Peter M. Sandman website update

May 9: Arousing "counter-outrage" about where your activist opponents get their funding

Guestbook comment and response

May 9: How should Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson have apologized for padding his résumé?

Guestbook comment and response

May 4: Why are people so politically inactive? Is it denial? Are they sheeple? What can be done?

Guestbook comment and response

April 23: What’s the job of a state health department risk communicator?

Guestbook comment and response

April 21: Outrage in Korea about U.S. beef and mad cow disease

Guestbook comment and response

April 21: Why Do Many People Still Refuse to Eat Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico?

by Peter M. Sandman
Email to Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, April 17, 2012

Reporter Ben Bloch of the New Orleans Times-Picayune emailed me about a story he was writing on why many people were put off Gulf seafood by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – so much so that now, two years later, 30% of the respondents in a recent survey said they were still apprehensive. This is the response I sent him. He used only a little of my emailed response to him in his story, not including my suggestion that officials might have been too quick and too keen to tell people there was no problem. But he did find a lot of other good material on the psychology of stigma in such situations.

April 21: 2 years after Gulf oil spill, Louisiana seafood still battling negative perception

by Benjamin Alexander-Bloch
Published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 19, 2012

Reporter Ben Bloch of the New Orleans Times-Picayune emailed me about a story he was writing on why many people were put off Gulf seafood by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – so much so that now, two years later, 30% of the respondents in a recent survey said they were still apprehensive. He used only a little of my emailed response to him in his story, not including my suggestion that officials might have been too quick and too keen to tell people there was no problem. But he did find a lot of other good material on the psychology of stigma in such situations.

April 11: H1N1 cases in India sparking media hype

by Lisa Schnirring
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), April 9, 2012

When CIDRAP News decided to do a story about recent hype in India’s media coverage of swine flu, I pointed out that it wasn’t just recent and it wasn’t just the media. So reporter Lisa Schnirring asked if I wanted to comment on the record. This is the response I sent her. She used most of it in her story, along with a lot of other good material on Indian pandemic H1N1 hype.

April 10: India's Response to Swine Flu -- Still Weird

by Peter M. Sandman
Email to Lisa Schnirring, April 9, 2012

April 4: Apologizing for your predecessors

Guestbook comment and response

April 4: Markets in Transition: Managing Outrage, Icky Pallets, Safety Issues at the Plant and Looking Ahead

by Rick LeBlanc
Posted on the website of Pallet Enterprise, April 1, 2012

In the ongoing war between the wood and plastics industries, each side likes to accuse the other of manufacturing a dangerous product. One front in this war focuses on the pros and cons of wooden pallets versus plastic pallets. And apparently one of the arguments against wooden pallets is that the wood may be treated with hazardous chemicals or contaminated with bacteria, and may transfer the chemicals or bacteria to food that is stored on wooden pallets. It’s an issue I have never worked on. But this article by Rick LeBlanc does a good job of applying basic principles of outrage management to the wooden pallet food risk controversy.

March 31: Motivating Attention: Why People Learn about Risk ... or Anything Else

The audience of precaution advocacy messages is quite likely to be apathetic, to find the information (safety information, for example) boring. This column outlines the only four ways I know to get people to learn risk information or any information. The first answer, learning without involvement, requires more budget than precaution advocacy campaigns usually have. The second answer, interest/entertainment, is also tough to achieve, though it’s always worth trying. So the column focuses mostly on the remaining two options. Giving people a “need to know,” such as a pending decision that requires the information, is a powerful tool of precaution advocacy. Also powerful, and psychologically much more complex, is getting people to see the information as ammunition – for example, motivating them to do something they’ve never done before, and then offering the information as a rationale that helps them makes sense of the new behavior.

March 30: Pink slime

Guestbook comment and response

March 19: Talking to the Public about H5N1 Biotech Research (original longer version)

Submitted to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, March 18, 2012

The H5N1 (“bird flu”) virus is incredibly deadly to humans, but almost never transmits from human to human – at least until late 2011, when two teams of scientists bioengineered H5N1 to make it transmissible in mammals. Now a battle rages over whether the two papers detailing this work should be published, and whether the work itself should continue – and whether the concerns of the general public should be considered in making these decisions. When I was quoted in Nature urging proponents to dialogue with critics rather than merely trying to “educate” them, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News asked me to write a brief opinion piece expanding on my view. Both the short version accepted for publication and a somewhat longer version (with a little more background on the controversy) I submitted at the same time are posted.