2018 Guestbook
Comments and Responses

name:	Anonymous	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
date:	December 21, 2018
location:	United Kingdom

comment:

Did you read the analysis about climate change recently published in The Psychologist?

People often underreact to real risks and overreact to remote risks. It seems the biggest problem with climate change is apathy.

What do you think? What do you think should be done to make people care about climate change?

peter responds:

Thanks for article link. It’s an excellent short summary of some of the reasons why it’s hard to get people upset about climate change.

I don’t dispute anything in the article. And I don’t dispute that apathy is the most common problematic public reaction to the threat of climate change. That is, the majority of people who say they just don’t care much about climate change really just don’t care much about climate change. So getting them to care more – piercing their apathy – is probably the biggest climate change risk communication challenge.

But I continue to think that there are other things going on as well. An important subset of the target audience, I believe, is offended by climate crusaders or terrified into climate denial or has some other outrage-related reason for shrugging off the problem. These people may tell you they’re apathetic. They may even consider themselves apathetic. For sure climate change activists are likely to mistake them for apathetic, and may therefore pursue persuasion strategies that backfire on this audience.

I wrote about this in some detail in my column on “Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial.” Written in 2009, it’s out of date now, and I haven't kept up on the literature enough to be sure whether there are new studies that confirm or disconfirm some of what I wrote. But I’m inclined to think what’s in the column is still true and still important and still neglected.

I summarized that long column as follows:

Whenever you’re trying to persuade people to take global climate change seriously, consider the possibility that the barrier you need to overcome may not be apathy, but rather psychological denial. If your persuasion efforts routinely backfire – that is, if people seem to get more apathetic when you start telling them why they should be getting more concerned – it’s almost surely denial.

When you suspect denial, try to figure out what kind. Are there deeply held beliefs or patterns of behavior that your global warming advocacy is challenging, leading to cognitive dissonance and a concerted search for evidence that you’re wrong? Are your messages arousing intolerable levels of fear, guilt, sadness, helplessness, or other emotions, leading people to avoid considering the issue at all?

Once you think you know what kind(s) of denial you’re up against, change your messaging to seduce people out of their denial. At a minimum, try to avoid messaging that seems likely to exacerbate global warming denial:

• Avoid fear-mongering.
• Avoid guilt-tripping – such as harping endlessly on the charge that global warming is anthropogenic.
• Avoid coming across as an ideologue, more committed to changing people’s lifestyles than to addressing global warming – and therefore as hostile to technological solutions.
• Avoid focusing on climate change mitigation to the exclusion of climate change adaptation.
• Avoid taking pleasure in bad news – venting your anger and self-righteousness in ways that add to your audience’s guilt and sadness.
• Avoid arguing a one-sided case that fails to acknowledge that climate change skeptics have some decent arguments too.

Finally, a crucial reminder: Don’t get so preoccupied with denial that you forget about apathy. And, in fact, don’t imagine that apathy and denial are all there is. Some people are still unaware that global warming is an issue they should be thinking about; some have acquired misinformation that keeps them from getting involved; some are on our side already and need support to do even more than they’re doing now.

Even though I’m writing this Guestbook response almost a decade later than I wrote that column, much of what I have to say now is a series of footnotes to what I had to say then. If you’ve already read the column and you’re looking for new thinking, you may find this response thin gruel. I’ll try to say some new things as well as underlining some of what I’ve already said.

Climate change precaution advocacy

As the article you recommend makes clear, climate change precaution advocacy is a daunting challenge in and of itself.

It may in fact be several quite different daunting challenges. A lot of my precaution advocacy work – especially the work on radon – made use of the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) , developed chiefly by my friend and colleague Neil Weinstein. The key insight of the PAPM is that the decision to take a precaution occurs in stages, with different factors affecting each transition from one stage to the next.

The stages in the PAPM are:

1. Haven’t heard about the risk in question.
2. Haven’t thought about it.
3. Haven’t decided what if anything to do about it.
4. Decided to act but haven’t acted.
5. Acted but haven’t decided whether to continue or do more.
6. Ongoing action.

A big piece of the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 is grabbing people’s attention, whereas getting from Stage 2 to Stages 3 to 4 has a lot more to do with telling people what you want them to do and convincing them it’s worth doing. These different precaution advocacy tasks are quite likely to call for very different messaging.

The stages in the PAPM may help sort out two of the biggest dilemmas in climate change precaution advocacy: doomsaying versus optimism and radical solutions versus moderate ones. Maybe doomsaying and radical solutions work best for attention-grabbing. But once people are attentive, maybe optimism and moderate solutions work best to get them moving. If this is true – and it’s just a hypothesis – maybe one of the problems faced by climate change activists is how to pivot from one messaging strategy to the other without losing credibility.

And what about mismatches? It seems to me that a lot of climate change messaging today combines doomsaying with moderate solutions. This is true of the October 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and even more of the English-language media coverage of that report. My somewhat unfair summary of the bottom-line conclusion: The world is going to hell in a handbasket so let’s all use energy-efficient light bulbs. Maybe that sort of mismatch is especially ineffective.

The literature on climate change precaution advocacy is vast, and it’s growing too quickly for me to stay on top of. The article you cite is one of thousands. I am not trying to second-guess this whole literature. I just want to suggest that climate change messaging challenges are daunting even without adding outrage management into the mix.

Climate change outrage management

But I think it’s important to add outrage management into the mix.

There is some overlap between my outrage management approach and the precaution advocacy advice in the article you cite. The very first paragraph of that article, in fact, concedes the possibility that “it’s not that people don’t care: it’s just that the problem is so enormous and encompassing that people feel helpless and disempowered.” A bit later, the authors note that “in the absence of a clear potential villain, there’s nobody to blame except ourselves, and this can trigger a range of defensive biases.”

The article also grapples with the liberal political identity of climate change advocacy:

Environmental messages could focus less on harm to nature (think polar bears), which appeals primarily to liberals, and more on community cohesion, enhancing national security and preserving nature, which appeal more to conservatives….

A person with a conservative ideology might be in favor of conserving resources, but if they don’t want to be seen as an environmentalist, they won’t carry a reusable bag emblazoned with an image of Mother Earth….

Facts are almost worthless if the audience sees the communicator as part of a rival outgroup. For example, Al Gore is so widely reviled among Republicans that even evidence-based messages associated with him could potentially be rejected out of hand.

Framing persuasion efforts in ways commensurate with the values of your audience – talking to conservatives using conservative frames and conservative spokespeople – is smart precaution advocacy, of course. But it’s crucial when the audience is more outraged than apathetic, when audience members suspect your persuasion goal is a challenge to their values, when they suspect you don’t share their values at all and are in fact contemptuous of their values.

In keeping with my outrage management perspective, I would go further on this point than the article’s authors go. I’d get the values gap if not onto the table, at least into the room. That is, I’d acknowledge that climate change has shaped up as a feature of liberal ideology, while conservative ideology has made climate skepticism a feature; and that this is truly unfortunate because there are sound conservative reasons for worrying about climate change and sound conservative remedies worth pursuing.

I’d also acknowledge, when it’s true, that your audience isn’t wrong (or entirely wrong) about you, that you’re a lefty who prefers big government climate change solutions to capitalist ones. And I’d acknowledge that the correlation between political values and climate change concern is only partly an unfortunate accident of how the issue evolved; it’s partly real. Environmentalism, for example, is explicitly globalist since pollution knows no borders, so insofar as conservatism is anti-globalist it has a real reason to be skeptical not just of the kind of people who are pushing for climate change action, but also of the kind of international cooperation that climate change action requires.

Of course all these acknowledgments won’t fit into a 10-second public service announcement. But it’s worth bearing in mind that a short attention span is most characteristic of apathetic people, which is why precaution advocacy efforts have to be brief. Outraged people, by contrast, turn off messaging because it offends them or upsets them, not because it bores them. When they’re addressed in ways that are responsive to their outrage, they’re all ears.

Allocating climate change messaging resources

I’m not arguing that addressing the outraged audience is necessarily the top priority for climate change activists. In responding to the climate change controversy or any controversy, activists have to allocate resources among three basic strategies:

• support mobilization (get people who are already concerned about climate change more involved, personally and politically);
• public relations (get people who aren’t very interested to move from apathy to support and involvement, inevitably pretty tentative and mild support at first, but it’s a foot in the door) or
• outrage management (get people who are disposed to be opponents less opposed, moving them more toward apathy and maybe, eventually, even into the supporter camp).

The public relations strategy in this schema is closely linked to precaution advocacy. There’s a huge audience of people who are apathetic about climate change. They’re not against efforts to address the problem, but they’re not disposed to pay attention to those efforts, or to join in them, or to accept personal sacrifices in their pursuit.

The outrage management strategy, by contrast, addresses people who are at least to some extent your opponents. They’re not just apathetic about what if anything should be done to mitigate climate change. They’re inclined to think climate change is a low-priority issue and inclined to oppose efforts to address it. At the extreme, they think climate change is a fraud perpetrated by leftwing environmentalists and their allies for dishonorable motives.

In order to allocate climate change messaging resources among these three basic strategies, it’s obviously crucial to diagnose your audience. How many are supporters already? How many are apathetic? How many are resistant?

And how many are someplace in the middle? The boundary between the precaution advocacy audience and the outrage management audience is sometimes squishier than I usually acknowledge. This is one of those times. Let’s set aside support mobilization for the moment and look only at the range of audiences from apathetic to opposed. At one edge of this spectrum are people who claim to have virtually no knowledge, beliefs, or attitudes about climate change – and no interest in it either. Their apathy is a pristine tabula rasa. On the other edge are people who define themselves as “skeptics” or even as “opponents.” They pay attention to the issue but from an opposition point of view; they are willing to invest considerable effort to defeat the climate change mitigation agenda they believe activists are trying to foist on the rest of us. Somewhere in the middle are people whose “apathy” is accompanied by a sense that it would probably be a mistake for our society to devote a lot of resources to mitigating climate change, especially when the mitigation strategies they keep hearing about sound either too radical to be feasible or too moderate to do much good. They are “apathetic” in part because their intuition tells them the climate change mitigation agenda is a bad investment.

Just as important as the squishy boundary is the probability that a lot of opposition/skepticism masquerades as apathy. People may say they’re not interested in climate change when in fact they’re skeptical/opposed. And proponents may think the audiences they’re unsuccessfully trying to arouse are apathetic when in fact those audiences are skeptical/opposed.

As I noted earlier, I believe advocacy that backfires is diagnostically significant. Apathetic people don’t normally recoil from messages urging them to become more concerned about something. At worst they remain stolidly uninterested, not more and more vehemently hostile. When advocacy boomerangs badly, it suggests that the advocates have erred, that the audience wasn’t simply apathetic and the messaging hit a nerve it should have avoided.

Similarly, people may say they’re supporters when in fact they’re apathetic … or perhaps even when in fact they’re skeptical/opposed. I have seen several surveys that seem to show growing public support for climate change mitigation, even in the U.S. and even among conservatives. I mistrust these findings. I think huge swaths of the public have learned that that’s the “right” opinion, so that’s the opinion they give when asked. In many cases I suspect that it’s a paper-thin opinion that won’t withstand much in the way of sacrifices for the cause. And in more than a few cases I suspect that under the camouflage of climate change support is something like opposition.

I don’t have data on this. I’ve seen plenty of studies that categorize attitudes toward climate change, including the wonderful work of The George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and the Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication. (This isn’t really two separate recommendations; they work together a lot.) All these schemas distinguish support from apathy from skepticism/opposition. But I haven’t run into any studies that test my intuition that a lot of what we think is support or at worst apathy is actually closer to outrage … and that efforts to mobilize the support or pierce the apathy may fail or even backfire because they exacerbate the outrage instead.

My own view

Before I go any further, I want to clarify my own view about climate change. It’s decidedly not a professional opinion; my field is risk communication, not climatology. But since I’m about to describe some of what puts me off personally about climate change activism, and what I’m guessing puts off lots of other people as well, I want to make clear that I’m still on your side. I see myself as a “skeptical supporter” – a category that too rarely figures into either side’s calculations.

A few specifics on my own climate change opinions:

• Even though I think the extent of the “expert consensus” is exaggerated (politically canny experts keep their climate change doubts to themselves), the odds still favor the expert majority over the expert minority. When most of the most knowledgeable people claim something is true, it’s probably true.
• I know the cost of mistakenly taking climate change concerns to heart would be high, but I believe the cost of mistakenly dismissing those concerns would be higher still. I’d rather risk implementing unnecessary precautions than risk failing to implement necessary ones.
• I’m all for climate mitigation measures that are good for the world anyway, and for climate mitigation measures that won’t have been too costly even if they turn out ineffective or unnecessary.
• I’m also enthusiastic about the promise of technological progress, even the possibility of a technical deus ex machina (seed the atmosphere with dimethylmeatloaf or whatever).
• I think the free market is at least as likely as big government to pioneer the path forward – albeit belatedly and with more collateral damage than an earlier and more coordinated solution might have permitted.
• I’m skeptical about those who claim that climate change mitigation demands radical shifts in how other people live – especially when the radical shifts they have in mind are precisely the ones they favored before climate change got hot.
• I consider all complex models to be works in progress. That is, I think the experts know a lot about the climate past and present, much less about the climate future, and less still about how to bend that future in the desired direction. Claims that we need to act without being certain make sense to me; claims that we are certain already don’t.
• I think anyone who is seriously worried about climate change should be fighting just as hard for adaptation as for mitigation.

In a nutshell: I think you’re probably right that climate change poses a serious threat that merits serious action. That’s why I wish the messaging promulgated by proponents of that view weren’t so often off-putting.

What’s off-putting?

What’s off-putting? The list that follows is incomplete, and the items on the list are described only very briefly. I’ve tried to avoid saying again things I already said better in my 2009 column So once again I recommend the column.

All of this seeps through to the consciousness of many who may look to climate change true believers like they’re apathetic – but who are actually leery of being snookered, or suspicious of the motives and sincerity and candor of the activists, or deep in the clutches not of “denialism” but of plain ole garden-variety psychological denial … something in the outrage bailiwick.

name:	Anonymous	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Concerned about vaccination
date:	November 18, 2018
location:	The Philippines

comment:

I read your recent column, “Labeling and Informed Consent,” with deep interest, particularly the section on the Dengvaxia crisis in the Philippines.

What would you recommend that the Philippine Department of Health do now to rebuild trust in the routine immunization program? Is this still a time for outrage management, or should they be shifting gears?

peter responds:

For readers who didn’t read the column you’re referencing and don’t want to read it now, here’s a quick summary.

Dengvaxia is a new vaccine against dengue, a common tropical disease that’s most severe the second time somebody catches it. The vaccine works well for vaccinees who have already had dengue – which is most people in places where dengue is endemic. But it sometimes backfires for the minority of vaccinees who have never had dengue before, making their first post-vaccination case resemble that second, more serious case. Tests exist to tell these two groups apart, but they’re laborious. As a practical matter, testing wouldn’t be feasible as part of a mass Dengvaxia campaign. So either you vaccinate everybody over a certain age, benefiting the majority but endangering the minority, or you don’t do the campaign at all.

The Philippines launched its Dengvaxia campaign back when this downside was already suspected but not yet proved. It did so without warning about the downside. When the truth came out, there was an explosion of outrage. Many politicians, journalists, and parents of vaccinated children came to see Dengvaxia as much more dangerous (to some) and much less beneficial (to many) than it actually is. The Philippine Department of Health was forced to cancel the campaign. Worse – far worse – outraged distrust of the health department led to a steep decline in parents’ willingness to let their children get other vaccines. Participation in longstanding Philippine vaccination campaigns plummeted.

This is of course an outrage management problem: how to ameliorate Dengvaxia-related outrage at public health officials sufficiently to rebuild confidence and participation in the nation’s other vaccination programs. If outrage management efforts fail and people continue to refuse to vaccinate their kids, population immunity will start to decline and the Philippines may start to see serious outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and even polio. That would be a public health crisis, so there would be need for crisis communication. The goal of outrage management now is to prevent that from happening.

In the meantime, of course, precaution advocacy about vaccine-preventable diseases is certainly relevant. But outraged parents are unlikely to pay much heed to health warnings from officials they have learned to mistrust. That’s why my fifth recommended message below has to do with more trusted surrogates who can take over the precaution advocacy task. For the people and agencies that foisted Dengvaxia on the Philippine public without doing a proper job of informed consent, the key task now is outrage management.

I should add that the need for outrage management applies not just to the Philippine Department of Health and the Philippine government more generally. It also applies to the World Health Organization, which encouraged the Philippines to launch its Dengvaxia vaccination campaign without pushing hard (if at all) for informed consent about the vaccine’s then-suspected (now confirmed) downside for never-infected people. After the evidence of this downside got stronger and the Philippine hullabaloo exploded, WHO reversed course. It now recommends Dengvaxia campaigns only if vaccinees are tested for prior dengue infection – which as a practical matter probably means no mass Dengvaxia campaigns at all until easier tests are developed.

I think WHO and the Philippine Department of Health share the blame for earning mistrust and thereby provoking vaccine hesitancy in the Philippines. Both should be in outrage management mode vis-à-vis the Philippine public. Both owe the Philippine public and especially the parents of vaccinees a heartfelt apology.

The question of what the Philippine Department of Health should do now is really two questions: What should they do ideally? And if they can’t do that because the higher-ups won’t let them, what might they be able to do that could help at least a little.

I’ll stick to the first question.

In a nutshell, I think the health department needs to acknowledge and apologize for its failure to trust parents and the public with complete information about the possible (and now confirmed) downsides of the Dengvaxia vaccine. The five key messages as I see them:

I’m pretty sure this is a pie-in-the-sky set of recommended messages. I’d have trouble persuading any client anywhere in the world to show this kind of candor about its past misdeeds – and tougher still, to publicly set this high standard of candor for its future communications. In the fractured and fractious political environment of the Philippines, with various Dengvaxia-related inquiries and lawsuits ongoing or threatened, my recommendations are unlikely to get a friendly reception from health department bigwigs … assuming anyone dared present them to health department bigwigs in the first place.

As for my fifth recommendation, in some ways the most important, it would take an unusual health department to hand over vaccination precaution advocacy to others on the grounds that it had forfeited the public’s trust. And I haven’t a clue who those others – X and Y and Z – might be.

Still, these are my first thoughts about the ideal messages for the current situation in the Philippines.

name:	Peter Stoller	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	University student
date:	November 13, 2018
location:	Iowa, U.S.

comment:

I am working on a research project analyzing public perception of nuclear power. I would like to include a section where it does a hazard vs. outrage analysis of nuclear power, determines what the appropriate course of action should be (precaution advocacy, outrage management, or crisis communication), and evaluates the response of the government and nuclear power companies.

I’m curious as to what your take would be on this topic. I have a general understanding of your work, but are there any specific areas you suggest I dive into deeper? Or potentially other research that might be useful?

peter responds:

I’m not going to address your entire comment. It covers too much ground for a Guestbook entry (and too much for a student research paper too, I think). But I can’t resist the invitation to do a quick-and-dirty outrage assessment of nuclear power.

I’m indexing this entry under both outrage management and precaution advocacy. A proponent working to build support and an activist working to build opposition would both need to assess the outrage potential of nuclear power. (In the event of an accident at a nuclear plant, of course, the task would be crisis communication. At that point the sources of outrage about nuclear power in general would be close to irrelevant, while the sources of outrage about the accident would be totally obvious.)

I need to note at the outset that U.S. public opinion about nuclear power is very fluid. (See for example this 2016 overview.) It’s currently a pretty low-salience issue. If given the option, a lot of people will pick “not sure” or “no opinion” as their opinion; supporters mostly shy away from “strongly support” while opponents tend to avoid “strongly oppose.” Much also depends on the context in which the question is asked. In environmental surveys where people are primed to think about environment, opposition tends to be higher than support, while the opposite is true in energy surveys where people are primed to think about energy supply. Concern about climate change is surprisingly unrelated to nuclear power attitudes, perhaps because so many people don’t know that nuclear is carbon-free and therefore a climate change winner. Generally, energy cost seems to affect people’s responses more than safety or environmental concerns. Support for nuclear power goes up when the monthly electricity bill goes up (and even when the cost of filling the car’s gas tank goes up – go figure).

Perhaps most interesting from an outrage perspective, people who live near a nuclear plant tend to be supportive – probably because of self-selection, I assume, but also because of outrage factors like familiarity and knowability. For the same reasons, people who don’t live near one mostly don’t want to – so new nuclear plants are typically proposed for locations that have at least one already. But even where nuclear plants already exist, fervent opposition arises when a new one is proposed. Some of the hostility comes from out-of-town activists, but plenty comes from longtime neighbors too.

All of the above aside, nuclear power is intrinsically high-outrage. Activists seeking to arouse anti-nuclear outrage have a lot going for them, while industry proponents trying to prevent or ameliorate the outrage face an uphill battle. This is so much the case that for years I routinely used nuclear power in seminars as my go-to example to show participants what an outrage assessment of a high-outrage situation looks like. After a while I switched to genetically modified organisms, which served the purpose just as well.

The following assessment is confined to my “A” list of “Twelve Principal Outrage Components.” It is based mostly on points I have made before, but I won’t clutter it with links to the many other places on this website where nuclear power outrage is mentioned.

Most of the concrete examples that follow are drawn from my experience at the 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant accident, and my work thereafter on the staff of the U.S. government commission that investigated the accident. In the 39 years since then I have seen plenty of equally good examples of the same factors playing out at other nuclear plants around the world. But TMI wasn’t my client so I can discuss events there without worrying about breaching client confidentiality.

name:	Margriet Kuijper	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Communication consultant
date:	October 3, 2018
location:	The Netherlands

comment:

Last week I happened to watch some of the U.S. Senate hearings. It was fascinating to watch, I think.

It made me think right away about all the situations I have experienced where people pretend to argue over the facts but in fact are so outraged that their main priority is making sure the other party does not succeed. See for example this article, “Kavanaugh Hearing Runs Red Hot with Partisan Anger.”

I was wondering whether or not outrage management can help decide on how best to proceed in this situation. Is the FBI investigation going to help? Or is this all too little too late.

Are you considering writing anything about this? Or is this too controversial an issue to weigh in on?

peter responds:

I don’t want to voice any opinion about the substance of the controversy over whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Within days that will be moot. And we’ll have years to debate whether Kavanaugh should have been confirmed.

But I do want to address the question you raise about whether outrage management can help in this situation or in others that are similarly polarized.

Consider the two dominant issues affecting how Senators should vote on the Kavanaugh nomination:

• What they think of the nominee’s judicial views – what sort of Supreme Court Justice he’s likely to be.
• What they think of the nominee’s extra-judicial behavior – whether he probably committed sexual assault decades ago; whether he was sometimes a drunken lout decades ago; whether he was forthright about these things in his recent testimony; etc.

Logically, these two considerations are completely independent. Judges whose judicial posture you like might be guilty of serious personal offenses, while those whose judicial approach you loathe might have been lifelong models of virtue in their personal lives. All four cells in this two-by-two table ought to be occupied.

But in fact two of the four cells are nearly empty. It is vanishingly difficult to find anyone who claims to think that Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy points in one direction vis-à-vis confirmation but his personal integrity points in the other direction.

This is one of the stigmata of extremely high, polarized outrage: the inability or unwillingness to notice that different aspects of a question suggest different answers.

It is similarly difficult to find anyone on either side of this controversy who is prepared to acknowledge publicly that the other side is right about anything – even something secondary. Thus there are very few commentators suggesting that Senator Diane Feinstein behaved badly when she withheld information about Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Kavanaugh until very late in the confirmation process but that Kavanaugh nonetheless should not be confirmed. And there are very few commentators suggesting that Kavanaugh was less candid than he should have been in his testimony but that on balance he nonetheless deserves confirmation.

The inability or unwillingness to acknowledge any argument coming from the other side as valid – or even as coherent and not idiotic – is also one of the stigmata of extremely high, polarized outrage.

Finally, far too many participants and commentators in the Kavanaugh controversy seem to see the other side not merely as opponents but as the enemy, not merely as mistaken but as evil. That too is among the stigmata of extremely high, polarized outrage.

The temper of the times

Obviously this is not just about the Kavanaugh nomination process. Nor is it just about the United States in the Trump era. I think it’s fair to say that in recent years much of the world has entered a period of extremely high, polarized outrage, not just vis-à-vis politics but vis-à-vis many controversies.

I remember studying the “Partisan Press” era in eighteenth and nineteenth century U.S. journalism history. There was at least as much “fake news” then as now. Extremely high, polarized outrage isn’t unprecedented. But it is unprecedented in my adult life, and thus in my professional life as an outrage management consultant.

It often seems to me that more and more people get a kind of ecstatic pleasure from being visibly outraged about some public issue. Not everybody enjoys that sensation, obviously; some have responded to the temper of the times by paying less and less attention to news and commentary that tries or threatens to rile them up. But I think there is a growing cohort that actively seeks out outraged and outrage-arousing media content – especially social media content and the endless comments sections of online versions of mainstream media. They’re not just outrage consumers; they also seek out likeminded people with whom they can share their outrage and people with opposing views at whom they can vent their outrage – again especially in social media and online comments sections. The growing audience enthusiasm for outraged and outrage-arousing media content builds the market, which in turn feeds the audience’s outrage.

Outrage fuels political participation, and political participation is the lifeblood of democracy. But participation motivated by outrage that is extreme, hyper-partisan, and lacking in nuance differs from participation motivated by civic duty, informed judgment, party allegiance, worry, or even “ordinary” outrage.

Outrage is also useful; it communicates to its targets that something they are doing isn’t going down well. I spent much of my career trying to convince clients that stakeholder outrage was a legitimate response to things they were doing. But even I am starting to wonder if too much outrage is eroding important values like civility, compromise, and the ability to see the other side.

People also increasingly utilize outrage for virtue signaling. This term is often used pejoratively, but I mean it neutrally. To a great extent we all define ingroups and outgroups by signaling to others which values and allegiances we hold dear. One crucial way to communicate group membership is to express outrage at whatever the group finds outrageous.

Sounding insufficiently outraged about something you’re supposed to be outraged about has become a significant reputational risk.

Slate Star Codex, one of my favorite bloggers, has coined the phrase “toxoplasma of rage” to capture an important component of the role of outrage in contemporary society. He argues that expressing outrage about something that is obviously outrageous is likely to be seen by one’s ingroup as an insufficient virtue signal. Say the issue is oppression of gays (on the left) or campus censorship (on the right). Expressing outrage about an egregious example of this issue does a poor job of signaling your allegiance to the ingroup norm, since even nonmembers of the group agree that the example is egregious. Furthermore, your point about the example is so obviously valid that it’s hardly newsworthy, so you don’t get much attention for your attack. But if you focus your outrage on a weak example, an example that objective outsiders might judge not to be objectionable at all, then your virtue signal to your ingroup is far more effective and far more likely to garner attention in both mainstream and social media.

The toxoplasma of rage feeds polarization. Instead of focusing your expressions of outrage on instances of gay oppression or campus censorship that neutrals and perhaps even opponents might find convincing, the incentive is to focus on more peripheral and less convincingly outrageous instances, thereby attracting more public attention and demonstrating to allies your total allegiance to the cause. In a calmer and less polarized environment, the fact that your ideological purity is off-putting to everyone other than true believers might be seen as a downside. In an extremely outraged, extremely polarized environment, alienating the outgroup is an added benefit.

Outrage management in highly polarized battles

I have written before about the three competing ways to manage controversies:

• Arouse supporters and cement your base (support mobilization)
• Reach out to neutrals (public relations)
• Ameliorate opposition (outrage management)

The three strategies aren’t just competitors for an organization’s internal resources. They are often in actual conflict with each other. Some ways of ameliorating opposition infuriate supporters, for example, while some ways of arousing supporters infuriate opponents. So it’s essential to figure out which of the three has the highest priority in a given situation.

Of the three, outrage management is least likely to be internally appealing to the organization’s management, which makes it the most likely to be neglected in the competition for resources. I earned much of my living as a consultant convincing clients that they were better off trying to get critics to hate them less (outrage management) than to get neutrals to like them a little (public relations) or to get supporters to love them even more (support mobilization). (For more on why, see also my 2010 column on “Two Kinds of Reputation Management.”)

My core argument to clients was that making opponents less hostile and therefore less engaged in the effort to defeat you was useful – often more useful than making supporters more engaged on your behalf. The example I usually gave was a regulatory proceeding. You want fewer busloads of opponents at the hearing more than you want more busloads of supporters; you want the regulator to feel as little pressure as possible to say no to your project. Outrage management strategies are often an effective way to get neighbors of a proposed facility less hostile enough to stay home from a hearing.

Elections are the obvious exception to the primacy of outrage management. That’s not because outrage management doesn’t work to diminish opponents’ hostility in an election. It’s because diminishing the hostility of people who plan to vote against you isn’t all that useful. They still vote against you. Unless you can get them to stay home, diminishing their hostility doesn’t change the tally. So election campaigns rightly focus instead on support mobilization (making sure your supporters actually vote) and public relations (persuading undecided voters to cast their not very strongly felt votes for you rather than the other guy).

I used to summarize the point this way: Issue politics is mostly about outrage management. Electoral politics is mostly about support mobilization and public relations.

But when issues are highly polarized and outrage is over-the-top – when total war is the only game in town – the case for outrage management gets weaker. Several things happen in an extremely outraged, extremely polarized environment:

I’m not suggesting that our lives have become so high-outrage and so polarized that outrage management is no longer possible or no longer fruitful. There are still many controversies where ameliorating opponents’ outrage is doable and worth doing – often more worth doing than arousing the base or reaching out to neutrals. But I think there are more controversies today than there used to be where that’s not the case, where outrage management is probably a lower-priority investment than support mobilization and public relations.

name:	John Godec	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Public participation consultant
date:	October 3, 2018
location:	Arizona, U.S.

peter’s intro comment:

John Godec’s comment and my response require some prefatory explanation.

Years ago I collaborated with the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) on a two-day course that combines (and in some ways contrasts) my approach to outrage management with the IAP2 approach to public participation. (For more on the “contrast” aspect, see my 2008 column on “Meeting Management: Where Does Risk Communication Fit in Public Participation?”) We also developed a train-the-trainer program to accredit IAP2 members who wanted to teach the course. Originally entitled “Emotion, Outrage, & Public Participation,” the course was recently renamed “Strategies for Dealing with Opposition and Outrage in Public Participation.”

John was on the IAP2 team that developed the course with me. He continues to teach it several times a year.

The “triangle” John refers to in his second paragraph is a graphic I often used to use in seminars to reference what I consider the three main reasons why an organization’s stakeholders become opponents. There are more than three – revenge and ideology, for example, could turn the triangle into a pentagon. But here are the big three:

• Sometimes stakeholders want some benefit for themselves or their communities, and see the organization as taking away that benefit or refusing to provide it. I typically call this “greed.” “Self-interest” is a more neutral term.
• Sometimes stakeholders are upset – most often angry or frightened or both – about something the organization is doing or proposes to do. This is what I call “outrage.” It’s the main focus of the outrage management paradigm of risk communication.
• Sometimes stakeholders feel ego-threatened by something associated with the organization. The threat to ego can be individual and grounded in something as simple as discourtesy. Or it can be communal and grounded in something as profound as discrimination or colonialism. I call this the “ego” or “self-esteem” corner of the triangle.

Note that the triangle explains a lot about everybody’s behavior in controversy. Company officials are expected to operate out of the “greed” corner (the self-interest of the company), but just like their stakeholders they often make self-defeating decisions motivated by outrage or injured self-esteem.

Note also that the triangle is hollow; a controversy may arouse all three motivators in varying degrees. It is useful to assess where in the triangle each major actor in a controversy is currently located. That’s not necessarily easy. Ego often masquerades as outrage (many ego-damaged people tend to convert their hurt into anger), while outrage often looks like greed (outraged people make demands that many recipients tend to misperceive as greedy). To the extent possible, the goal should always be to move all actors toward the greed corner, minimizing the distorting effect of ego and outrage so self-interested stakeholders can calmly negotiate their respective interests.

Although I have mentioned the greed/outrage/ego triangle on this website from time to time, I haven’t written about it much. It has mostly been a staple of my outrage management seminars and my consultations – especially with mining companies, which are often seeking community permission to launch a new mine in developing countries where a history of oppression has left a legacy of damaged self-esteem.

The video John refers to below is an IAP2 clip that was excised from the video record of a proprietary seminar I conducted expressly for IAP2. Watch my video entitled “Sixth Outrage Management Strategy: Get the Underlying Issues into the Room” for a comparable segment of the same seminar for a different client.

john’s comment:

Recently I delivered the Outrage course to some folks from one of the EPA regions. I got a newer and interesting reaction to something and I’d like your thoughts.

When explaining the self-esteem corner of “the triangle” I usually use your videotape clip story of how you might counsel an extraction business client to approach a community that had suffered historic oppression. In the past I’ve run into some pushback (but not always) from students who find the approach and whole idea of a link between oppression and self-esteem possibly insulting. Not surprisingly, the pushback is usually (but again, not always) from minority students.

So I use the clip carefully and I usually preface it with some discussion about self-esteem and powerlessness – which I find resonates with people, “foams the runway” for your clip, and provides some additional context. I like the clip because I think it stretches their thinking about how a “big, bad extraction company” might think. But in this case at EPA it was met with big-time anger. We talked it out and I eventually got the class back on track. But there was disbelief in any connection between oppression and self-esteem.

You state/suggest, in the clip, that there is ample research to support this and I haven’t yet had time to dig into your website to try to find something to support it.

Any help or advice with the self-esteem piece would be welcome.

peter responds:

I didn’t spend as long as it would take to do a serious literature review on the issue you raise, but a key term in the literature is “internalized oppression.” One decent starting point would be this Google Scholar search for “self-esteem ‘internalized oppression.’” That search taps into the psychological literature on how individual members of oppressed groups (victims of racism, sexism, homophobia, obesity shaming, etc.) often accept the invidious judgment of others at some psychological level. Diminished self-esteem is by no means a universal outcome, nor is it the only likely psychological outcome of oppression (depression is also widely reported). But it’s certainly high on the list of possible outcomes.

One recent (2014) source I’ve seen cited is Internalized Oppression: The Psychology of Marginalized Groups, edited by E.J.R. David. I didn’t read the book, but I did find a chapter from it by David and Annie O. Derthick that’s on point. Here’s a sample, with the citations removed:

For historically and contemporarily oppressed groups, their experiences may have resulted into internalized oppression, which may negatively influence their collective self-esteem. Empirically, internalized oppression is related to lower levels of personal and collective self-esteem….

Given internalized oppression’s documented relationships with variables such as personal and collective self-esteem and depression symptoms, it is not surprising that internalized oppression may also be related to other mental health concerns facing various oppressed groups, primarily because low self-esteem and depression typically go hand-in-hand or co-occur with other problem behaviors and conditions….. [E]xperiences of oppression may lead oppressed individuals to experience maladaptive emotional and cognitive states such as rumination, emotional avoidance, negative self-schemas, and feelings of hopelessness in response to such experiences, all of which may increase the likelihood for oppressed individuals to develop clinically diagnosable disorders or for them to engage in high-risk behaviors.

As you might guess, research suggests that in-group “pride” movements work to counter internalized oppression; that’s one of their main purposes. So I would expect activists on behalf of oppressed groups to show far less diminution in self-esteem than passive victims show. And even passive victims, I’d expect, would experience less internalized oppression when such movements were visible to them than when they weren’t visible.

It also follows that oppressed groups with strong pride movements would evince less diminution in self-esteem than oppressed groups with weak movements. I’ll bet, for example, that the problem is a lot smaller among gay people in the U.S. than it used to be, and a lot smaller than it still is in countries where “gay pride” isn’t a culturally acceptable concept. And I’ll bet that the problem is huge (no pun intended) in fat people, whose oppression is unfortunately still socially acceptable and widely seen as a way to “encourage” them to get thin rather than as an attack on their self-esteem.

In short, people who feel (usually correctly) that they have been or are being oppressed sometimes internalize the oppression to varying extents, and that internalized oppression sometimes takes the form of damaged self-esteem.

I don’t want to make this sound simpler than it is. One fairly consistent finding in the literature is that African-Americans have higher self-esteem on average than white Americans with comparable accomplishments. I’m not sure how to square that with the generalization that oppression damages self-esteem. Maybe the answer is that success is harder for members of oppressed groups, so having succeeded leads them to a greater increase in self-esteem.

Note that some of my observations here go beyond the literature I ran into this morning when I started Googling in response to your comment. They’re what I remember from prior reading and/or what I deduce based on generalizing the research results I’m seeing. The literature on fat people’s diminished self-esteem because of societal oppression is particularly persuasive, as I recall, but I didn’t go looking for it this morning.

The above is more about the psychology of individuals than the collective psychology of groups. There’s a comparable political literature on how colonialism affects the self-esteem of colonized peoples that may be more directly relevant to the video clip that got you into trouble with your EPA audience. See for example this search for “self-esteem colonialism.” You might also search terms like “colonial mentality,” “internalized colonialism,” etc.

What’s most interesting to me in pondering your experience at EPA is how the link between oppression and self-esteem is alternately embraced and denied by members and advocates of oppressed groups. On the one hand, internalization is one of the most damaging and long-lasting effects of oppression, and it’s easy to find claims along the lines of “You not only took away our minerals/resources/wealth. You also took away our self-respect!” (I’m making this quote up, but real ones along the same lines are plentiful.) And yet many people – and often the same people – are understandably offended when a member of the oppressor class “accuses” members of the oppressed class of lacking self-respect.

The same ambivalence is unsurprising in members of an oppressor class who wish to avoid being or seeming to be oppressors. So EPA bureaucrats, especially white male EPA bureaucrats, might resist acknowledging the link between oppression and self-esteem because they don’t want to sound like oppressors who are blaming the victim. Or of course they might resist acknowledging the link because they themselves feel oppressed in the current political climate, and resent the suggestion from a third party that they might have internalized their oppression.

It almost goes without saying that sexual assault can also arouse these sorts of complex and ambivalent responses. Victims of sexual assault sometimes feel shame, telling themselves that they should have avoided the situation, should have fought back harder, should have told people sooner, etc. Empathy with victims requires us to empathize with their shame even as we assert that they did nothing shameful. (As a Jewish American, I have read the writings of some Holocaust survivors who expressed shame about their victimization, and I am aware that some of my fellow Jews feel a kind of collective shame.) In terms of my triangle, obviously, shame lives in the ego/self-esteem corner.

Scholars and practitioners increasingly emphasize the concept of resilience as both a psychological and a societal asset. People and societies are better off if they can work their way toward recovery from horrific experiences, whether personal (like an assault) or societal (war, financial crisis, oppression).

It can be difficult to encourage resilience without condemning victims for its absence. Some victims of sexual assault are less resilient than we would all wish ourselves and our loved ones to be in comparable circumstances. And people in native villages in African or Latin American countries with long histories of European colonialism may find themselves unable to bounce back from generation after generation of low self-esteem. In both cases we should try to help them become more resilient – that is, help them recover their self-esteem and sense of self-efficacy despite their history of abuse or oppression. That requires noticing that they’re currently not as resilient as we and they would wish.

But how do we take note of the failure of resilience without blaming the victim or seeming to blame the victim?

I think that’s part of the problem you encountered with EPA. I used to encounter it too, periodically, when I discussed this implication of the triangle. But I probably encountered a weaker version of it than you did recently. That’s partly because I was addressing these issues mostly with industry audiences, not regulators. It’s also because the times were less sensitive to blame-the-victim issues (whether we see these as mere “political correctness” or as crucial social justice concerns).

In a nutshell, my advice to my mining industry clients seeking a social license to operate in a historically oppressed village was that they should:

• Acknowledge the history-of-oppression problem in a way that places the blame on the oppressors and those who benefited from the fruits of oppression, not on the oppressed or their descendents.
• Insofar as the sensitivity of the issue requires it, acknowledge this history indirectly: “Some people in your village have told me….”
• Try to help ameliorate stakeholders’ damaged self-esteem by making a case (when it’s true) that the oppression can no longer be sustained and that the mining industry is now in a one-down position vis-à-vis the village.
• Frame the village’s situation as a choice between getting even with the company for past oppression by refusing to permit the mine (outrage) versus achieving its own future-oriented goals by driving a hard bargain re what benefits it requires to permit the mine (greed).
• And then leave the scene so the villagers can discuss this choice “privately,” without needing to acknowledge the competing appeal of outrage versus greed in the presence of company representatives whose presence would continue to remind the villagers of how past oppression has damaged village self-esteem.

I never advised a mining company to tell the villagers that they had a self-esteem problem resulting from prior oppression. I advised companies to know there was likely to be a self-esteem problem, and to work to mitigate the problem by acknowledging the history of oppression, asserting the new and less oppressive balance of power, framing the outrage-versus-greed choice the village currently faced, and then getting out of the way.

In my judgment it isn’t blaming the victim to notice the effect of oppression on self-esteem. It’s identifying a key aspect of the victimization – which is a prerequisite to dealing with it in a way that encourages resilience, is empathic to the victims, and fosters a new balance of power that doesn’t replicate the oppression.

name:	Michelle McDowell
field:	Research Scientist, Harding Center for Risk Literacy
date:	July 14, 2018
location:	Germany

comment:

Having read your work on hazard + outrage, I frequently come across the statistic that the rank order correlation between hazards and how upsetting these hazards are to the public is around 0.2.

I would like to find the original source of this correlation and have difficulty finding the reference. Your book “Responding to Community Outrage” refers to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1987 report “Unfinished Business” as a source for similar findings, although from my reading this is not the original source for the often-cited 0.2 correlation.

If you could kindly refer me to the original source of the 0.2 correlation referred to in your publications, it would be very much appreciated.

peter responds:

I have looked for this citation before and failed to find it. The 1987 EPA “Unfinished Business” report is compatible with it … but as you say, it’s not the source.

My own writing in the 1980s doesn’t seem to have used the 0.2 figure. The earliest written article I have found with this figure (in a cursory search) was from 1998. I’m pretty sure I used it in presentations well before then – but probably not as early as the 1980s.

In one 1986 publication, for example, I wrote only that “public fears are not well correlated with expert assessments or mortality statistics.” Not only didn’t I give a number for the correlation between what I came to call “hazard” and “outrage,” I also finessed the incredible difficulty of measuring “hazard” in a universally acceptable way by referencing instead two more readily measurable aspects of hazard, expert assessments and mortality statistics.

As I ponder what might have been my source, my best guess is that I found the number in one of the 1980s psychometric studies by Slovic, Fischhoff, and colleagues (and others). I remember especially studies that did indeed compare public opinion with expert opinion. Less frequently, I think there were studies that compared public opinion (or public estimates of mortality statistics?) with actual mortality statistics.

I haven’t looked to see if any of these studies claimed a 0.2 correlation. For sure, I remember scatter plots from which I might have estimated a 0.2 correlation, not quite justifiably but not unreasonably.

If that’s what happened, then what would have happened next was still more open to question. Is expert risk estimation an acceptable measure of “hazard”? And is public risk estimation an acceptable measure of “outrage”? Assuming I had a study in hand from which I could legitimately deduce a 0.2 correlation between expert and public estimates of various risks, was I entitled to reinterpret (or misremember) the study as showing a 0.2 correlation between how endangered people are and how upset they are – in my terms, between hazard and outrage? Expert risk estimates are at best a very rough measure of hazard, though they may be the best measure we have. And even though public risk estimates are greatly influenced by outrage, it’s a jump to equate the two.

I think I’m on solid ground claiming that hazard and outrage have a low correlation (even “absurdly low,” as I have often said and written) – that people routinely shrug off serious hazards and overreact to trivial ones based on factors like control, familiarity, trust, responsiveness, dread, and the rest . But I can’t find an acceptable source for my oft-repeated and oft-cited claim that that low correlation is 0.2.

I imagine the above is a lot more than you wanted to know. You were looking for a citation, and I gave you a mea culpa instead.

If anyone reading this knows of any study that provides a quantitative estimate of the correlation between hazard and outrage, please let me know. I will pass the word to Michelle and post it here. It would be lovely for me if the answer turns out 0.2, but any answer will be welcome.

In fact, if anyone knows of a study yielding a correlation coefficient between something like hazard and something like outrage, that would help too … or even a correlation between some aspect of hazard and some aspect of outrage. It’s incredibly difficult to come up with a satisfactory global operationalization of the two concepts and thus measure their global correlation. (See for example the Guestbook entry right below this one, on “Quantifying outrage”.) Something less than that will still add value.

But when we interpret studies that explore limited aspects of the relationship between hazard and outrage, we need to remember that they are limited aspects. Michelle and I have been corresponding about a 2012 study that investigated (among other things) the correlation between mortality statistics and dread. That correlation came out 0.71, way higher than 0.2. The risks that kill the most people tend to arouse the most dread.

But mortality statistics are only a part of hazard. And more importantly for my approach to risk communication, dread is only a part – a small part – of outrage. Even if you broaden dread to include all emotions, you still don’t capture what I mean by outrage. Crucial components of outrage like trust, responsiveness, control, and morality aren’t emotions. Yes, people tend to get emotional about them. But it’s predictable that neighbors of a factory will want to shut the factory down if they judge that the factory’s management is untrustworthy, unresponsive, unwilling to share control, and acting immorally. And it’s predictable that the neighbors are likely to think such a factory’s emissions are hazardous, even if the emissions are actually quite safe. All that is true whether the neighbors’ outrage is hotly emotional or coldly calculating.

name:	Kwanghee
field:	Doctoral student
date:	May 11, 2018
location:	Korea

comment:

I am a Ph.D. student studying in Korea. I am studying safety at a chemical plant.

Because the area where I live is adjacent to the factory, the contents of the “outrage” of the residents seems to be important.

I am an engineer and I can calculate the risk when chemicals are spread. Now I am trying to quantify outrage too. My goal is to combine the two to quantify the overall risk.

Are there studies or cases that quantify outrage?

peter responds:

Coincidentally, I just finished working on a response to a different Guestbook comment, focusing largely on the role of research in my approach to risk communication. It’s not directly on how to quantify outrage, but it’s relevant, and I urge you to read it.

Two earlier Guestbook entries (from 2009 and 2012) are also relevant to your question about how to quantify outrage:

• Research to prove that outrage management works
• A gradient of outrage susceptibility

Let me quickly make a few additional points.

Outrage is at least theoretically a quantitative concept. I write routinely about “high” versus “low” outrage and about ways to make outrage “higher” with precaution advocacy or “lower” with outrage management – all of which suggests I must think there are ways to judge how high or low outrage is : and even to predict how high or low outrage will be under specified circumstances.

In a very rough sense, I do think that. But we’re a long, long way from measuring outrage the way we measure length or mass or electric current.

Suppose we want to ask people how upset/angry/frightened/outraged they are, or how upset/angry/frightened/outraged they think they would be if X or Y happened. We have to give them a “scale” for their answers – typically something like this:

• ❏  Not at all outraged
• ❏  A little outraged
• ❏  Moderately outraged
• ❏  Very outraged
• ❏  Extremely outraged

This obviously isn’t quantitative. It’s merely an ordinal scale: “not at all” is less than “a little” which is less than “moderately” which is less than “very” which is less than “extremely” – but we can’t claim that the intervals between these terms are equal and we certainly can’t claim that “very outraged” is X times as outraged as “moderately outraged.”

Social scientists sometimes pretend that scales like this are more quantitatively meaningful than they are. We number the five options one through five and proceed to do math. The math assumes equal intervals; it also assumes a real zero somewhere less than “not at all outraged.” We end up claiming that one group of people “averaged” an outrage level of 3.2 while another group averaged only 2.7, and then we calculate the statistical significance of the difference between the two means. We may even claim that our “very outraged” respondents (scoring 4) were twice as outraged as those who were only “a little outraged” (scoring 2). Experts in statistics and research methodology argue endlessly about the value and meaning of these sorts of quantitative manipulations of basically non-quantitative data

We can make this sort of scale look quantitative if we want: “If 1 equals ‘not all outraged’ and 10 equals ‘extremely outraged,’ what number best describes how outraged you are?”

This way to ask people about outrage specifies that the intervals are equal; at least it instructs people to imagine a scale with equal intervals and pick a number they think best represents their level of outrage. But we still can’t assume that someone who picks 6 on our scale is “twice as outraged” as someone who picks 3; that would require a real zero. Nonetheless, a lot of the math we do with data of this sort makes exactly that assumption.

Moreover, there is no unit of measurement for outrage the way there is for length, mass, or electric current.

Just to make matters worse, outrage has many components: trust, responsiveness, fairness, control, dread, familiarity, etc. To really understand what’s going on, you would need to “measure” each component separately – which would raise exactly the same scaling problems. Plus an additional problem: We don’t have an algorithm for merging these components. A few of the outrage components are usually more important in determining overall outrage than the rest – but in a specific controversy any one of them could be dominant or insignificant. So if I know how mistrustful you are; how unresponsive you think the company is; how unfair you think the situation is; etc., I still don’t know “how outraged” you are.

In 1998 I marketed a software package that attempted to get around these outrage quantification problems. (The software is now freeware. You can download it from this website. If you’re interested, see “OUTRAGE Prediction & Management Software.”) Here’s part of what I wrote in an introductory section entitled “The program looks like it’s counting something – but there is no reliable ‘outrage yardstick’ and no such thing as an ‘Outrage Unit.’”:

In designing this program, I tried to think of all the things I could that would make the outrage better or worse. That was the easy part. Then I tried to decide how much better or worse. That was the hard part, quantifying the dynamics of outrage. Basically, I made it up.

Here’s how it works. After you’re done describing the situation you face and analyzing your stakeholders, you will get to the meat of the program: 12 outrage “factors” such as voluntariness, familiarity, and dread. Each factor is on a scale from 0 to 10. If the factor is complicated, there are subfactors, and each of them is on a scale from 0 to 10.

As you answer a question, the “outrage meter” at the bottom of the screen moves up or down – a lot or a little, depending on what sort of impact I think your answer is likely to have…. When you finish assessing a factor, the subfactor totals, if there are subfactors, are averaged using the root mean square – which puts the average on the high (bad) side of the arithmetic middle. Then your total for the factor is squared. These mathematical manipulations are both intended to reflect the reality that weaknesses do you more harm than strengths do you good. Finally, your squared factor total is weighted to reflect the fact that some factors are more important than others.

At the end of the outrage assessment, these weighted squared factor totals are summed and then normalized to 1000 – and you get your score: 743, say, or 491. The question is, 742 or 491 what? “Sandmans”? Outrage Units? Square elephants per fortnight? There is no unit in which the program is measuring outrage.

In fact, the program isn’t really measuring outrage at all. It’s just quantifying my intuitions as a consultant.

This isn’t a devastating admission. (At least I’m not devastated. I hope you’re not.) Companies deal all the times with things you can’t measure well (what’s the cancer dose-response curve for dimethylmeatloaf) and things you can’t measure at all (what will be the wholesale price of dimethylmeatloaf five years from now). Seat-of-the-pants quantification strategies that have little grounding in data can prove useful if you don’t take them too seriously….

I am very confident that working your way through this program will give you a solid sense of how much trouble you’re heading for, why, and what you can do about it. I’m even confident that a score of 743 portends more reputational headaches than a score of 491. The numbers are probably a modest improvement over the sorts of qualitative judgments I make in consultations: “looks pretty bad” or “batten down the hatches” or “this should pass.” Over time, your company may develop enough experience with the program to base a policy on these numbers: Everything over 600 has to be cleared by a Vice President, or whatever. Just don’t take them more seriously than they deserve.

You mention that you hope to combine outrage and hazard into a single risk measure. I think that would be very unwise – and not just for methodological reasons. Combining all the outrage components into a single outrage measure makes conceptual sense even if it’s a methodological nightmare. But combining hazard and outrage into a single risk measure doesn’t make conceptual sense either.

I think everything about risk communication depends on the relative size of hazard and outrage:

• When hazard is higher than outrage, the risk communication task is precaution advocacy: “Watch out!”
• When outrage is higher than hazard, the risk communication task is outrage management: “Calm down.”
• When they’re both roughly equal at a high level, the risk communication task is crisis communication: “We’ll get through this together.”
• When they’re both roughly equal at an intermediate level, the risk communication task is information transmission: “Let’s chat about this risk that interests us both.”
• When they’re both roughly equal at a low level (and likely to stay that way), there’s no risk communication task at all.

So collapsing hazard and outrage into a single measure called “risk” would throw away the most important distinction you need to focus on in order to figure out what risk communication strategies a specific situation calls for.

It makes perfectly good sense to look at hazard and outrage together in a single two-dimensional matrix. But collapsing them into a single dimension would be a conceptual and strategic disaster.

name:	Kate Poole
field:	Corporate communications and part-time doctoral student
date:	May 11, 2018
email:	kpoole8@gmail.com
location:	United Kingdom

comment:

I have really enjoyed reading your articles, Peter, particularly in relation to confirmation bias.

Having spent a career in advertising and corporate communications, specializing in market and stakeholder research, I can recall many instances of where it is very difficult to persuade a client with a strong pre-existing bias that consumer feedback contradicts his/her opinion.

In one memorable debrief, just before I began, my (American) client pushed back his chair, shoved his legs out, put his hands around the back of his head and said “well, I know what I think.” I was debriefing the client on consumer reactions to a new commercial for a breakfast cereal. The TV commercial featured squirrels, in a spoof-Hitchcock style, trying to get the nutty breakfast cereal. Anyway, after my debrief, the client looked directly at me and said, “I WILL NOT HAVE MY PRODUCT ENDORSED BY A RODENT.”

We don’t see squirrels as rodents, but as relatively benign woodland creatures. As a rooky researcher, I didn’t have the tools to deal with his cultural difference, so ploughed on with what I was going to say regardless. Taking your advice, I should have found a point of convergence, where his pre-existing bias met with something I had discovered in the research.

Anyway, moving to the present, I am determined to complete a Doctor of Education before I retire (I’m approaching 60), and am researching how learning theory, particularly transformative learning theory, could help bridge the gap between research and organizational action. In too many cases, although researchers think they have come up with insights which have the capacity to change an organization, the organization listens, usually politely, and then does nothing. Your articles on confirmation bias have given me a very strong basis for understanding why this might be happening.

So what I need to do now is think how researchers can overcome confirmation bias to increase the likelihood of research being acted upon. Any ideas in this area would be much appreciated.

peter responds:

Your clients have often trusted their own intuitions more than your research data. I get how incredibly frustrating that is.

Your comment asks my advice on how to get practitioners to pay attention to research results, especially results that challenge their intuitions. I will try to address that question. But first I want to take advantage of the opportunity your comment gives me to address two tangentially related topics: the role of research versus intuition in my risk communication consulting; and my own judgment (bias?) about the relative value of practitioner intuition and research results in risk communication and communication more generally.

Research versus intuition in my consulting

From time to time in my risk communication consulting career I have undertaken (or persuaded clients to undertake) research studies to answer key strategic questions. Given the time and budget pressures, the studies I launched with clients weren’t methodologically strong enough to be publishable in an academic journal, even if my clients had been willing to see them published. But I thought they would still help guide our strategic decision-making.

For example, a consumer products manufacturer sought my advice when it discovered that one of its iconic products contained parts-per-trillion of a carcinogenic and highly stigmatized contaminant. The evidence was convincing even to activist-leaning experts that in such low concentrations the contaminant posed no significant health threat. But it could certainly pose a significant reputational threat. And there was no feasible way to manufacture the product that wouldn’t yield tiny amounts of this contaminant. The question: Should the company go public proactively to try to defuse the controversy before it arose, or should it build a standby response to be deployed only after the word got out if it ever did – and in the latter case, what should the standby response look like? I suggested a series of focus groups to examine the options.

In most of the cases where I pushed for a study of some sort – including the one I just described – it wasn’t really because I thought research results were a more reliable guide than intuition. It was more because my intuition and my client’s intuition diverged, and I thought research results could help settle the matter. I expected the outcome of the research would support my side of the disagreement. In other words, I was using research to generate ammunition more than guidance.

Even so, I tried to be open to the possibility that my client’s intuition might be proven right instead. And I tried to make sure the study we undertook together was methodologically sound enough that it might actually be dispositive – that the results would be capable of convincing one of us, me or my client, that the other one was right. Above all, I tried to involve the client in the design of the study and to make sure the client was onboard with my hope that the study would be dispositive. The goal was for each of us to think the study was a fair test, for each of us to expect to be proven right, and therefore for each of us to be willing to reconsider if the study didn’t support our intuitions.

Not surprisingly, quite often the results were ambiguous or intermediate. But even then the study added value; it was a collaborative work product of semi-solid evidence to think about as we tried to reconcile our competing intuitions.

I am very attached to this model of people with competing intuitions collaborating on research to help resolve their differences. The model applies to a lot more than consultant-versus-client disagreements about communication strategy. I often proposed it to clients as a way of reconciling their substantive disagreements with stakeholders as well. “You claim the groundwater isn’t seriously polluted. The neighborhood association claims the pollution is severe. Why not work together on a groundwater contamination study?” I will return to this model at the end of my response to your comment.

There are three main occasions when communicators are likely to want a research study:

• When they haven’t got any relevant intuition. They lack an answer and hope the study will provide one.
• When they don’t trust their intuition. They’ve got a tentative answer and hope the study will tell them if it’s a good answer.
• When somebody else doesn’t trust their intuition. They’ve got a firm answer and hope the study will help them sell it.

All three are valid motivations to undertake a study. Before launching a study, it is helpful to think through which reason, or which combination of reasons, is behind that particular study.

While it’s true that I have periodically urged clients to undertake research to help answer a risk communication strategy question, quite often in my consulting experience it was the client who demanded research – or at least yearned for some. I think my approach to risk communication is grounded in something more than just intuition: in communication theory (which itself is grounded in research) and in decades of consulting experience. Even so, my recommendations, especially my outrage management recommendations, have often diverged not just from my clients’ intuitions but from the recommendations of more conventional public relations and “crisis communication” counselors.

So it wasn’t unreasonable of clients to demand proof. They didn’t usually want to conduct their own studies. They wanted me to hand over preexisting studies that documented my assertions about how outrage gets high in situations where hazard is low, what companies do that exacerbates the outrage, and what they ought to do to ameliorate it. As a rule my clients didn’t really want me to study their particular problem; they wanted me to provide evidence that others with similar problems had succeeded using my approach.

Satisfying this demand was difficult. My consulting had yielded lots of examples where clients tried at least some of what I had recommended and experienced at least halfway success (better outcomes than they’d feared, at least). But of course these weren’t formal case studies, much less quantitative, empirical studies. And for the most part they weren’t in writing. And they were all confidential anyway.

Of course a lot of published communication research bears indirectly on risk communication questions. And the literature on risk communication itself has burgeoned. Because I am one of the “pioneers” in the risk communication field, a lot of this literature cites me and briefly summarizes my approach, often in a single sentence and not always accurately. My “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” mantra, for example, is referenced in the introductory sections of hundreds of research studies that go on to test hypotheses only tangentially related to my approach. Though my actual actionable recommendations are still pretty iconoclastic, as context and metaphor my approach has become part of mainstream risk communication, sufficiently so that it’s not infrequently referenced without my name: “Risk communication experts often point out that ‘Risk = Hazard + Outrage.’”

But I’ve seen only a dozen or so published studies that explicitly set out to test some of my thinking about outrage and outrage management. Most of these studies are qualitative examinations of the dynamics of outrage in the course of a particular risk controversy – from cell tower siting battles in Australia to anti-vaccination conflicts in the U.K. A few scholars over the years have contacted me about their intent to undertake quantitative, experimental or quasi-experimental tests of my outrage management strategies, but I rarely saw a published outcome that (at least in my judgment) actually confirmed or disconfirmed any of my core recommendations.

Back in the 1990s when I was still a university professor, I collaborated on a few relevant studies of my own; they’re on this website and described and linked here.

From time to time I have provided these studies and others like them to clients in response to their demands for evidence supporting my approach. Typically the studies helped only a little. Like your breakfast cereal client, my risk communication clients tended to hang onto their intuitive reservations, studies or no studies. In fact, I’m not sure how often clients actually examined the studies I gave them. It was mostly the mere existence of supportive studies, not the studies’ actual content, that seemed to help a bit.

As I have often written, my approach to risk communication is profoundly counterintuitive and uncomfortable, individually and organizationally. It challenged my clients’ egos and their organizational cultures. They had powerful incentives to think my approach was wrongheaded and conclude that they needn’t do the things I was urging them to do. I was a successful consultant because I found ways to get through or past their resistance.

In that effort, my “gilded tongue” (so I’m told) was an asset. My respect for their skepticism and resistance was an asset. Understanding how to address confirmation bias was an asset. The risk communication seesaw was a big asset. My redefinition of the task I faced as “Managing Management’s Outrage at Outrage Management” was the biggest asset of all.

Research showing how risk communication works wasn’t much of an asset.

Two earlier Guestbook entries (from 2009 and 2012) also include discussions of risk communication (especially outrage management) research – what’s been studied and what hasn’t; what’s easy to study and what’s hard or impossible:

• “Research to prove that outrage management works”
• “A gradient of outrage susceptibility”

Which to trust, communication research or communicators’ intuition

Persuasive communication has been an art a lot longer than a science. In my judgment the science is still pretty weak. But it’s gaining.

When I was starting my professional life nearly fifty years ago, it seemed clear to me that a good practitioner’s intuition often yielded better outcomes than an empirical study. That was largely because good practitioners considered dozens of factors in reaching a considered intuitive judgment, even factors they weren’t aware they were considering, whereas comms research articles seldom looked at more than three or four factors at a time.

I took graduate courses in communication research theory and methodology, of course, and I was required to read hundreds of journal articles and research reports. In my years as a communication professor I also wrote journal articles and research reports (though not hundreds).

I wound up with four convictions about the relationship between practitioner intuition and research data with regard to communication (especially risk communication):

Confirmation bias in the fight between research and intuition

None of the above addresses your point about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias prevails whether you’re trying to convince somebody that your data are better than his intuition, or that your intuition is better than her data – or, for that matter, that your breakfast cereal is better than somebody else’s.

As you note, one good way to cope with other people’s confirmation bias is to find a point of convergence. It’s easier to move people to your point of view if you start by agreeing with them about something than if you start by challenging them about something (or everything). I sometimes refer to this as using jujitsu rather than frontal attack. In 1982 I wrote an article for Not Man Apart, published by the environmental group Friends of the Earth, entitled “Motivating Change: Psychological Jujitsu and the Environmental Movement.” (It’s not available online.) My 2016 column on “How to Counter Your Audience’s Pre-Existing Beliefs” – the one you found useful – covers surprisingly similar ground.

I don’t want to overstate this point. There are times when gracious candor is a better path forward than disingenuous pseudo-agreement. It’s not helpful to set up your audience to feel betrayed later when you get to the point of disagreement. So if you know that’s where you have to get, it’s probably wisest to give fair warning: “Some of what I have to tell you this afternoon challenges a couple of positions the organization has taken in the past. We will need to figure out where we stand on those challenging issues. But let’s start with some areas where our most recent research bears out the organization’s longtime strategy.…”

In your doctoral work, you say you’re “researching how learning theory, particularly transformative learning theory, could help bridge the gap between research and organizational action.” I don’t know much about transformative learning theory. But I gather it has a lot to do with critical self-reflection – with looking back at your experiences and prior beliefs and coming to the realization that some of your experiences suggest you might actually benefit from changing some of your beliefs.

Insofar as that’s what it means, obviously confirmation bias is a huge barrier to transformative learning. And a Google search of the two terms (“transformative learning” and “confirmation bias”) quickly revealed that you and I aren’t the first to think so. My other confirmation bias column, “How to Overcome Your Own Pre-Existing Beliefs,” may yield a few starting points for thinking about what it takes for people to get past their confirmation bias and open themselves to transformative learning.

But that’s not the question you’re posing in your comment. You’re not focused here on one’s own confirmation bias as a barrier to transformative learning. You’re focused instead on organizations’ confirmation bias as a barrier to their learning from research about the ways they need to transform. So my column on other people’s confirmation bias is the one you’re looking hard at.

Your specific question: “how researchers can overcome confirmation bias to increase the likelihood of research being acted upon.” You have already grabbed onto the main recommendation from my column re finding points of agreement. I can think of three other recommendations worth adding.

name:	Ivo	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Citizen
date:	May 3, 2018
location:	The Netherlands

comment:

Thank you for your insightful website. Contrary to most of the commenters in your Guestbook, I have no professional interest in risk communication. I’m just a citizen trying to make sense of events that have been happening in the Netherlands in the last couple of years.

In 2015, during the European refugee crisis, our national government asked cities to build refugee shelter centers in order to deal with a large influx of refugees caused by the war in Syria. As city governments started to discuss the possibility of building such a center in their city, this turned out to cause extreme outrage and even violence. For example, in some cities people stormed the city hall to prevent city council hearings from taking place.

As far as I can tell, there were a number of issues causing the outrage:

• Fear of the town being “taken over” by refugees. Especially in the more rural towns, people were concerned that refugees would arrive in such huge numbers that their town would not feel like “their” town anymore.
• Fear of terrorists. There are a lot of people coming into the country; we don’t know who they are and what their motives are. We cannot know for certain that there are no terrorists among them.
• Perceived unfairness. “My daughter has been looking for affordable housing for years, and now people from Syria arrive and suddenly they build housing for them and let them stay there for free.”
• Fear for the safety of your family. There will be lots of people in the refugee shelter and they won’t have a lot of things to do. They might start stealing from you or they might rape your children.
• Fear of property value loss. “Nobody will want to buy my house once there is a refugee shelter next door.”
• Racism (for a few of the most fanatic opponents).

When some of the shelters were finally built, it turned out that there were also a very large number who really did like that a shelter was being built in their town. For example, in a lot of cities there were so many applications for volunteers to help run the shelters that they had to turn down lots of people who wanted to help, because there simply weren’t enough tasks to do.

These people did not make their voices heard in the council meetings et cetera, because they were afraid of the opponents. I can understand that you’ll think twice about attending a city council meeting to express your support, after you've seen the last meeting being disrupted by violent protesters. These protesters might come after you as well.

I was wondering if you might be able to answer three questions:

1. What do you think caused such high (and violent) outrage in this case? Where there’s outrage, there’s protest, but I can’t remember seeing people become so violent if for example a nuclear power plant is being built.
2. How would you increase outrage among (potential) supporters of refugee shelters, so that they would be more willing to make their voices heard?
3. How can you best contribute to a debate like this as a citizen, while making sure you won’t be the victim of outrage yourself?

peter responds:

Your comment references violent resistance to refugee shelters. I am always leery of giving advice about how to respond to violence. Here’s what I wrote in a 2009 Guestbook response on “Managing the outrage of extremists”:

Since you mention violence, I need to start there. Whatever it is that makes people turn violent, outrage is surely part of the mix, so in principle outrage management might help deter a violent opponent. But only in principle. Far more than outrage is going on, and the outrage itself is too high, too unreachable, and certainly too dangerous to try to manage. The appropriate response to violence or the threat of violence, I believe, is to call the cops – not the communication consultants.

I do believe that outrage management can help prevent outrage from escalating into violence. People are likelier to stay calm and nonviolent if they feel their grievances are being respectfully heard and responded to. I even believe that outrage management can help defuse outrage that’s already on the cusp of violence. Also, I have often counseled clients not to interpret rudeness or “verbal violence” or minor legal violations (peaceful trespass, for example) as violence. But when you start fearing for your safety, or anybody’s safety, the time for outrage management has passed. The time to leave the scene and/or call the cops has arrived.

There’s one other issue I need to address before trying to answer your three questions. I hesitate to address it, because commentary on this topic is so easily misinterpreted. But here goes: Many opponents of refugee admission generally and refugee shelters in particular aren’t just outraged. They are also standing for particular viewpoints on genuinely debatable questions of policy. At least three clusters of questions come immediately to mind:

1. What’s best for my country and my community? How many refugees, from what sorts of places with what sorts of backgrounds and values, is it optimal for my country/community to accept? What good and what harm can we expect their presence to accomplish? How much will they change us, and in what ways? How much of these sorts of change can we absorb and how much do we want to absorb? How capable are we of vetting the likelihood that particular refugees will embrace our nation’s values and become patriots?
2. What’s best for me individually? In what specific ways do I stand to gain or lose from various proposals vis-à-vis how my country/community should respond to the refugee situation?
3. What else is relevant besides anticipated benefits and harms to my country, my community, and myself? What is best for the refugees, and to what extent should this influence the decision? What moral, legal, or political obligations do we bear with regard to these specific refugees, and to refugees in general? What precedents and what principles are we establishing, following, or violating? To what extent do our values call for us to be open to refugees who need our help regardless of our judgment about the likely impacts of their presence in our midst?

Countries, communities, and individuals obviously differ in their answers to these questions. Refugee acceptance issues would be debatable even in the total absence of outrage.

I am not claiming that people’s reactions to refugee shelters aren’t largely about outrage. I am claiming that they’re not solely about outrage. Attributing policy battles to outrage as if there were no substantive disagreements to resolve is as serious an error as addressing only the substantive disagreements as if nobody were outraged.

This is an important point to emphasize. Outraged people certainly resent it when their outrage is ignored. Responding in a purely substantive way as if there were no strong emotions in the room is infuriating. But it’s even more infuriating to treat outraged people as if they were merely bundles of strong emotions, with no facts, opinions, arguments, and values to contribute to the controversy.

You need to acknowledge and take seriously both your opponents’ emotions and their facts, opinions, arguments, and values.

But let me take your questions as you asked them, and focus my response on outrage aspects of refugee shelter disputes.

Why is there such high outrage against refugee shelters?

Your list of reasons why people might be outraged against refugee shelters pretty much matches my intuitions and observations about why refugee issues generate a lot of outrage. Further thought might yield additional factors worth considering, and even very informal empirical research – asking people about their feelings (and views) – might sophisticate the list and help you begin to prioritize it. But you’re off to a good start in trying to understand the outrage you are seeing.

The tougher question is the one you ask: Why is the outrage about refugee shelters so much higher and more prone to violence than outrage about other controversies like nuclear power?

Predictions about when protests and demonstrations are likely to turn violent are notoriously unreliable. Sometimes the violence seems like a spontaneous upwelling that surprises everyone – alleged outrage experts included.

The most reliable predictor of violence at an event is the presence or absence of agitators bent on fomenting violence. It often takes only a handful of such individuals to turn an outraged crowd into a violent mob. A few coordinated (or even uncoordinated) acts of violence are often enough:

• Some people in the crowd follow the agitators’ example, feeling inspired, or disinhibited, or even pressured into joining in.
• Others in the crowd flee, leaving behind a smaller but more violence-prone cohort.
• Some non-members of the crowd – police, targets, opponents, even bystanders – respond in kind, leading almost inevitably to escalation.
• Journalists cover the violence more than anything else that’s going on, which misleads the public, attracts troublemakers, and creates a feedback loop that encourages still more violence.

Other times, of course, that same handful of agitators bent on fomenting violence fail to ignite the crowd. And sometimes there are no agitators, and the violence seems to emerge organically from people’s strong feelings.

I havc no experience at all with anti-refugee violence in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. I don’t know why controversies over refugee policy have turned violent more often than other strongly felt controversies. (Assuming you’re right that this is so. I have no firsthand knowledge of that either.)

But if I had to guess, I’d start with the hypothesis that perhaps opponents of refugee resettlement (and refugee shelters, a pretty obvious foot-in-the-door for refugee resettlement) feel disrespected. It may be self-defeating, but it’s true nonetheless that feeling disrespected doesn’t usually make people moderate their ideology and their behavior in an effort to garner more respect. Instead, it tends to make people more extremist in ideology and behavior.

One of the things I liked best about your comment was that you didn’t attribute opposition to refugee shelters solely or chiefly to racism. You saw racism as a factor for some of the more extreme opponents, but you also listed more sympathetic reasons for their opposition. If all opponents are publicly attacked or dismissed as racists by authorities, media, etc. – perhaps even by their neighbors – that could easily trigger a more extremist response, which of course could trigger more charges of racism, perpetuating the vicious cycle. A related phenomenon: Fear of being labeled racists may lead moderate opponents of refugee shelters and refugee resettlement to stay quiet (and certainly to stay home), leaving the opposition movement in the hands of those most inclined toward extremism and violence.

Refugees usually make a country’s or community’s culture more heterogeneous. As I noted at the start of this response, even in the total absence of outrage there is no easy way to distinguish refugee-induced heterogeneity that adds vitality to the culture from heterogeneity that damages the culture’s sense of community – and even heterogeneity that threatens to undermine the culture’s deeply held values.

It is commonplace to stereotype outsiders in ways that are invidious, unfair, and yes, racist. As an American in the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I am certainly aware that people often do that … and often did it before the Trump presidency, and often do it elsewhere in the world as well. But it is also true that different cultures have different values. Taking in people who share your values or aspire to share your values is one thing; even taking in people who will enrich your values by adding elements of their own; even taking in people who will challenge your values and provoke change. But what about taking in people whom you expect will trash your values – people who haven’t absorbed your values and don’t want to absorb them, but rather fully intend to subvert them as much as possible?

Of course the claim that certain sorts of refugees or too many refugees may threaten the receiving country’s or community’s core values is sometimes nothing more than a cover for racism. But sometimes it is a genuine opinion (with accompanying strong emotions) that deserves to be challenged by those who disagree on the merits, respectfully and even compassionately, without name-calling. And sometimes it contains a germ or more than a germ of truth and thus constitutes a genuine downside of accepting that many refugees of that sort from that place. The upsides of refugee acceptance may or may not more than compensate for this downside.

My point in a nutshell: Assuming or claiming that (all) opponents of refugee shelters are racists is as mistaken and as harmful as assuming or claiming that (all) refugees are threats to the values of the place that takes them in. You’re not making that mistake. But it’s a mistake that is made pretty often in my country and I’m guessing in yours as well. I suspect one of the harms this mistake does is to incite extremism and even violence in those who feel disrespected when they voice initially moderate versions of anti-refugee views (that is, views against taking in too many refugees or refugees with certain values). Another probable harm of this mistake: It “chills” the voices of moderates who don’t want to be misperceived as racist extremists, further polarizing disagreements over refugee issues and thereby making violence likelier.

I am reluctant to offer any additional seat-of-the-pants guesses about the factors that motivate anti-refugee sentiment and anti-refugee violence in the Netherlands. There must be experts who have studied these questions and have answers that aren’t mere guesses. But since you asked, I’ll quickly note two more possibilities:

1. For people who are middle-aged or older and doing well (and perhaps also for younger people who anticipate doing well), fear of change is probably a major factor. Several of the more specific items on your list are indeed changes that people might understandably fear, but I’m thinking about something broader: the overarching sense that things are going well and a sudden influx of refugees might upset the applecart in all sorts of ways, some of them unpredictable.
2. For younger people, on the other hand – especially those who aren’t doing that well and don’t anticipate doing that well – I suspect anti-refugee sentiment may be largely about competition and resentment. “Why are the government and the powerful treating them better than they treat us?” You address this under the heading of “unfairness.” But again I think it’s broader than that. People who already feel badly treated are likely to resent decent treatment of anyone other than themselves. “I deserve better treatment” morphs into “they deserve worse treatment.”

One final point before I move on to your second question: In figuring out how to respond to outrage, it’s important to try to suss out how permanent or transitory that outrage is likely to be.

At one extreme, sometimes an issue is so strongly felt that you haven’t got a prayer of calming the waters. It’s still important to treat people decently. But on the most fundamental level some group’s ongoing outrage (and perhaps even their permanent disaffection) has to be considered a long-term downside of the policy option that has aroused it and will continue to arouse it. The policy option may or may not be worth pursuing anyway, but there’s no point in imagining that their outrage will go away.

At the other extreme, a lot of times people feel very strongly but very temporarily about something. Again, it still matters to treat them decently. But what matters most is the passage of time. Pretty soon they’ll get reconciled to the policy option they’re currently opposing; they may even come to support it (and more or less forget their prior opposition). I was working on my Ph.D. in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was peripherally involved in demonstrations against a pyramid-shaped skyscraper that the Transamerica Corporation was proposing to build. We were strongly (and we thought deeply) committed to stopping a structure we thought would ruin the San Francisco skyline. The Transamerica Pyramid is now considered one of the city’s prime architectural icons.

I’m not suggesting that refugee resettlement is as transitory an issue as a proposed skyscraper. In fact, refugee resettlement may be precisely the sort of issue that can permanently divide a community. One obvious question: How do people who opposed a refugee shelter and lost feel after the shelter has been open for a few years?

How can supporters of refugee shelters be encouraged to make their voices heard?

You frame this second question in terms of ways to trigger more outrage on the part of supporters, to counter the outrage of opponents. I’m not sure that’s the best approach.

There are three basic strategies for managing any controversy:

• Support mobilization – try to get people who are already on your side more active, more vocal, and more deeply committed. Getting them outraged at the other side is surely one effective support mobilization strategy – though not the only one.
• Public relations – try to get people who are neutral and not very interested to lean toward your side. They’ll probably remain not very interested, but passive public support is an asset whereas passive public opposition is a liability.
• Outrage management – try to get people who are against you to feel their opposition less fervently. You’re not likely to convert them into supporters, but a half-hearted opponent is far less damaging to your goals than a deeply outraged opponent.

There’s also a fourth option: deciding to let the controversy rage unmanaged – perhaps hoping that it will slowly fade; perhaps resigned to enduring it forever.

The three strategies aren’t just competitors for internal resources. They are often in actual conflict with each other. Some ways of ameliorating opposition infuriate supporters, for example, while some ways of arousing supporters infuriate opponents. It is certainly worthwhile to search for compromises among the three strategies – but it’s also essential to figure out which of the three has the highest priority in the situation at hand.

The third option, outrage management, isn’t always the best option. But it is typically the most overlooked option, so it’s worth serious consideration.

You didn’t ask me to outline an outrage management strategy aimed at shelter opponents, but I think that’s a good way to go. Key would be acknowledging their valid concerns – and then looking for ways to address those concerns without fatally undermining your plans. Most of the other tools in the outrage management toolkit (for starting points, look here , here , and here) also have pretty obvious application to refugee shelter controversies.

The way you frame your question presumes a focus on mobilizing support for refugee shelters to counter the opposition and win the controversy. Shelter opponents are loud; you want shelter supporters to be louder.

The downside of support mobilization is that it mobilizes opponents too. It exacerbates the vicious cycle I described earlier. That’s especially true if your chief tool of support mobilization is to increase supporters’ outrage at opponents. You might win the internecine battle in your community. But whoever wins, splitting a community has heavy costs.

With however much effort/resources you decide to focus on support mobilization, consider tools other than mobilizing outrage at opponents. Maybe mobilize outrage at how much the refugees themselves are suffering. That’s a very different sort of outrage – if indeed it’s outrage at all – made up of less anger and more compassion.

Is it possible to get involved in a high-outrage controversy without risk of being a target of outrage?

As I have rephrased your third question, the answer is obvious: No. If you choose to insert yourself into a high-outrage controversy, there is simply no way of “making sure you won’t be the victim of outrage.”

My responses to your first two questions imply a partial answer to the third: Find ways to define a position that supports refugee shelters and refugee resettlement in your community without ignoring or disrespecting the concerns, arguments, and emotions of your neighbors who disagree. Even more: Remain visibly open to the possibility that some of what you stand to learn from your neighbors who disagree might alter your own position, at least at the margins.

But I’d be lying if I claimed that this respectful, open-minded posture protects you from outrage.

It may help protect you somewhat from the outrage of those who disagree with you about refugee policy. Notice how modest this claim is, with “protect” duly qualified three times over: “may,” “help,” “somewhat.” Outraged people may have trouble even noticing your respectfulness and open-mindedness. They’re used to something different, and may be too embattled to pay attention to such nuances. And of course your posture toward them may come across as a lot less respectful and open-minded than you imagine.

And here’s the worse news. “Your” side of the refugee shelter / refugee resettlement controversy is probably embattled as well. Some of those who share your judgment that refugee shelters are a good thing are likely not to share your judgment that dealing respectfully and open-mindedly with opponents is also a good thing. They may think you’re coddling the enemy. They may even think you are the enemy.

Refugee policy is a hot-button, highly polarized issue. As I have already pointed out, a lot of people on your side of the issue see those on the other side as racists, pure and simple. They see themselves as anti-racists, pure and simple – and see no legitimately debatable questions to be addressed. Some people on your side go even further. They believe that unequivocal and even contemptuous rejection of the “racist” position is a crucial piece of virtue signaling; that anyone who acknowledges any merit at all to the other side is on the other side. Thus any effort to signal respect and open-mindedness to opponents of refugee shelters may be seen by supporters of refugee shelters as a bridge too far.

It’s easy to join a movement – whether it’s a movement to build refugee shelters or a movement to stop them from being built. It’s harder, and in some ways more dangerous, to stake out a position in the middle … or a position that looks like it’s in the middle because it refuses to demonize the other side. You can easily end up excoriated by both sides.

This risk is smaller for organizations whose commitment to one side of a particular controversy is unquestionable. Much of my career was spent advising corporations on ways to reach out respectfully and open-mindedly to outraged stakeholders. There was little or no danger that a corporation that took my advice would be widely seen as having abandoned its own stake. Even so, one of the consistent challenges in corporate outrage management was the risk of outraging and alienating allies by seeming to have befriended enemies. Sometimes senior management perceived the community relations department as having gone over to the other side; sometimes the board of directors, customers, or employees perceived a community-responsive senior management as having gone over to the other side.

When an issue is polarized and people are hurling insults at each other, an individual who speaks out aggressively on behalf of mutual respect may end up with no constituency at all. A group that advocates a respectful process has at least a chance of earning both sides’ respect. But for an individual, it is probably wiser to join the side you support, earn your bona fides as a stalwart but non-violent supporter of that side, and then urge your comrades-in-arms to consider a less embattled posture toward your opponents.

name:	Yousef	This guestbook entry is categorized as:
field:	Journalist and Ph.D. applicant
date:	January 13, 2018
location:	Saudi Arabia

comment:

Thank you so much for your wonderful website. I was looking for a while for a specialized person in risk and outrage communication because I want to specialize in this area.

Based on your knowledge and experience, what do you think is the most important issue in the digital age that future research in risk and crisis communication should focus on?

peter responds:

Good luck in your doctoral studies, and thank you for your kind words about this website.

Let me answer your question about the most important issue for future research separately for the three paradigms of risk communication: precaution advocacy, outrage management, and crisis communication. Bear in mind that I might well give completely different answers on a different day; it is hard (and close to random) to pick just one research priority. I have often wished I had dozens of doctoral students to whom I could propose research questions they might want to study.

Vis-à-vis precaution advocacy, I’d like to see a lot more research to figure out which corners are okay to cut and which aren’t when designing and implementing a health or safety campaign. Especially in developing countries, but really everywhere, the vast majority of precaution advocacy campaigns are low-budget. Yet all too many experts insist on recommending the “right” way to do a campaign – even though they have to know that they’re talking to a group that lacks the resources it would need to follow their recommendations.

I wish I had a dollar for every time an expert from a well-funded national U.S. agency has urged a much tinier organization somewhere in the world to make sure to do lots of audience segmentation, lots of formative and evaluation research, etc. As so often happens, perfect is the enemy of good.

The problem is that once an organization has realized it can’t possibly attempt “perfect,” there’s not a lot of guidance out there on how to achieve “good” and avoid disastrously bad. I think there’s a desperate need for systematic research on which precaution advocacy corners to cut.

Vis-à-vis outrage management, I have to confess I’m torn between two diametrically opposed suggestions.

On the one hand, nearly everything I think I know about how to respond to outraged stakeholders comes from theory and on-the-ground experience, plus (at best) case studies. There’s far too little of the sort of research that might win over skeptics by dint of sound empirical methodology and careful quantification. For decades clients kept asking me for proof that my shortlist of core outrage management strategies – stake out the middle, acknowledge prior misbehavior, acknowledge current problems, give away credit, share control, etc. – was really the way to go.

I always wished I had better answers. So research that rigorously tested how well these core outrage management strategies actually work could be incredibly useful.

On the other hand, it might be just confirmation bias but I’m actually pretty certain these strategies work. Furthermore, I’m dubious that even the most compelling proof would have convinced my clients who kept demanding such proof. These outrage management strategies are profoundly counterintuitive; they’re organizationally and psychologically uncomfortable. My clients had powerful reasons to want not to believe they worked. In fact, they had powerful reasons to want not to believe their stakeholders’ outrage had anything to do with their own behavior. It was so much more soul-satisfying to blame the public for being stupid and the activists for making trouble.

The outrage management research I always felt I needed most was research on how to reconcile my clients to the wisdom of addressing their stakeholders’ outrage instead of giving in to their own outrage.

Vis-à-vis crisis communication, I think the biggest problem practitioners face is their tendency to conflate two kinds of crises: the low-hazard high-outrage controversy versus the high-hazard high-outrage genuine emergency. These are both crises for the practitioner’s organization, because in both cases stakeholders are upset and inclined to blame the organization. But in the first sort of crisis (which I have relabeled outrage management) they’re unduly upset and the task is to figure out how to calm them down, whereas in the second sort (real crisis communication) they’re rightly upset and the task is to help them bear the crisis and guide them through it.

Crisis managers frequently treat the second sort of crisis as if it were the first sort. Officials simply can't get through their heads that when hazard is high, outrage is an ally, not the enemy. Outrage is what motivates people to take precautions (and to tolerate official precautions). Calming people is the right goal in outrage management, but dead wrong in crisis communication. If panic were likely, that would be a different story. But people rarely panic in crisis situations.

So my top priority for crisis communication research is research that explores how high-hazard health and safety crises differ from low-hazard reputational crises, and nails down the differences in how these two sorts of crises should be managed.

Your comment asked what research needs I see as paramount “in the digital age.” So it’s worth noting that nothing in my answer relates to anything digital. Maybe because I’m 72 and pretty much retired, I don’t see much that’s different because of social media and related digital developments. Yes, social media are the venue where most risk communication happens now, whether it’s precaution advocacy or outrage management or crisis communication. And there’s no longer much of a periodic news cycle; deadlines are immediate and everything is 24–7. And there’s rarely a mass audience reachable in a single place; when you need to reach a mass audience (you don’t always), you need to reach that audience in small, self-segregated pockets.

But none of this affects what sort of messaging is optimal. Though obviously there is social media risk communication research worth doing, the risk communication research needs that look most pressing to me have little or nothing to do with social media.