We Need the Right Words to Weather the Storm

They don't care solely about their public. Risk communication is a public health function, helping people make the best choices for themselves and their loved ones. Yet the communications job is often given to public affairs, or public relations, or even marketing people. These professionals have valuable skills. Any organization without them can get eaten alive. However, they naturally focus on their employers' welfare, and not just that of their audience. When people feel that their lives are on the line, they just want unspun facts.

Only the most cynical and shortsighted public affairs person would emphasize spin over substance in a crisis. However, research finds that changing hats is not that easy. Conventional concerns so permeate people's thinking that they cannot set aside their habitual ways of communicating, however hard they try.

My wife and I were in London during the third week of July. On the 21st, the day of the second bombing that month, we heard a public health-focused response, soberly revealing the facts as they became known. On the 22nd, we heard the same agencies provide what turned out to an inaccurate account of the police killing of an innocent Brazilian immigrant, creating a crisis of confidence that is still reverberating.

They have nothing to tell their public . Without the proper research in advance, an agency cannot assess the risks that its public faces. In that case, it's better to plead ignorance than to offer confident guesswork. Of course, no one wants to be told, "Beats me. You're on your own." But that's a more useful message than an unsupportable "Trust me." Still, there's always the temptation to pretend to know what should have been known, and to blame the victims for not doing the impossible.

Communication is part of any relationship. After Katrina and Rita, after the anthrax mailings, the D.C. sniper attacks and the abortive smallpox vaccination campaign -- indeed, after any public crisis -- citizens will ask, "Did you listen to us, so that you could tell us what we needed to know?" When the answer is yes, the authorities increase their standing as information providers. When the answer is no, the authorities undermine our resilience as a society.

Author's e-mail: baruch@cmu.edu

Baruch Fischhoff is a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and president of the Society for Risk Analysis. He does research and writes frequently about assessing and conveying accurate information about risks.