He also discussed five theories associated with taking evaluation and assessment to the next level to advance communication science. Given that there is an “embarrassment of riches” in the accumulation of communication science over the last 10 – 15 years, he emphasized that: “We need to take advantage of it and build stronger models . . . We’ve got to start triangulating our research. That is the people in sociology, anthropology, public policy, political science and communication all need to start together and cross-referencing each other’s work.” Finally, he concluded, “we need to cultivate partnerships,” with public policy makers, researchers and practitioners.”

Havidan Rodriguez, the director of the Disaster Research Center and professor in the department of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, discussed the role of science, technology, and the media in communicating risk and warnings. The Center was the first social science center devoted to the study of hazards and disasters in the world and just celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Rodriguez explored what needs to be done and how we engage and respond to our communities. Echoing O’Hair in calling for a multidisciplinary approach, he noted the “need to develop a holistic model to communicate risk and warnings which takes into account the contributions of different disciplines.”

He also identified the need to not only consider the role of new and emerging technology and how that enhances communication, but how it also creates problems in communicating warnings and crisis information to the general public. In order to communicate with our communities, he related, we must know who these communities are, citing the changing socio-economic and demographic changes that are occurring in the U.S. In many of these communities the primary language is not English, their ideas, values and cultures are not the traditions in the society at-large.

Social scientists, said Rodriguez, are needed to better understand and expand our knowledge regarding how individuals and how organizations perceive and respond to, for instance, forecasts, warnings, and risk information. We know, he explained that “disaster behavior and perception of risk, varies according to income, to education, to race, to ethnicity, and to the location of the residents or individuals.” These are important variables that we need to take into consideration, he emphasized.

To do this, we must provide information to the community in a form that is comprehensible and useful. It must be perceived as relevant to them, he stressed. “This information must make me aware of my risk; I [must] recognize my risk, and the potential outcomes,” Rodriguez explained.

He noted that technological innovations -- earth observational systems, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing, and cellular phones -- have dramatically altered and transformed the way we communicate. While this may seem to be a good thing, he noted that “access to multiple sources of information can create confusion and uncertainty, particularly if it is inconsistent, contradictory and inaccurate.”

Rodriguez concluded by noting that “risk and disasters are socially-constructed phenomena influenced by our cultural norms, our prejudices, our values, and therefore it is important to take the social sciences into consideration. . .If we continue to focus on the development of technology while ignoring societal impacts and the social factors that influence disaster behavior and response in the communication processes, we are going to go in the wrong direction.”

Katherine Rowan, professor of communication at George Mason University, examined the research on effective risk, crisis, and emergency communication and how it can be translated into strategies and steps for communicating effectively with the public.

According Rowan, some of the emergency communication challenges practitioners confront include alerting people without panicking them, fostering emotional resilience when a disaster strikes, communicating preparedness for terrorist attacks, chemical, and biological and nuclear, and reducing media sensationalism.

In social science parlance, noted Rowan, this is “trying to take people’s feelings and perspectives and change lay theories about how we communicate in mass approaches that will be more likely to result in safe behavior.”

One important function that the briefing can serve, Rowan emphasized, is to connect the attendees to each other. She explained how a memory aid or pneumonic could help the attendees to put the information from the briefing together to use if you happen to be an emergency spokesperson. One such approach she noted is something called the CAUSE model. It is a memory aid to think about classic tensions or obstacles in risk and crisis situations. CAUSE stands for: Confidence (in communication), Awareness (of danger), Understanding (of danger), Satisfaction (with solution), and Enactment (of safety steps).

Rowan noted that “frequently the most important problem when we are talking about some sort of physical danger is the fact that [the public] is more afraid of the officials.” Thus, a difficult challenge for officials is to “earn the trust of those who are afraid of physical danger, but, frankly, unfortunately, of [officials] as well.”

A second important challenge, said Rowan, is how do you create awareness of the danger? An individual trusts the communicators, but sometimes do not literally hear the warning signal. A third challenge is that the person understands the message. This relates to Rodriguez’s concern with the diversity of the American population.

The fourth challenge is satisfaction with solutions. “We all know about the dangers of terrorism, but we clearly disagree about how best to manage them.” So we need to find agreement on how to manage dangers. “Last, and not at all least, sometimes we need to move from agreeing that something is a good idea to actually doing it.” Rowan explained.

For example, she explained how risk and crisis communicators tell us that everybody should have a survival kit with them in their home, their office, and their car. That is, we should have three days work of water, three days worth of food. We should have a radio that runs on batteries. If we had those survival kits, we would be less likely to tax emergency systems, she asserted. But, it was clear from the audience that most people have not complied with this warning.

The CAUSE memory aid allows communicators to think about their challenges. What are you trying to get across? Why is that message going to be hard for them to understand? Is it mainly because they don’t trust me? Is it because they just haven’t heard it? It is usually something about trust in the spokesperson that affects the response, Rowan explained.

According to Rowan, risk and crisis communication research suggest confidence is earned when emotions are legitimated. In addition, she noted, confidence is earned when people can monitor officials and their attempts to figure out the situation.

Finally, she emphasized the need to partner with the media, stressing the need to understand what the media does well. Media, said Rowan, “are really good at creating awareness of information. . . They are far less good at getting deep understanding and deep comprehension.” They can, but that is not their strength, she added.

COSSA will prepare edited transcripts of the seminar, which included a lively question and answer period, during which all three speakers questioned the current color-coded homeland security warning alert system. These should be available by late July. If you would like to request a copy, please e-mail cossa@cossa.org.