Index of Web-Available
Articles by Peter Sandman

Dave Johnson, the editor of ISHN, admired my website column on “Empathy in Risk Communication.” But of course it was much too long for him to republish. So he excerpted the less complicated sections, made a few editing and formatting changes, and came up with a shorter, more accessible article.

On August 20, 2007, I gave a five-hour pandemic communication seminar to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The focus was on how to persuade an apathetic public to take pandemic preparedness seriously – that is, on precaution advocacy. There is no transcript available. But the seminar was webstreamed to health department offices throughout the state, and the webstream videos are available online in both audio and video formats. The picture quality is pretty bad (and there’s not much to see anyway), but the audio is okay. And I think these tapes are useful if you’re trying to arouse public concern about pandemics … or anything else.

There are three tapes. Part One has three segments of roughly 30 minutes apiece: “Pandemic 101: The Four Faces of Bird Flu”; “Risk Communication 101: Hazard, Outrage, and the Four Kinds of Risk Communication”; and “Assessing the Public’s Mood: Apathetic? Burnt Out? Skeptical? Yet to Hear?” Part Two is a 75-minute segment entitled “Selling Pandemic Preparedness” – my effort to list core strategies of pandemic precaution advocacy. Part Three is mostly an hour-long practitioner panel on “What’s Working and What’s Not,” with my interpolated comments. There is periodic audience discussion on all three tapes.

Systems requirements to access the videos are: (a) Windows Media Player 10 or better; and (b) Internet Explorer 6.0 or better. Access to the tapes is not user-friendly. It took me several tries. Here are some instructions.

For three days starting 30 November 2006, Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism ran a conference on how the news media cover (and should cover) the risk of an influenza pandemic. I spoke twice, a stand-alone presentation on “Risk Perception, Risk Communication, and Risk Reporting: The Role of Each in Pandemic Preparedness” and a panel presentation on “Fear of Fear and Panic Panic: Is It Okay to Scare People about Pandemics?” The two were abridged and combined into one article when Nieman Reports published an edited transcript in Spring 2007. As compiled by the Nieman Foundation, the published article focuses on two topics – the four kinds of risk communication as applied to pandemic risk and the importance of fear in pandemic preparedness. The entire edited conference transcript is also available online. For the (nearly) unedited transcripts of the two presentations, see below.

An abridged version   of this presentation was published in the Spring 2007 issue of Nieman Reports (see the previous entry). The Nieman Foundation for Journalism also made the original transcript available to me. I edited it very lightly so it makes sense – but it's still very much a transcript, not a polished article.

I was joined in this panel discussion by three experienced risk communication practitioners, Howard Koh, Glen Nowak, and Dick Thompson. My contribution was entitled “Fear of Fear and Panic Panic: Is It Okay to Scare People about Pandemics?” An abridged version of my presentation and a tiny bit of the Q&A were published in the Spring 2007 issue of Nieman Reports (look two entries up). The Nieman Foundation for Journalism also made the original panel discussion transcript available to me, very slightly edited by them. I edited my parts a bit more thoroughly, though it’s still very much a transcript, not a polished article. I left other people’s presentations and comments alone – so blame any garbles on the transcription process, not the speakers. The conversation ranged widely over the various challenges of pandemic communication.

I am a member of the external “faculty” of a U.K.-based consultancy called SustainAbility, a leader in advising companies and governments on what founder John Elkington calls the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social, and economic sustainability. For several months in mid-2006, SustainAbility fostered an exchange of emails among its faculty on globalization and its likely impacts (good and bad) on sustainability and corporate responsibility. Excerpts from that dialogue have now been posted on the SustainAbility website. It’s a bit distant from my usual risk communication turf, but for those who are interested, some of my remarks are included in the excerpts for Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5.

As part of its pandemic preparedness consulting business, Bio Economic Research Associates (“bio-era”) conducts periodic teleconferences for clients and prospective clients. Its June 2006 session featured an illustrated presentation by Jim Newcomb of bio-era, with a detailed update on bird flu developments and pandemic risks. But bio-era managed to squeeze in three other speakers — United Nations pandemic coordinator David Nabarro, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Billy Karesh, and me. My piece runs from page 23 to page 27. It focuses on the different “kinds” of bird flu/pandemic flu problems, but also includes my answers to questions about how companies should talk about these problems — how restaurants should talk to their customers about bird flu and how manufacturers should talk to their employees about pandemics.
(Please note that the article is a 4.7-MB Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file located on this site.)

Since 2004 I have been working with the U.S. Government-funded National Center for Food Protection and Defense at the University of Minnesota. One of the projects I worked on was an effort to develop a set of consensus “best practices” in crisis communication. Matthew Seeger wrote up the results in an article entitled “Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process.” I got a second bite of the apple when I was asked to write one of four commentaries on Seeger's article. My commentary, posted here with permission, focuses on some things I think the group missed or got wrong: the importance of fear and other emotions, the need to trust and respect the public, and the over-emphasis on message consistency. Seeger's article and the other commentaries are available online from the publisher, but only if you pay. A much less detailed PowerPoint on the ten best practices   is available without charge.

(Please note, the title link opens an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (57 kB) located on this site. The latter two links go to other sites.)

In November 2005 I did a two-hour interview in Melbourne with Kevin Jones, editor of Safety at Work, a monthly electronic magazine published out of Australia but distributed worldwide. We covered an extremely wide range of topics — from whether the mining industry is serious about safety (and why it so often sounds like it isn’t) to how to talk about worst case scenarios like a severe influenza pandemic to why I put everything I can on my website and don’t trademark anything. I imagined that Kevin would edit out the boring parts and organize the nuggets. But instead he used the whole two hours verbatim.

The Part 1 Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (218 kB) and the Part 2 Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (387 kB) are located on this site.)

I have long argued that corporate environmental performance is better “sold” to stakeholders as a response to pressure than as a self-motivated commitment to the environment; I think claiming to be responsive is both truer and more credible than claiming to be responsible. In this article I make the same case about “selling” safety to employees. When management says it cares more about safety than productivity or profit, I argue, employees are likely to conclude that safety rules have more to do with company PR than company policy, and may “loyally” rather than rebelliously disobey. The article also discusses why both safety professionals and top corporate managers enjoy making a values case for safety, and resist making the business case I think they should make. This Adobe Acrobat (.pdf; 593 kB) file is located on this site.

I have a two-page “essay” in this chapter (pp. 190–191) entitled “Public Reactions to Crisis Situations and Communication Implications,” which covers yet again material that is presented in more detail in “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication.” The rest of the chapter (on which I collaborated) is worth reading for its advice to journalists on how the public and the official sources are likely to cope with a terrorism crisis. The rest of the manual is mostly about biological, chemical, and radiological threats and the government agencies that try to address them.

Despite the title, this brief speech focused mostly on pre-pandemic communication, and especially on the need to overcome official “fear of fear” and scare people into pandemic preparedness. (Please note that the article is located on the source page.)
In addition to the speech transcript (which I edited a little for clarity and grammar), a video of the speech itself is also available.

This article quickly covers some of the emotional reactions to crisis situations — ground covered in more detail in “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication”   and “Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication.” An earlier version appears in a soon-to-be-published manual for journalists on Terrorism and Other Public Health Emergencies (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). Some minor editorial changes made by the magazine’s staff have not been replicated here (only the ones I liked).

PAHO asked us to combine a primer on risk communication with a primer on avian influenza. The resulting article talks about the challenge of alerting the public to bird flu risks, then offers ten risk communication principles, each illustrated with bird flu examples. The PDF file also includes the cover, an editor’s note entitled “Communication: risky business,” and the contents page.

(A Spanish language edition   is also available. Both Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files are located on this site. English version 806 kB; Spanish version 774 kB.) There is also an online version (same text, but easier to read than a PDF file) posted on the PAHO website. The entire issue is also there.

A lot of what gets called risk communication actually deals less with future risk than with past events: “What happened?” This short two-part article offers ten pointers on talking about a recent accident, regulatory action, etc. It’s a start toward a post-event risk communication checklist. The Part 1 Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (41 kB) and the Part 2 Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file (163 kB) are located on this site.

This speech was basically my standard intro speech on outrage management — the distinction between “hazard” and “outrage”; the four kinds of risk communication; the risk communication seesaw; and six key strategies for reducing outrage. Since the audience was made up of corporate PR people and Corporate Social Responsibility specialists, comments are interspersed throughout on how risk communication relates to PR and CSR.
(Please note that the article is located on the source page.)

Poster version of the same speech (jpg file: 987 kB)

Susan Kelly is a “graphic facilitator” in San Francisco. For every presentation at the International Corporate Citizenship Conference, she produced a poster in real time and posted it immediately afterwards — an incredible tour de force! Even the dull presentations turned into lively posters. Here’s mine.
(Files on this site.  Also available: smaller jpg 111kB; a smaller gif file: 86 kB;and a Microsoft PowerPoint version. 1.3 MB)

When the Three Mile Island nuclear accident began in late March of 1979, I was asked by the Columbia Journalism Review to go to the scene and “cover the coverage.” The resulting article, “At Three Mile Island,” was written jointly with Mary Paden. This new article focuses on some of the crisis communication lessons I learned at Three Mile Island — lessons many corporate and government crisis managers have yet to learn.

This Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file is located on this site.   safety AT WORK is an electronic full-colour magazine that is published every 2 weeks. It reports on OHS, Risk Management and other issues from an independent and global perspective. A sample issue and subscription details are available at www.worksafety.com.au.

In March 2006, this article was reprinted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its IAEA Bulletin (vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 9–13) under the title, “Tell It Like It Is: 7 Lessons from TMI.” The IAEA version is available online in the following languages:

• Arabic,  
• Chinese,  
• French,  
• Russian,  
• Spanish  
• English.  

In the fall of 2003 I was commissioned by Vodafone Group Services Limited to think through and write up my opinion on the following question: Assume that a particular risk is probably not serious from a technical perspective, but some people are worried or upset. Should governments impose more stringent precautions in such a situation then they would impose if people were calm or apathetic? The question arose because of a draft document being circulated by the International EMF Project of the World Health Organization, proposing that public concern itself can justify a “precautionary” approach to controversial risks. Originally raised with respect to the risk of mobile telephones and telephone towers (hence Vodafone’s interest), the new standard was — and still is — being floated as a possible extension of the Precautionary Principle to a whole range of risk controversies where hazard is uncertain but probably low, and outrage is undoubtedly high.

The resulting essay turned out more nuanced than Vodafone probably expected. In general, I did reach the conclusion Vodafone was presumably looking for — that government precautions and government warnings are not reliable ways to reduce outrage, and probably should not be deployed for that purpose. I found surprisingly little research on point, but lots of theoretically interesting arguments in both directions to dissect. There is a certain irony that the most thoughtful, tentative, balanced, academic writing I have done in years was done for a corporate client.

Vodafone plans to distribute this essay (in electronic and hard-copy form) to interested parties, including, of course, the WHO staff whose policy proposal provoked it. (Adboe Acrobat file on this site: 47 pages / 636 kB.)

I was part of a 30-person “Working Group” that developed a report urging leaders to treat the public more as an ally and less as a problem in crisis situations. The report was drafted by Monica Schoch-Spana of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who later redrafted it as an article for the Center’s Biosecurity and Bioterrorism journal. The writing is a little academic for my taste, but I think the recommendations are wonderful ... and the footnotes are invaluable.
(Please note that the article is located on the source page.)

In October 2003, the WHO included social scientists (including me) on its SARS-fighting team for the first time. This invited paper has a list of 24 risk communication principles relevant to a possible second SARS outbreak or to any infectious disease outbreak; it also lists SARS-related risk communication research needs and has a short bibliography.

This three-part interview was published in ISHN E-News. Excerpts were also published in the September 2003 issue of ISHN (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News) — the paper version, which is also on-line — under the title “Charting your course: 25 keys to safety success — Advice from Dan Petersen, Peter Sandman & John Henshaw.”

• Part One (ISHN E-News, July 25, 2003) — on persuading management to take safety seriously ... and why it’s so difficult.
• Part Two (ISHN E-News, August 1, 2003) — on persuading employees to take safety seriously ... and why it’s difficult too.
• Part Three (ISHN E-News, August 8, 2003) — on reputation management, employee outrage, and finding your niche as a safety and health professional.

After a rocky start, the world’s premier performer in SARS risk communication turned out to be the authoritarian city-state of Singapore! In this brief op-ed in Singapore’s biggest newspaper, my wife and colleague Dr. Jody Lanard and I tell the surprising story. A link to the longer, unpublished version of the article is provided.

On September 21, 2004, Jody told another version of this story as one of the keynote presentations at a World Health Organization conference on “outbreak communications.” The conference was scheduled in Singapore in part because of the superlative job Singapore had done communicating with its population about SARS — an accomplishment WHO wanted to help other countries emulate in other outbreaks. Entitled “WHO Expert Consultation on Outbreak Communications — Singapore's SARS Outbreak Communications,” the speech text is located on the website of the Singapore Ministry of Health.

In early February of 2003, I attended a wonderful conference on bioterrorism, focused on “the public as an asset, not a problem.” The panel I participated in was about “how to lead a community during times of trouble.” Most of the panelists had actually led their communities through various crises, from the 2001 anthrax attacks to Oklahoma City’s bombing; I was added, along with the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, so there would be at least two panelists whose experience was observing rather than doing. 
Clicking on the link will open a new browser window from which you can choose either to read the transcript or to listen to the audio.

This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC's CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. This one deals with the likely emotional impacts of terrorism (and other major emergencies), and how communicators can best help the public cope with these emotions. The focus is especially on denial and misery as more common emotional reactions than panic — reactions that may be mishandled if the communicator is over-worried about panic prevention instead.

This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The CD-ROM is expected to be available starting in February 2003; order from http://www.cdc.gov/cdcynergy/.   (File on this site: 11 pages / 127 kB.)

This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC's CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. Based partly on my earlier Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action, this one deals with ten "dilemmas" facing emergency communication planners: >

1. Candor versus secrecy
2. Speculation versus refusal to speculate
3. Tentativeness versus confidence
4. Being alarming versus being reassuring
5. Being human versus being professional
6. Being apologetic versus being defensive
7. Decentralization versus centralization
8. Democracy and individual control versus expert decision-making
9. Planning for denial and misery versus planning for panic
10. Erring on the side of caution versus taking chances

For each of the ten dilemmas, my own position leans toward the first of the two poles — and the natural instinct of communicators in mid-emergency leans toward the second.

This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The CD-ROM is expected to be available starting in February 2003; order from http://www.cdc.gov/cdcynergy/.   (File on this site: 29 pages / 193 kB.)

This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. The usual paradigm for emergency communication is the obviously horrific event that is happening right here, right now. This article focuses on communication strategies to address six other paradigms:

1. Obvious/here/future
2. Obvious/here/past
3. Obvious/elsewhere/now
4. Suspected/here/now
5. Suspected/here/future
6. Suspected/here/past

Among the topics covered are worst case scenarios, uncertainty, and dilemma-sharing.

This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The CD-ROM is expected to be available starting in February 2003; order from http://www.cdc.gov/cdcynergy/.   (File on this site: 21 pages / 167 kB.)

On September 12, 2002, I gave a half-day presentation on “Planning for Bioterrorism Communication” in Breezy Point MN, at the annual Community Health Conference sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). The presentation was based on three chapters I was writing for an emergency communication manual soon to be published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The three chapters have now been posted:

• “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication”  ;
• “Dilemmas in Emergency Communication Policy”  ;
• “Obvious or Suspected, Here or Elsewhere, Now or Then: Paradigms of Emergency Events  .”

But this much shorter summary by MDH's risk communication specialist Buddy Ferguson is still useful. (9 pages)

In June 2002 I gave a keynote presentation with the above title to the annual meeting of the Canadian Chemical Producers’ Association. I focused on some ways the chemical industry’s Responsible Care program wasn’t working, and what the industry might want to do next. CCPA followed up with an interview covering roughly the same ground, which was posted on its members-only web site. The text of the interview is on this site. The interviewer was Harvey Chartrand.    (File on this site.)

The interview that CCPA posted on its web site is the previous item on this list. But the actual interview also covered my views on how September 11 should affect chemical industry transparency, and on the relationship between terrorism and employee sabotage. That portion of the interview is here, with CCPA’s permission.    (File on this site.)

This CDC webcast includes excerpts from a November 2001 presentation I made to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, plus live discussion of the issue by a panel of other risk communicators. For a longer written version of my CDC presentation, see my December 29, 2001 column “Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action.”

This interview focuses on the “other side” of risk communication — how to persuade people to take risk more seriously. It deals mostly with two problems: employees who ignore safety procedures even though they have been well trained, and employers who ignore safety opportunities even though they are cost-effective. Both problems have their roots in outrage.

This very brief interview discusses the events of 9/11. For a much (MUCH) longer treatment of the same topic, see my October 22, 2001 column “Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism: High Hazard, High Outrage.”

These Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files are located on this site.   safety AT WORK is an electronic full-colour magazine that is published every 2 weeks. It reports on OHS, Risk Management and other issues from an independent and global perspective. A sample issue and subscription details are available at www.worksafety.com.au.

Back in the 1980s, Vincent Covello and I gave back-to-back presentations on risk communication as part of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lecture series. When Tony Wolbarst of EPA decided to collect the presentations into a book, he offered everyone a chance to revise and update. Vincent and I decided to merge our efforts into a single article on the state of risk communication, based loosely on what we had said originally plus what we now consider important. The result is a pretty good overview of the shared opinions of two well-seasoned practitioners.    (File on this site.)

This NPR program, produced by WBUR in Boston, was mostly an interview with Sheldon Rampton, author of a book about the untrustworthiness of experts whose research supports industry positions on risk issues. But I was discussed in the book, so they decided to include me in the interview too.

(This audio file is located on the web site of the radio show.)

This review of a book on England’s “mad cow disease” crisis is relevant for its discussion of how to communicate about a small problem that threatens to become a big problem. Think anthrax. As always, over-reassurance turns out to be the wrong approach.   (File on this site.)

In 1999, I was part of a review team analyzing a groundwater contamination controversy at the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod. Most of the team focused on technical issues, but Tara O’Toole and I wrote a chapter arguing that MMR should take community involvement even more seriously than it already was doing, and should consider a range of other outrage management strategies as well.
(Note: this PDF file is on the Massachusetts Military Reservation site.)

SustainAbility is an international consultancy devoted to founder John Elkington’s concept of a “triple bottom line” (economic, environmental, and social sustainability) for corporations. I have long admired it, and in recent years have been a member of its “faculty,” a sort of board-of-old-farts. This exchange of letters with John and with Chris Marsden, another faculty member, points to a key difference between SustainAbility’s work and mine: the distinction between corporate responsibility (doing what’s right) and corporate responsiveness (doing what stakeholders want).    (File on this site.)

This short overview was written for public utilities — sewage treatment plants, water companies, power companies, etc. The focus is especially on the benefits of sharing control ... or even abandoning control altogether. Includes a sidebar article:  Managing Outrage: A Primer.    (File on this site.)

This short article features a rationale for focusing more on outrage management, and a summary of five key strategies for managing outrage. It was aimed at corporate directors in the Australian mining and minerals industry. The editor’s introduction includes a thinly disguised advertisement for my outrage management software; that was my price for the article.    (File on this site.)

This is one of two articles I have posted dealing with the Precaution Adoption Process Model, developed mostly by Neil Weinstein and tested by Neil and me (and colleagues) using radon as the test case. The other article, A Model of the Precaution Adoption Process: Evidence From Home Radon Testing, is statistically heavier going and methodologically less rigorous, but covers more ground: It says more about how people decide to test their homes for radon, and contains a more detailed description of the model itself. This one has more convincing evidence that people decide to take precautions — in this case to test for radon — in stages, and that different interventions work best at different stages.    (File on this site.)

The experiment reported in this article deals with ways of depicting risk when you’re trying to get people to realize how serious the risk is ... or how serious is isn’t. In other words, how do you explain risk data so your audience will neither underestimate nor overestimate seriousness? The study shows some strategies that help, even in the face of outrage. The study also documents — for readers who need it documented — that outrage does make people consider a risk more serious.    (File on this site.)

This is a summary of the article: “Experimental Evidence for Stages of Precaution Adoption,” by Neil D. Weinstein, Judith E. Lyon, Peter M. Sandman, and Cara L. Cuite, Health Psychology, 1998, vol. 17, pp. 445–453. The article isn’t available on the web.
(Please note that this summary is located on the source page. Clicking on the link will open a new browser window.)

This short column deals with sabotage — and the important possibility that outraged employees can pose a hazard to everyone else. It was written (obviously) before 9/11, but resonates even more powerfully now.   (File on this site.)

This article organizes my thinking and research on media coverage of risk into seven principles. Not included is the “principle” I now emphasize most with clients: that media relations usually matters a great deal less than stakeholder relations, and usually follows it. The article overlaps the media portion of Explaining Environmental Risk, but it has newer thinking.

In the mid-1990s I consulted on and off for two years at the Hanford nuclear waste cleanup. My client was Westinghouse, then a major Hanford contractor. This interview with Westinghouse’s Peter Bengston was published in the site newsletter. It’s a pretty decent overview of what I was trying to accomplish there. Roughly a decade later, by the way, I was brought to Hanford again, on and off, for a year. The contractor wasn’t Westinghouse any longer and the technical issues had evolved some. But the basic problem of insufficient attention to the outrage half of the risk equation was unchanged. (Doesn't say much for the value of consultants, does it?)

Being asked to summarize the whole of risk communication in a short encyclopedia article was a challenge (even a decade ago, when much less was known). For me the biggest challenge was to summarize risk communication, not just my approach to it. I think I partially succeeded.    (File on this site.)

My conviction that the “outrage” component of risk influences public responses more than its “hazard” component is grounded in two decades of consulting experience ... and a scant handful of empirical research studies. This article reports most of the latter.    (File on this site.)

Power line EMFs have greatly declined as a public controversy since this short article was written in 1993 — mostly because the industry took the issue seriously and learned with us that the risk was low. But comparable issues (cell phone EMFs come to mind) are still hot, and the article’s advice is relevant to any risk controversy.   (File on this site.)

This short article starts with the assumption that coercion is an unreliable way to site controversial facilities, and tries to offer some better answers grounded in risk communication. An earlier and much longer treatment of the same themes can be found in Getting to Maybe: Some Communications Aspects of Siting Hazardous Waste Facilities.   (File on this site.)

A recurring question among my clients is: “Why can’t we just explain the data so people won’t be outraged any more?” This article reports some research on the efficacy of technical information as a way to shape risk perception. The results are not encouraging to my clients’ fondest hopes.   (File on this site.)

This DEP “Research Project Summary” reports research comparing the impact of outrage management and technical detail on public perception of risk. Guess which one wins.    (File on this site: 4 pages / 95 kB.)

For about a decade, Neil Weinstein and I (with colleagues) did research on radon — a high-hazard low-outrage risk that first became important in the mid-1980s. This article uses several of our radon data sets to illustrate Neil’s Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM). The PAPM is one of several contending models of how people actually decide whether or not to protect themselves from risks. Different models lead to different interventions, so the competition over which model best explains people’s behavior is important for those trying to persuade publics to take precautions about serious hazards.
(I've also posted another article, Experimental Evidence for Stages of Health Behavior Change: The Precaution Adoption Process Model Applied to Home Radon Testing, on the PAPM and radon, this one reporting a later experiment demonstrating that the decision to test does happen in separate stages.)
(Both files on this site.)

I wish I could publish an article like this for all the professionals I work with who tend to do their jobs in ways that make my job harder. Two come immediately to mind: emerging communication responsibilities of toxicologists ... and of lawyers. Still, epidemiology has the worst communication problems of the three — especially when public outrage is high, hazard is probably low, the epidemiologist is working for the company that made the mess, and the science falls far short of definitive. This article focuses on my wishful recommendations for such situations. I feel them today even more strongly than I did when I wrote the article more than a decade ago.   (File on this site.)

This short article argues that dialogue works a lot better than monologue, especially when people are outraged about a technically small but nonetheless frightening or offensive risk. It ends with a list of questions sources should ask themselves when trying to convince an audience some risk isn’t worth worrying about.   (File on this site.)

In the late 1980s, the Chemical Manufacturers Association (now the American Chemistry Council) inaugurated its “Responsible Care” program in the U.S. In 1990, I spoke at a national CMA meeting on how to address skepticism about the program — not just external skepticism, but skepticism inside the industry as well. I later massaged the speech into a CMA pamphlet. Most of the advice is generic; any company or trade association can expect to encounter the same sorts of skepticism today about its “pro-social” initiatives. As for Responsible Care, it continues to be an influential internal initiative, ratcheting performance ever-upward in such areas as process safety and product stewardship. But the industry has pretty much given up on persuading outsiders that it’s meaningful. There’s a nice irony here. Critics assume the industry has terrific rhetoric and poor performance — but Responsible Care has been much more successful as performance than as rhetoric.    (File on this site.)

Most of the research on radon risk response — mine as well as others’ — has focused on how to persuade people to test. This article shows that even after people have tested and found a high radon level, persuading them to do something about the problem isn’t easy ... and mere information isn’t what does the trick. When this research was done, radon was a new issue; the findings reported here may be more useful for those working on other new issues than for those working on the now-familiar radon problem.    (File on this site.)

This was one of several articles written jointly with Michael Greenberg, David Sachsman, and Kandice Salomone summarizing our research on media coverage of environmental risk. This one looked at 26 months worth of network coverage. Not surprisingly, we found that visually interesting stories got more coverage than ones that were more serious in health terms but harder to photograph. We also found that the networks were much likelier to cover environmental stories near one of their bureaus than comparable stories requiring more travel. The coverage patterns for the three networks were more striking in their similarities than in their differences.    (7-MB Adobe .pdf file on this site.)

This manual on how to use risk comparisons and risk statistics was commissioned to help chemical plant managers explain air emissions to their neighbors. Chapter III on risk comparisons, especially, is still relevant; I posted it alone last year after reading too many comparisons of anthrax spores in the mail to auto accidents. Later research hasn’t borne out all its seat-of-the-pants conclusions, but the advice at the end of the chapter about the worst risk comparisons holds firm — in my terms these comparisons fail (especially when people are outraged) because they try to compare the hazard of high-outrage and low-outrage risks. The other chapters are also useful and not really outdated, I think. The appendices are both outdated and all too likely to be misused. They’re what the client originally wanted most. Vincent Covello, Paul Slovic, and I wrote the rest of the manual to soften them.
(Multiple files on this site.)

This is one of the earliest — and the shortest and most often cited — of my articles about the distinction between hazard and outrage. The focus is on the factors that determine whether people will over-react or under-react to a risk.   (File on this site.)
Traducción en Español  : Comunicación de riesgos: afrontar el ultraje público   (PDF on this site.)

I have long been convinced that explaining risk data is not the essence of risk communication. Addressing people’s outrage is far more important. Still, you do have to explain the data! And it’s not an easy task — especially when being interviewed by a journalist on a hot story. This article is a primer on three aspects of the problem: simplifying, personalizing, and using risk comparisons.   (File on this site.)

This EPA brochure has long been out-of-print. It predates my articulation of the hazard-versus-outrage distinction, but contains much of the thinking that went into that distinction. In fact every time I reread this it reminds me of principles and examples I ought to reinstate in my presentations. (Files on this site.)

This article got its start as a 1985 report for the New Jersey Hazardous Waste Facilities Siting Commission. New Jersey never sited a facility; on the other hand, most of the advice in the article was never implemented either. I've since been involved in dozens of siting controversies (some of them over facilities that actually got built!), and I've learned a lot that isn't in this article — but the basics haven't changed, and this is a pretty solid summary of them. (P.S. Jim Lanard, who helped develop the ideas in this article and wrote the foreword, is also my brother-in-law; he introduced me to his sister in 1985 and we were married in 1990.)    (File on this site.)

This 1986 article aimed at helping peace activists develop communication strategies that wouldn’t deepen people’s “psychic numbing” about nuclear weapons. Though its political content is out of date, its prescription — anger, love, hope, and action — is relevant today to coping with public denial about terrorism. (For terrorism I would want to add to the prescription the need to acknowledge and share the underlying fears — what people are “really” afraid of.)   (File on this site.)

In 1983–84 I was media and outreach coordinator for the New Jersey Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze. This article was originally written for committed freeze activists, warning them about the things they (we) did or failed to do that turned off newcomers. In the years that followed, it was reprinted in the newsletters of all sorts of activist groups.   (File on this site.)

In 1983–84, I took a sabbatical from my professorship at Rutgers University and worked on communication for the nuclear freeze movement. This interview was published in the Rutgers alumni magazine during my sabbatical. It talks about people’s fear of nuclear war and their reluctance to get involved in the peace movement. I have to say that both the world and my political values have changed some — though I do like the young man who gave this interview. What hasn’t changed much is my analysis of nuclear denial, which resonates today for current issues like the fear of terrorism. (The book I said I was writing, by the way, never got written; I still have a hundred or so pages of draft somewhere.)    (File on this site.)

After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed an investigative commission. One of the commission’s mandates was to look at public communications, both what sources told the media and what the media told the public. Having just published “At Three Mile Island” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I was asked to work with the commission’s Public Right to Information Task Force, chaired by David M. Rubin. The task force report, with 14 authors, has been out-of-print for decades, but was recently put online as part of a huge Three Mile Island “Resource Center” run by Dickinson College. The report constitutes a wonderful blow-by-blow account of a pretty typical example of corporate, government, and media crisis communication.

This was the first “crisis” I watched unfold. The themes have since become familiar (they are playing out now in the terrorism crisis):   The sources minimize the risk and over-reassure the audience; the experts are uncertain and disagree with each other; the public doesn’t panic but everyone keeps thinking it will; the color stories overpower the technical stories. (Writing this article in 1979 changed my career; see “Muddling My Way into Risk Communication.”) Includes two sidebar articles: “The local media feel the heat” and “The Inquirer goes for broke”   (File on this site.)

This discussion of how the media influence their audience and how doctors can influence the media was written 25 years ago — before managed care and before cable. Despite the outdated specifics about both medicine and media, the principles have held up well. This is still a pretty good primer on media impact and how to horn in.    (File on this site.)