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Risk Versus Risk
Public panic has on several occasions been created by media stories of risks posed by contraceptive pills. On one occasion, when it was announced that a particular pill posed a greater risk than others, many women spontaneously ceased to take it. It later became apparent that, in doing so, their overall risk was now greater because the difference between the risk posed by the pill in question and others was smaller than the risk of fatality in childbirth.
On another occasion, the reopening of schools after the summer break was to be delayed because of a central agency's backlog in vetting new teachers and other staff for histories of pedophilia. The government advocated that the schools remain closed in the interest of protecting the children. Then a head teacher intervened, pointing out that the risk posed to pupils in classrooms during the next few weeks by unidentified pedophiles was tiny compared to those posed to them on the streets by traffic, miscreants, drug dealers and their own instincts. Calm was restored, and the schools reopened.
The public in general is not practiced in handling risk information. When the risk is not stated in absolute terms but as an increase over some other risk level, or when it is one that needs to be traded off against some other risk, the full story needs to be told. Even professional decision makers, such as safety managers and politicians, whose duty it is to treat risk as only one of many information sources, and who should be versed in weighing it against the other factors in the decision-making process, are likely to forget context and accord excessive importance to one or other type of information.
Context and Meaning
A frequent assertion, often made by politicians, is that "the risk is one in a million." Such a statement is almost always intended to reassure rather than to inform, and any meaning that it might contain depends on its context and requires interpretation. It answers no questions and raises some. One question is, what risk? In the context of the risk posed by a carcinogen in food, does the statement refer to the probability of contracting cancer or of dying of it? In the context of road traffic, does the statement refer to the probability of an accident, being injured in an accident, or being killed? The statement alone is incomplete.
Another question is, one in a million what? Is the statement intended to mean that one in every million people in the country, or the world, will die of the cause in question? Or, are we to understand that, of every million people who come into contact with the source, one will die? Or is another probabilistic implication intended?
Glib statements may roll off the tongue easily, and they may give confidence to large numbers of the public that "the risk" is small, but if the intention of communication is to honestly provide a basis for decision making, they are inadequate, almost certainly not accurate, and likely to be misleading.
Time Units
As just mentioned, risk statements require units, and it must be made clear what the risk is and who or what is at risk. In addition, it is essential for the relevant time factor to be defined. Does the risk affect the given population per year, or per day, or for the lifetime of the persons involved? Or, might the risk apply per hour of exposure to the risk?
Risk is stated per hour or per year of operation if it is posed by continuously operating equipment. It may be stated per unit of time of presence in a hazardous area in the case of someone — for example, a maintenance technician — who must enter that area for only a portion of the day. The risk associated with the failure to operate of protection equipment, such as a fire extinguisher, is stated per demand.
Failure to define the appropriate time units can lead to incorrect decisions and, in many cases, over-engineering of manufacturing facilities, which may then be uncompetitively expensive.
Framing
It is now well established that the response to communicated information depends strongly on how the information is framed, or packaged. For example, information couched in terms of the number of survivors of an accident creates a significantly different impression on the recipient, and elicits a very different response, from the same information framed in terms of deaths.
In one experiment, Shah, Domke and Wackman [Ref. 4] tested two groups of subjects for how their decision making was affected by the framing of information. The groups, of evangelical Christians and university undergraduates, were expected to hold different views. The decisions to be made concerned voting for one or other of electoral candidates. The information presented to the groups consisted of simulated news stories about the candidates' views, using "ethical" and "material" frames. It was found that the two frames had a pronounced influence on the interpretation of the issue at hand and on how the voters perceived other issues within the same environment — referred to as "the priming effect." If ethical framing was activated, it helped to foster an ethical interpretation of other issues, for both groups of subjects. The material frame had a corresponding effect. Further, voters were likely to put the frame at the center of their evaluation for decision making. Thus, the frame was not only influential on the subject's interpretation of the particular issue, but also on subsequent decision making — in the form of voting. An individual's judgment became biased by the framing of the information.
As communicators, we influence the recipients of our information by the way in which we frame it, whether or not we are conscious of doing so. Marketing and salespeople understand this, and use framing to influence others to their way of thinking. As safety professionals, it is proper for us to be aware of framing. There is no wholly objective transmission of information, for our own biases influence our framing, and it is useful for us to recognize this. Neither is there any wholly objective receipt, for the recipient's biases cannot be put aside. Thus, our awareness of the phenomenon of framing should be used in an attempt to make communication as objective as possible.
Presentation of Numeric Information
Framing includes the way in which numeric information is presented. The message that, on average, one in a million of the population will die of cause A each year could be presented in a number of forms, for example: 1 per 1,000,000 per year, 1/1000000 per year, 10-6 per year, or one person in a city the size of "Metropolis" per year. Which is used should be determined from knowledge of the intended recipients of the information. We should be aware of any assumptions made about the ability of recipients to understand the communicated information.
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