Emergency Management -- Risk Perception

Emergency Management -- Risk Perception

Identify some avenues of risk perception and communication. Also, identify potential impediments to effective risk perception and communication, and how they may be overcome.

One person's risk may be another person's adrenaline high, as is evidenced by the popularity of skydiving, smoking, and also the variability of fears in any given society. Thus risk analysis cannot be based in personal emotion alone, as the emotional perceptions of risk vary greatly from individual to individual. Broadly defined, risk is the possibility of adverse consequences. Risk is predicted in terms "of the likelihood that an event of a given magnitude will occur at a given location within a given time period" and describes the expected consequences that the event will inflict on persons, property, and social functioning" (83).

Some risks happen suddenly, others only over time. An effort addressing the imminent threat of an extreme event is referred to as a warning and designed to produce an emergency response, like evacuating before a hurricane. A risk communication program raises hazard awareness about long-term risks that may not be immediately obvious, like the dangers of eating transfats or global warming (86)

To persuade people of the need to guard their lives against risk, the classical persuasion model dispenses information from an authoritative source, with a clear message, through channels such as print, television, and advertising, to produce the intended effect upon the target population. But other models, such as the proactive decision model view the process of decision-making as beginning with predecisional processes, which selects the correct channels to communicate the risk. If the population at risk does not trust the channel, however seemingly authoritative it may be, then the communication will not be effective or obeyed. For example, community advocates may more accurately explain the need to evacuate to select populations from a flood-prone area before a storm than a warning from the highest authority, if there is tension between the government and the affected neighborhood. Also, having a coherent predecisional process allows the risk to be more completely defined and convincingly communicated to the individuals in question in a way that is comprehensible, and also reasonable (89). Hysteria about the risks of smoking, or solemnly informing teens that one puff will cause inevitable addiction and lung cancer, will merely cause this population to distrust the communication channel and the message, but communicating how risks accumulate over time in an accurate manner may dissuade teens more effectively from adopting the smoking habit.