Monitor - March 2015

people will be convinced
by the same evidence that
convinces them, when it in
fact needs to be explained
differently to a lay audience,”
Fischhoff says. “People
can understand just about
anything if you do your job
right as a communicator.”
That includes keeping it
simple and communicating
what people need to know,
versus what is nice to know;
expressing risk in numbers —
“there’s a 30 percent chance
of rain” — and reminding
people of the opportunity
cost of waiting for more
evidence. Messaging should
also be tested on individuals
to spot any potential
misunderstandings, he says.

One example he cites of making sense of reams of information: Lisa Schwartz, MD, and Steven Woloshin, MD, both professors at the Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, drew on behavioral decision research to create a “drug facts box,” a label similar to the FDA’s nutrition fact box. The label clearly spells out a drug’s potential benefits versus harms, and enumerates how well it performs versus placebo or alternative treatments.

Effective communication also requires scientists and others to be honest about underlying uncertainties, as Fischhoff wrote in in a recent paper for the

Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS, 2014).

Such is the goal of the CDC, which prioritizes candor and immediacy in its communications, Reynolds says.

“Science is a messy arena,” she says. “I think psychologists working in the realm of risk communication assume we have too much control through our messaging. We need to step back and allow for high emotions and missteps by people as long as we work to help them make well-informed decisions that ultimately protect them and the people around them.” n