The side of risk communication that built my reputation and sent my children to college was outrage management: what to do when people are excessively frightened or angry about a small hazard and you want to calm them down. Telling people to “Calm down!” is obviously not how this goal is best accomplished. The strategies that actually work turn out to be profoundly counter-intuitive: apologizing for your mistakes, giving others credit for your improvements, acknowledging their grievances and concerns, etc.
In the mid-1980s I coined the formula “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” to reflect a growing body of research indicating that people assess risks according to metrics other than their technical seriousness: that factors such as trust, control, voluntariness, dread, and familiarity (now widely called “the outrage factors”) are as important as mortality or morbidity in what we mean by risk. My clients tended to imagine that their neighbors, employees, or customers were upset mostly because of media sensationalism or activist distortions or their own ignorance; helping them understand the dynamics of stakeholder outrage was a prerequisite to helping them figure out how to reduce the outrage — mostly how to stop doing the things they were doing that provoked the outrage.
Of course reducing outrage is a socially valuable thing to do only if the outrage is misplaced — that is, if the hazard, the technical risk, is genuinely small. (Similarly, increasing people’s outrage, as activists do, is socially valuable only if the hazard is genuinely big.) A recurring theme in my writing, and in others’ writing about me, is the ethical issues raised by outrage management, especially when deployed on behalf of huge multinational corporations.
A lot of my writing on outrage management is repetitive. I have tried to pare down the lists below to reduce the repetition. Readers who want to know more about my approach to outrage management can check out my Risk Communication Book and my three Risk Communication Training Videos, all published by the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention my OUTRAGE Prediction & Management Interactive Software, available from the Reputation Qest consulting company in Australia. I think it’s wonderful — with the help of Australian programming experts, I managed to create software that would give a client the same advice I’d have given if I were there. But it’s expensive and labor-intensive (you have to answer a lot of questions about what’s going on), and it hasn’t sold well. Several reviews of the software have been published; check out Spin doctors may be obsolete (May 1999) by Tim Radford, or We can work it out with Outrage (May 1999) by Duncan Graham-Rowe, or Running risk of public outrage (June 1999) by Joanna Pitman.
(2001), by Rolf Schmid
