Part One
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Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, journalists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today’s
conversation is with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. He’s
the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Department of Social and Decision
Sciences and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. An expert in
risk and decision-making, he’s the recent president of the Society
of Risk Analysis and former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision
making. Currently Dr. Fischhoff is on the Environmental Protection Agency's
Scientific Advisory Board and chairs its Homeland Security Advisory Committee.
Joe: Welcome, Baruch.
You've written a very interesting article recently regarding climate change,
which I want to turn to. But, first to orient us, perhaps you can tell
us a bit about your professional interests and how climate change figures
into them.
Baruch: I grew up in Detroit. I did an undergraduate degree in mathematics at Wayne State and toward the end of my time there, backed into a secondary major in psychology. Then I was out school for a number of years. When I went back I decided to go back in psychology and ended up with a group…an exceptional group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who kind of created the field of the psychology of judgment and decision making. And then I was fortunate enough to, get a post-doc working with Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein at a place called Decision Research.
And, shortly after the time I arrived there in the mid-1970's, we started to get requests from people who were concerned about why the public was making seemingly irrational decisions about technology or about the environment. And getting engaged with those questions was a worthy test of our science. That is, did we know anything from laboratory studies that enabled us to speak about issues of major public concern. . . .
Initially we were being asked about liquid natural gas and nuclear power, at the beginning of resistance to them. But fairly early on, towards the end of the 1970's, I started to go to meetings on climate change. And, interestingly, at the very beginning of those meetings, there was an understanding that the social sciences were important. And so I've worked intermittently on that. What I've found over the years is that – I’ll try to put this nicely -- that the natural scientists have been so engaged in their parts of these questions that they really haven't had much of a place for social variables, much less the social sciences. And it's really only been in the last few years that the social variables have become important and maybe in the last…almost the last few months that there's been a realization that you need the social sciences in order to provide systematic knowledge about why people do different things. How you can help them to make better decisions and how to design policies that people like.
Joe: You wrote an editorial last November in a professional journal describing what you call “non-persuasive communication.” The editorial's title was “Non-Persuasive Communication about Matters of Greatest Urgency -- Climate Change.” There's a lot we might talk about in the article, but perhaps the place to begin is with a definition. What do you mean by “non-persuasive communication”? Who should be doing non-persuasive communication…and why?
Baruch: Well, the distinction that I was trying to make is that there's lots of persuasive communication. There's advertisers, politicians. Really, anybody who thinks that they know how other people should run their lives are engaged in persuasive communication. And it's a major area in psychology.
There's also unpersuasive communication, which entails attempts to be persuasive but not bringing it off. And then I try to make the distinction of something called non-persuasive communication. Well, what you're trying to do is to give people the information that they need in order to make their own decisions in an autonomous way. And there are situations…particular situations in which persuasive communication is called for: where you know exactly what people's goals are. They want you to process the information to them and tell them what to do.
But in many of the big decisions in life, different people want different things. Looking at the same facts they could reach different, different conclusions. They don't trust you to tell them how to run their lives; whether it's voting or consuming or driving or making health decisions. So there's a legitimate intellectual enterprise to help people to make better decisions. And, that's, I think, the role of non-persuasive communication.
It has a discipline of trying to learn enough about people in order to provide them the few facts that are most essential to their decisions, in a way that makes sense to them and enables them to make decisions.
There's a natural tendency of many scientists just to share everything they know, because it's all so fascinating to them. And it would be fascinating to their audience too, if their audience wasn't concerned with making some sort of a decision. In which case, they want you to turn off the fire hose and just tell them what really matters to their choice.
Joe: You know, for some listeners, the notion of non-persuasive communication, particularly as applied in this case, to climate science, might beg the question of… so what are scientists who are concerned about climate change supposed to do? Are they supposed to be like sort of, you know, Victorian children who don't speak unless they're spoken to? You're not suggesting, are you, that…that, scientists who have valuable information should just stick to their research labs and never speak to the public?
Baruch: Clearly the scientific community are the source of trustworthy information about climate, about many different things. But I think that one can make a choice about whether to be a persuasive communicator, or attempt to be a persuasive communicator, or to retain the stance of non-persuasive communication. I think that the default for scientists ought to be to try to be the source of the facts . . . and their attendant uncertainties and not try to spin them. Because once you're caught spinning, then you've lost credibility on everything. If you really believe that given your facts and other people's values, they'll choose to make the choices that you want, well, then that's a win-win situation. There may be cases where people look at your facts, understand them as a trustworthy source and decide that there are other considerations that lead them to go in a different direction.
Joe: You wrote that -- quote “perhaps scientists have failed the public by not providing the information needed to make climate-related decisions in a credible, comprehensible way.” How would you describe the information needed to make good decisions? And, what kind of scientists need to be involved?
Baruch: I think that non-persuasive communication is the natural stance for most scientists. I mean, that's the way we work. We have a kind of persuasive communication within us. We try to convince one another about the quality of our data and listen to their criticism. But we're trying to understand what the facts and uncertainties are. I think that scientists often pass this threshold of wanting to do persuasive communication, in which they feel that there's a truth that's so self-evident. And they can't understand why other people don't respond to it.
So I think in the climate area, scientists have known the broad outlines of the kind of gamble that we're taking with the climate. You know, they've probably been known for twenty-five years well enough for people to say, boy, that's a gamble I don't want to take. . . .we ought to be doing some precautionary things. . . .we ought to take this seriously. . . .we ought to develop energy alternatives.
So, for decision-making purposes, in terms of the overall threat posed by climate change, we've known what the gamble has been for quite a while. And, in fact, the public has realized this for a long time. Most of the public believes in the reality of climate change. I think the social sciences have something important to contribute. So one thing that they can contribute is that if you look at the vast array of communications about climate change, they're a lot about the problem and not a whole lot about the solution, in ways that will give people decision options that are attractive to them.
So we see more and more about the severity of the problem. We see more and more about the ecological impacts. But that doesn't necessarily translate into action unless people see viable alternatives in which they can make large meaningful changes in their lives, consistent with all the other things that are going on in their lives. So the lack of action is not a sign of public irrationality. It's not that the public doesn't get the general message. But we have some other barriers to action that, I think, the social sciences have some of the clues to disentangling [them] and to providing people both the options and the information they need to do what they want about climate.
Joe: Recently the Climate Change Communication Research center at George Mason University conducted a survey in which they found that “roughly a third of American adults were still undecided as to the dangers posed by global warming, and our ability to combat it." Are you surprised by that?
Baruch: You know, as somebody who's been worrying about this for thirty years, I would say I'm not sure about our ability to do anything with it. So, I might be in the one-third of skeptics. I think that, for us to take on climate change is going to require a revolutionary reorganization of how we do science, as well as some major reorganizations of how we do public policy, both domestically and internationally.
I think that there are different ways of doing social research. And, surveys can get you at some kinds of information. But they can't really get to the depth of people's thinking. So I would have to speculate, based on other research and, you know, general principles, what it is that people are thinking. And it's often true where people don't have a command of the facts, they try to read the process. So, people will often seem to be very concerned with relatively minor…minor problems that popped up in the news media. And, it's not a wholly accurate, but not a wholly inaccurate assumption to say, gee, if lots of people are worrying about it, if the news media are reporting on it, this must be a big problem.
And
so there may be many people who aren't following the details of climate change
or the real or putative solutions who say, gee, there does seem to be a mobilization. There's
lots of coverage about this. There's lots of people who are doing it. There's
entrepreneurs
putting
money into it, or people trying to do so. They're trying to do biodiesel.
trying to do these different things. That, if we put enough of our talents
together and there were government support and good will, then maybe something
could happen. That certainly a better bet now than it would have been
even two years ago.
Joe: Take us deeper into your model for nonpersuasive science communication. I know you’ve written about it in the book called Risk Communication, and in many other places. You talk about a team collaboration of four different professionals that is appropriate to create scientifically sound communication. Why don't you tell us a bit about who those professionals are, categorically.
Baruch: I've worked on a wide variety of different areas with trying to help people to make better decisions, like teen sex and drugs, and sexual assault, and environment and …various technologies. Homeland Security. And, you know, we often get it wrong. And I think that part of the problem is that we haven't organized ourselves appropriately. I mean, I'm actually quite optimistic about people's ability to understand and make reasonable choices about things that they're willing to invest in.
Whether people are willing to invest in learning about a topic and making decisions about it, in part depends on what they think the return on that investment will be. So if we, as the professional community, do a good job of creating options and presenting information, people are more likely to get engaged. And if there are decent options, they're more likely to do appropriate things.
And, I think the kind of organization that I believe is essential, is, you need people who really understand about the problem. And, for climate change, that's certainly climatologists, but it's also ecologists, wildlife biologists, economists, architects; whoever has the pieces of the puzzle, to create the options that we want people to evaluate.
Second thing, you need decision analysts, or risk analysts who will take all of this wonderful, complicated, subtle information that the technical community can provide and will identify the few facts that are really most relevant to people's decisions. Because you'll lose people's attention if you don't focus your communication on the things that matter to them. They'll get bored. They'll wander off. They'll think that you don't understand them.
Third, you need social scientists who will kind of communicate to the professional community what's really on people's minds. What do they care about, what are their constraints, and so on. And then we'll communicate the relevant technical information back to people in terms that they'll understand. And I think that this role of the social scientist is particularly important with unfamiliar technical areas, like the things related to climate change, where people have fragments of the relevant mental models to understand what's going on. But they need help to make these things comprehensible.
And then finally, you need communicators like yourselves, who will set up credible channels, who will provide feedback, who will provide the right production values so that information gets to people in terms that they understand. And we’ll go wrong if you miss any of these. You know, if you just got a psychologist like me, or a decision scientist like me doing the work, it won't get out. I won't know how to talk about it. I'll be making up scientific facts.
If you just have the technical people, then they have no direct way of knowing what their audience cares about or… sort of teasing apart why their message seems not to be getting through. Is it because they are not communicating clearly, or . . . They're communicating clearly, but they're off target. And, I think [it] requires a much higher level of organization than we often have.
Joe: You’re listening to Communicating Climate Change. I’m Joe Cone at Oregon State University. Our conversation today is with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, and he’s been talking about a model of nonpersuasive communication which involves a team comprised of subject matter experts, decision scientists, behavioral researchers, and finally science communicators, all playing distinct and essential roles.
You know, Baruch, science communicators are very familiar with working with the subject matter-expert scientists. But in formulating our communications, it’s not often that decision researchers and social psychologists are involved. So I guess it would be useful, if you could, to give us an example of this sort of communication.
Baruch: Let me do this. It will be too far off topic, but let me tell you about a project that we did. So at least I know this one well. So we were interested in helping and to reducing the rate of sexually transmitted infections among young women. And we had a largish grant from the National Institutes of Allergies and Infections Disease. And we wanted to adapt a non- persuasive stance. That is we and other people have found that by the mid-teen years, young people have roughly the cognitive skills, the decision making skills of adults. They know more about some things and less about other things. And we thought, well, let's help young women to make better decisions about their own sexuality.
And, what we found. . . so we worked with the head of Adolescent Medicine at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and a professor of nursing. And what they told us was that an important limit to the communication channel is that young women are often uncomfortable talking about sexuality. And that many of their staff, even people who end up in, you know, working in these clinics, are uncomfortable talking about these issues. So they proposed to us that a good communication channel here was an interactive DVD.
That is so, you know, somebody could interact with it; they could learn about these issues without having to interact with an adult, a possible reproving adult. And if they wanted to, they could then talk to the adult about the issues in the DVD or about their own personal issues.
And we had a professional film crew that developed the DVD for us. So we had good production values, an appropriate channel. We had, scientists who, . . . well, professionals who knew everything that you needed to know about sexually transmitted illnesses. And, then the question was, well, what do you say? So, in our formative interviews with young women, we found that many of them actually knew quite a lot about HIV AIDS, but didn't know anything about other sexually transmitted infections. So that suggested some direction . . . some place where you would focus the information.
We also found that there were a few things even about HIV AIDS that they didn't know because it just wasn't taught in [their?] curriculum. Like, how relatively small risks can mount up through repeated exposure, as well as some other things that in our society we're reluctant to talk [about].
So, we were able to focus the informational part of our DVD on a relatively concise set of facts that were kind of surprising to kids. They said, oh yeah, I didn't know that. I can see how fits in. And then…But we also found that a lot of young women felt that they didn't have control over situations in which there were young men, or not so young men, pressing them for… you know, for sexual relations. So the fact that they really knew a lot more than they were able to take advantage of. So it wasn't an information gap; it was actually like a control gap. And so about half of the DVD focuses on [a] choose your own adventure format, where there are young men, either a steady or a pickup, is pressing on a young woman. And there's a succession of decision points where she can stop the interaction and get a chance to figure out how to reassert control.
So that was sort of the decision and risk analysis; we have a psychological point; we did a lot of pre-testing. We got the tone right, so the kids felt that they were being respected. We had the resources to do a randomized control trial on a fairly high risk population. And we're able to achieve meaningful results, in terms of reducing the risks and improving young women's control over their sexual behavior.
This is what we try to do, is to put together a team that has each of these different elements. It takes resources and it takes commitment.
And I'll give you a second example, of somebody who I think did this on a shoestring. One of my heroes is head of the Des Moines, Iowa, Waterworks. A guy named L.D. McMullen, who prior to Katrina, Des Moines had the largest loss of water in modern American history. There were big floods in the Mississippi, Missouri, in…either '93 or '94. At that point, Des Moines had one waterworks on an island in the middle of the Beaver River, and it was swamped.
And, it turns out, it's not easy to bring things back online. And what L.D. did, and I think just, is an intuitive communication, he held -- every twelve hours for the week it took them to get back online -- held an open-ended news conference. Where he said this is what we promised to do twelve hours ago. This is what we've done and have failed to do. This is what we've gonna do the next time. Are there any questions? And then he took questions as long as possible. There were no printed releases. And, it was all broadcast as…you know, as long as somebody was willing to…to carry it. Apparently somebody wrote a country western song about him, treating him as a…[chuckle]…hero of this incident. So that's proof to me.
So he had a staff that knew this particular problem. They knew what the risks were in . . . they were able to do the risk analysis. And they knew their audience so well, that it's good…I mean, they knew they just wanted water. They weren't answering really all that complicated [a] thing. They eliminated the social science role by taking questions for long enough until they were able to clarify everything that wasn't clear. And so over time the news media, in effect, educated the communicators so that they knew their audience. So they were frank. They weren't spinning it. It was non-persuasive communication. And he managed to assemble a team that had these functionalities.
Joe: This is a conversation with Baruch Fischhoff, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, and we’re going to take a pause here in the conversation, to keep the audio file from becoming too large. Please join us for the rest of this conversation in the file labelled as part two.