Latest / The Alerting Authority / Why Some Emergency Alerts Fail — New Research Explains What’s Missing - Part II Discussion

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Why Some Emergency Alerts Fail — New Research Explains What’s Missing - Part II Discussion · The Alerting Authority

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Jeanette Sutton.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I am Eddie Ritzolena.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we welcome you to another episode of the Alerting Authority.
• 0:13
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• 0:19
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• 0:30
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• 0:31
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• 0:56
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• 1:02
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• 1:44
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• 1:47
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• 1:48
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• 1:50
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• 1:58
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• 2:02
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• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: So we want to welcome back today to the podcast, Hugh Walpole, Dr.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Hugh Walpole, who, if you listened previously, you met him and you know how much, how interesting and how deep we can go on subjects about research.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to return to that today.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Hugh is a consulting research scientist for the Warren Room.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: His research focuses on how people perceive risk and respond to risk communication associated with a wide variety of natural and technological hazards and psychological measurement of risk-related concepts.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Hugh received his PhD in environmental social sciences from the Ohio State University.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: And he and I worked together at the University of Albany, where he was part of my research team within the emergency and risk communication message testing lab.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And um, we just had so many studies we've conducted, analyzed, and wrote together.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: We wanted to spend some time in this episode talking about the new most recent publication that came out of that lab.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I am very excited because it's some groundbreaking information.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So y'all are gonna be the first to hear about it.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: But we're gonna start by asking a question about risk perception because this is one of Hugh's um areas of research that he has published on.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and most probably most importantly, it was his dissertation research.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: So he knows a lot about risk perception.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, can you introduce yourself real briefly and then tell us about the importance of risk perception and how it's related to alerts and warnings?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks for having me back.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be here.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm Hugh Wobble.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um I conduct a lot of research, as Jeanette said, on uh how people think and feel about risk from a wide variety of different hazards.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and a big part of that work, and and we're kind of the genesis of me coming into that work was through the concept of risk perception.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there's a lot of definitions for risk perception that kick around in the world, but um it's mostly exactly what it sounds like.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's how people perceive the risk associated with something.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if we wanted to think of that in general terms, um we might think of it as how bad someone thinks uh the outcomes associated with some hazard, whether that's a a wildfire or whether it's a power outage, um, how bad that is likely to be.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um generally speaking, we think of this as some combination of how likely something bad is to happen, uh, how bad that would be if it did happen, and then uh how bad it feels, how scary it is, that visceral sense of risk.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so we usually think of perceived risk as some kind of combination of those things.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: So there's like an emotional element to risk perception too, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there's a lot of research on kind of the the relative position of where that belongs in uh in a process of perceiving risk and how important it is relative to that analytic sense of how likely is this and how bad would it be, that more um yeah, that more analytic sense of of how those go.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: But most theories uh in the modern era of risk perception uh include both of those elements and give them a fair amount of prominence um kind of each.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: They they one is not considered to be more impactful than the other.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: So when I think about like scary messages related to risk perception, if I give people a really scary message, is that gonna get people to take action?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really tempting to do that, right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of the time the thing that we're really worried about is giving somebody uh a message and uh having them say, like, ah, it's not that scary.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna do anything about it.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we're really worried about not reaching those people with information about how risky some of the hazards that they might be facing really are.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that makes it makes a lot of sense.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we do need to include that for a lot of people.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time, it's really critical to include those pieces of information that help people understand how they're at risk and how they could be at risk if they, even if they think that they're not.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the whole story.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of great theory from the last uh 30 years or so that spends a lot of time thinking about um what other components of risk messages are required.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So when do risk messages fail, even when they activate people's risk perception?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: They make them really scared.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why doesn't uh people kind of act on that information?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the kind of pieces of that theory is that if you give people something to be scared of, you also have to give them a way to get themselves out of danger.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have to provide them with information that helps them feel like it's not hopeless.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a way for them to confront this risk, as scary as it might be, um, and that they're capable of doing that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we talk about a couple of different concepts in that space, talk about self-efficacy, so a sense that there are things that I can do.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I am capable of taking an action that will help reduce my risk.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then we talk also about response efficacy, um, which is essentially just how effective do I think recommended actions will be at helping me reduce my risk.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have high risk perception, you might feel motivated to do something, but unless you believe that you can do something, so you have self-efficacy, and you believe that that thing will be effective, so you have response efficacy, then you're not as likely to take an action on that behalf.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: It can make people fatalistic if you give them an enormous amount of risk perception, you boost their risk perceptions really high by telling them something is really scary, it's gonna impact them in a really serious way, and you don't give them a way out.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: You don't give them an action that they can take in order to kind of help them get out of that situation.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's one of the things that we're gonna be talking about, I assume, is is the importance of guidance, thinking about how important it is in risk messages to include information about what people can do to protect themselves.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: As we were talking about in the last part, they may not always do exactly that, but for the people who don't know what to do, it's absolutely crucial for them to have that sense of there's something I can do to reduce this big risk that I'm facing.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna go off script for just a second.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna ask you a question about wildfire because this is one of those places where the messages that go out can be really scary, especially if there's a lot of environmental cues around you.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: But a lot of times there's there's jargon that's used to communicate about wildfire where the perception of risk has really increased, but the jargon is trying to do a lot of things in one statement, like evacuation warning.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: And for some people, evacuation warning might mean to them, okay, you're warning me that I need to evacuate right now.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: So the implied guidance is to leave.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: But we know that that jargon, evacuation warning, does not mean to leave.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: It actually means to prepare to leave.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's raising people's perceptions of risk without if you don't give them that guidance that goes along with that jargon.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: It leaves people wondering, well, what do I do?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, we've we've written a lot about this.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So what are your thoughts?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think particularly in the case that you're describing, we've done work specifically looking at um evacuation warning versus evacuation order as ways of describing um kind of recommended guidance for a wildfire.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it can get pretty pernicious because a lot of the time the term evacuation warning or evacuation order are used kind of in lieu of describing what the risk actually is.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of the time, the heavy lift that it's doing, the jargon, in terms of guidance, it's trying to tell you to either um leave if you need additional time, leave immediately, or prepare if you don't need additional time, versus leaving immediately for an evacuation order.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're asking it to do the lift of that guidance, but you're also not including information about whether what what kind of hazard people are facing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in many cases for wildfire messages, the word wildfire isn't used.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they just describe, hey, if it's a it's an evacuation warning, it's an evacuation order.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it can be tempting to think like, oh, come on, what does it matter?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a hazard, we want people to evacuate.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing that that we really want to focus on.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I can sympathize with that perspective because what you're asking them to do is not really dependent on what hazard they're facing.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: You just want them to get out of there to keep themselves safe.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but kind of pertinent to the conversation that we had last time about compliance, there's a lot of different things that people can do to keep themselves safe.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not always exactly what we tell them to do.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so if a person finds themselves in a situation where knowing that the threat that they're facing is a fire could help them take action more safely than if it was something like a windstorm, a flood, a landslide, or something like that, that you might ask people to evacuate for.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously not a windstorm, but you know what I mean.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But knowing that a fire is in a given location, it might make traffic bad, it might block egress routes, it can behave in ways that are different from other hazards.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: It can help people contextualize the information that you're giving them about guidance and actually implement it.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, that requires that they actually know what you're trying to tell them to do.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so in the case of evacuation warning versus evacuation order, we did some research and we developed some evidence that people don't really understand the difference between these terms very well.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in some cases, this may not matter a great deal, but there are edge cases where if you have uh a group of people that you want to stage for an evacuation, but your egress is limited enough, you have a small town that has one road that goes in and out, and you have to be able to get everybody out along that one road, you're gonna want to stage that evacuation process so that you can get people out without choking the roads with traffic or causing accidents along the way.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so being able to stage people to get them ready to go on a moment's notice is really important.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But if those people are also interpreting that guidance as leave immediately, then you're gonna end up with a more chaotic evacuation that's harder for you to manage and stage.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, again, I'm not a wildfire expert and I haven't been in the situation rooms doing those logistical decisions.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a presumption that I'm making about a challenge there.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: But there are many other kind of terms that we could use if we move past using jargon, we move into using plain language that allow us to say what we mean and allow us to give people the best chance to interpret the guidance that they're given and then make a judgment on that basis, both in terms of knowing what hazard it is that they're actually facing, but also what kinds of behaviors are, in our view, kind of optimal for keeping them safe in the event that they don't already know.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and it touches on something that we we didn't talk about in our last episode that I do want to bring up is the concept of milling.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And milling is one of those things that the warning response model calls out as being present for in response to every alert and warning message that someone receives.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: It is the process that we as social individuals go through to confirm the information, to confirm what is happening around us, to confirm that we should be paying attention to the message, um, to figuring out what we should actually be doing in response to the message.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: And milling is it delays action.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: And when a message is incomplete and it simply says something like evacuation warning, zone 25A, like really incomplete, not giving people a lot of information that's really easily consumed if you don't have pre-education and awareness of the jargon and of the location.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: That process of looking for information to confirm is gonna delay action.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where these incomplete jargony messages become really dangerous.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like you've increased people's perceptions of risk.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And now you want people to take action immediately.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like you gotta give them a complete message so that they can actually do that.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um even we know milling's always gonna happen, but reducing the amount of time people spend looking for information is like a real key here to helping people to go.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's it's the most natural thing in the world to when you're trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do in this situation, just to look at what other people are doing, um, and then to look for information on whether or not there's guidance about what you're supposed to be doing.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So knowing that that's the most natural thing in the world, but also knowing that delays can be really costly, it really behooves us to try to reduce that delay, that decision delay, as much as you can.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that can uh that can best be facilitated, as far as we know, by including that complete information in those messages.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well then kind of going back and incorporating what we just did and talking about the future, and this is kind of an all-around can we go over biases for a second or biases, right?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um we we talked about risk perception.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I know those two things are not the same, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: But but it seems like the biases that that can exist can play a pretty important factor and can influence a lot of that, the actions or inactions.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I guess so.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: My question is can you help identify the differences between those two things of risk perception and then the biases?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then is there a way as practitioners by following the principles that we're talking about that we we can affect people's biases?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think this is a really good question.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um we talk about biases a lot in risk research, decision research in general.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: So just thinking about how people make decisions and how they kind of focus on risky things.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Bias is something that that turns up a lot.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think you're spot on.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're not quite the same thing as risk perception.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: We could think of relying on your risk perception entirely to make a decision might constitute a bias of some kind, but we'll talk about that in a sec.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um so they are different, but I would say people's biases affect their risk perception, and their risk perception can affect how their biases affect their actions.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we're gonna get super, super nerdy here for a minute.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So um just derail me if I go off the rails a bit.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: But generally speaking, awesome.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Generally speaking, we we we think about biases as coming about from an over-reliance on simplifying rules for decision making that we call heuristics.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um so in decision research, a lot of the time, when you're faced with a decision, making an objective decision to do something like should I evacuate or not as a result of this hurricane, answering that objectively is really, really hard.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have to know a lot about hurricanes in general.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have to know a lot about this hurricane in particular, you need to know a lot about your home's resistance to hurricanes.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, is it is it able to kind of withstand the wind speeds that you're gonna get from those kinds of things?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, traffic conditions, uh, the direction that the storm's gonna go, which requires you to be able to see into the future.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: You need to know all of those things if you want to make a rational decision about that.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um instead, you can rely on a simplifying question, a question that helps you get most of the way there that's much easier for you to answer.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, if you get a risk message from an organization that you trust, instead of saying, should I evacuate from this disaster, which is a really hard question to answer, you can ask an easier question.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do I trust the organization that's telling me that I should evacuate?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: If the answer to that is yes and they're telling me to evacuate, then none of that other stuff about the storm matters.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: I trust that they're going to try and keep me safe.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: That question's really easy for me to answer.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I can make a decision on the basis of that.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a positive case, I think, when people rely on a heuristic and it helps them make a decision that's good enough.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um when those biases can kind of uh frequently lead us astray, or when those heuristics can frequently lead us astray, we we call it a bias.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a bazillion different biases that come up in risk research, decision research.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not worth unpacking them all of them here, and I couldn't possibly if I tried, because I don't know a lot about all of them, but there's a ton.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Some that I think are really, really interesting to kind of focus on in this space are um what's known as confirmation bias.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up a lot in kind of popular literature as well as other places, but confirmation bias is essentially an over-reliance on the heuristic that if information that I see out in the world is similar to things that I already believe, I already know to be true, then it's likely to be true.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if it is dissimilar from things that I already believe, then it's likely to be false.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time, you can imagine how this would serve you pretty well.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it basically gives you a nose for BS, right?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, I know a lot of things about the world, and you got this piece of information, and that doesn't conform with my understanding of how the world works.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so like, I suspect that's not true.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Serves us well in a lot of cases.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're getting information about a hazard that's asking you to do something that doesn't conform with the way that you normally think about stuff, or the last four hurricane messages that you got, it turned out not to be a big deal.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: You think that they're overblown, it may not kind of allow you to make the best decision if you rely on the conformity of that new information to stuff you already believe.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a bias that can really affect how your risk perception develops as a result of the information that you're getting.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Does it conform with my worldview or not?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, another one that we see a lot and is the basis for a lot of the early research on building an emotional sense into risk perception is a bias that results from over-reliance on what's called the affect heuristic, um, which is a jargony term that basically is associated with the idea that if you uh if something feels good, it probably is good and not bad.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if it feels bad, it's probably bad and not good.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so if you can imagine a lot of cases, this is really, really good.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, things that you have negative experiences with in the past, things that are taboo in your society, or other things that feel bad, uh, you probably don't want to think that those things are actually really good for your society to do.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you might think that they're more risky, you might think they're less beneficial.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it can run into some serious trouble in the space that we're in if it creates a bias against kinds of things that we're asking people to do.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine um it could negatively impact, say, risk perceptions of a hazard that you're talking about in a community where that hazard is generated by some kind of important activity.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're thinking about greenhouse gas emissions, uh talking about those as a hazard in a coal mining community, you're asking people to take something that is really important to their livelihoods and see it as a bad thing.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be really, really hard for people to do.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're asking them to kind of go against that bias.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think that they have a legitimate risk that's associated with that, that can be a barrier to you being able to talk about that risk in a way that will help elevate their perceptions.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh similarly, if you're advocating for behaviors that have negative competitions in the community that you're talking to, you're saying you should do this, and they think about that, and they're like, ooh, that's icky, they're gonna think that that is.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Likely riskier and less beneficial than you're trying to convey to them as a risk expert.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And for those on the audio side of this, I'm I'm doing bunny ears around risk experts.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, no, you're doing quotes all the time.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it occurs to me that this is a this is an audio medium, so I should probably make that clear.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so those are just a couple of examples of biases that can come about from those heuristics.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Whether or not we can change them is really hard.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Generally speaking, when we're writing messages, our touch points with our publics can vary.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a lot, or you can have not that many.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't necessarily have many opportunities to change people's biases.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you did, it's unclear whether those would be particularly effective.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to shift people's beliefs over time, particularly when they're based on using these decision rules that people use below the level of consciousness.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they use them without thinking about it.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is just an easier question to ask myself that I can actually answer as opposed to one that's really hard.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: So usually when I think about shifting biases, it's more about trying to keep in mind what the biases of the group that you're going to be speaking to are and trying to communicate in a way that can help you, if not bypass them, then account for them.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, if you're advocating for a hazard in a community that thinks of it as beneficial, or in the other case, if you're advocating for behavior that response behavior that people have negative connotations associated with, using trusted messagers.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: So people who are in that community, who are part of that community, who can help them uh contextualize what you're asking them to do or what you're asking them to see as a threat in a way that is less likely to be discounted.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's from a member of that interior community.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can kind of fight fire with fire, use a trust-based heuristic to help you fight against that instinctual affect heuristic.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they might say, like, oh, Bob's telling me I really need to worry about this.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I thought it was all BS, but now I'm I'm thinking like this person who's important, who's kind of um who I trust has my best interests at heart, is asking me to to focus on this.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you might be able to get past those biases in that kind of way.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: I th I really appreciate that because so what you're saying, we may not be able to directly impact the bias that exists, right?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: But just knowing that they exist, knowing your community and what some of those are should help you again structure either your message, your dissemination method, maybe the trusted sources that you're gonna use to act as a secondary um sender of information or to to push or help influence that.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and again, just I think not admitting that they are out there or being ignorant of the fact, I think just is just bad.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like you need to have that understanding.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I appreciate the understanding of the difference between those.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and like I said, as you guys talk and as you guys nerd out, what I am thinking about is the way I'm writing messages and maybe the way that I need to do it a little differently based on a hazard for a specific population.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't talk about that enough sometimes.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think we we send out a message to this group when in reality we have population subsets within that greater population that may have a bias, a very strong bias one way.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if I send out this message to everybody, it is not a one size fits all.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I may need to do a secondary reach out or a secondary effort to specifically target that that potential barrier that may, you know, impede someone from taking that that action when I have other groups of my population that are immediately gonna be like, okay, it's a trusted source, all these things.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Where this other one is like, yeah, you know, it was sent by Red Rock Police Department.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't trust them.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're, you know, a bunch of whatever.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: So we may need that additional source to break through that.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I honor I'm very grateful that you went through that.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm I'm really glad you bring that up as well, just um in terms of of the bias that we have, because because the question this brings up for me is how do you know?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of how do you know what biases are active in your community?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do you subset your community in a way that helps you get around those different biases?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think turning that lens around and thinking like researchers are biased too, practitioners are biased too, right?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have beliefs about the populations that we serve, the populations that we work with that we don't always know about.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's really important, I think, to while sometimes these biases are gonna be super obvious, um, and that anecdotada will suffice, right?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: That sense from your friends, from other community members who tell you a thing once, you're like, oh, okay, I know something about this community now.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: But there's really no substitute if you're going to be relying on this to help keep people safe, there's no substitute for really trying to get into those communities, get to know them really well, and collect more than just a handful of anecdotes about that before you make a decision on the basis of the biases that they're likely to have.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it can be really easy to kind of make that judgment a blanket judgment.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we we definitely want to make sure that when we're making a call about going around a bias, um, we're making the right call.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Dang it.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I know, Jeanette, I'm sorry for saying one more thing and then we'll get to your question.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: It goes to that whole Craig Fugate Waffle House comment because that is one that is very real.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And Jeanette reminded me I have to get them on the show.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: When you send a message out here and people look at the phone, they look at, and I'm not kidding, they'll compare it to Waffle House and be like, well, they're still selling waffles and pancakes, or oh, the level is only pancakes now.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, whatever it is, it it is a real thing that people just naturally go to that you have to fight.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm done.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go to your go to the paper.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: I you you started to talk about message contents where you're talking about like trusted sources and such.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think this is a nice shift to to talk about this study that that I'm I'm pretty excited about.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is the last study that we got to do with a little bit of money that was left over from the work that we had done with the FEMA project.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think we were like, oh, we have like a couple thousand dollars left.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: We could do this one last experiment out in the community, and we have no money left to analyze it, but we're gonna collect the data.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: This is what happens when you're a researcher and you have too many questions.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: You're like, where can I find a couple thousand dollars in somebody who just like really wants to do this work?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, when I have great research partners, we figure out a way to do it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: So this paper um we called it content mapping, which is not the same as message mapping, which I know some PIOs know this idea of message mapping, which is uh I think it came out of Cavello's research, and it's it's developing a framework for like the three ideas that you're gonna communicate in a certain amount of time.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's message mapping.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's not the same.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: What we did was content mapping, because we took the contents of a warning message and we identified what contents matter the most in terms of the outcomes that are within the warning response model.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and if you leave a content out of the message, what does it do to people's understanding of the message, their belief about the message, their personalization of the message, their ability to decide, and if they need to look for more information to be able to take action.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I thought this was a fantastic study.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: So, Hugh, you could you describe for us some of the methods that we use to design the study?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: I know it was like a year ago, but it takes that long for things to get published.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was an experiment, and it was in San Diego, and I think uh wildfire and chemical spill.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that should kick us off.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um again, uh for those of you coming back in from the the first part of this, uh, an experiment is my favorite thing in the world.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: So special thanks to Jeanette for letting me play in my experimental playgrounds.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a really important study that I think we we as a group really, really needed to do.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and hopefully I can kind of walk you through and convince you why.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um so what we've been kind of working on for uh the last few years, um building on decades of research on the warning response model, is thinking about um the contents of messages that people uh need for when they receive that message to feel motivated to take some kind of action to protect themselves.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so according to the model built on decades of research, there's five content areas that are really important for um kind of how people get motivated to do that.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so the first thing you need is uh a source.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So your hazard needs uh a source ideally that is trusted.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: People need to know who the message is coming from before they'll kind of believe it's gonna happen.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um you need a hazard.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we were talking uh earlier on about uh wildfire jargon.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time um when you provide information in the form of just jargon, you're not including the name of the hazard.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing the nature of the hazard can really help contextualize the decisions that you make.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it needs to be in there.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And an extension that we've made over time is thinking about well, I can tell you what the hazard is, but what if people don't really know what the hazard's gonna do?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so we've been extending that by talking about the impacts that are associated with that hazard as well.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that a lot of our weather colleagues have been doing for quite some time.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So thinking about that and contextualizing how important that is is gonna be a big part of what this study is contributing.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got a source, you've got a hazard.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you also need information about the location.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: So where that hazard is going to affect.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: This can really help people make a judgment about whether or not they're going to be, whether or not they need to pay attention to that message.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are kind of limitations on our ability to hyper-target a message to a specific area.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to, in the message itself, delineate the area where that hazard's going to be particularly threatening is really useful.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Also providing information about where people can respond to.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if we want them to evacuate, where do we want them to go?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Where do we want them to not go?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it gives them an opportunity to think about that as well.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you need an element of time.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: So as important as where a hazard is going to strike, when it's going to strike is really important too.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you see a hazard coming and you have time to prepare, being able to identify a time by when people should have done something is also really important too.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that sense of when a hazard is going to affect a group of people, uh, but also when they should be able to take action to make themselves the most safe.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, the other really important element is guidance.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: You need to provide information about what people should do to keep themselves safe.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we've talked a lot about people know in a lot of cases things that they could do.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: They may know better than we do in a particular circumstance what they can do to keep themselves safe.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that guidance information is really critical for those people who don't know or who just need a guidance in the moment of like, oh wow, I really need to take some kind of action, help them get past that milling that Jeanette was talking about earlier, give them a sense of this is my starting place, this is what I should do, and then adjust from there.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um so those content areas, uh, and I'm gonna stretch it from five into six because it builds into the way that we we talked about our message design, we differentiated between the name of the hazard itself and uh those impacts of that hazard.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: So including those as two separate pieces of information.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: So what we did is that we built uh seven versions of the same message for each of two hazards.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the first message that we built for each one was um a complete message.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it was one that included all of those content areas in it.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's the kind of best job that we could do in 360 characters of writing a message that includes all of the information that the warning response model would suggest that you have.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we started that, and that was our first treatment.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so thinking back to our discussion earlier on about experiments, a treatment is in this context just a different message, different set of information that you're giving people.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when you make comparisons across different treatments, when you do an experiment and you randomly assign people to those different conditions, um, then you can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that any differences that you see between people who are in those groups is a result of the different treatment that they got.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: So in this case, the different type of message that they got.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that first treatment was a complete message.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: They we also had six other versions of that message that eliminated one of those content areas one by one.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd get a message that was identical to the complete message, but didn't include a source.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was also an identical message that didn't include the name of the hazard, one that didn't include the hazard impacts, one that didn't include location, one that didn't include time, and one that didn't include guidance.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what that allowed us to do was to look across all of these different motivational outcomes and see when we compare them to the complete message, which messages did worse than that complete message at motivating people.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: We know from some research that we've done in the last couple of years, we have some pretty good evidence that including all of those versus omitting chunks of them at a time makes you more motivated to take some kind of action.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what this experiment let us do that was so exciting was to drill down into specifically what each of the contents was doing.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: How do each of those specific contents motivate people to take action?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: So in the warning response model, we've talked about this uh already, but just quick reminder generally speaking, what we're focused on is we want people to understand what the message is about and what it's asking them to do.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: We want them to believe the message, so believe that something is actually happening.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: We want them to personalize the risk from the hazard.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: We want them to believe that it's relevant to them, that they need to do something about it.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we want them to be able to decide based on the information in the message.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: If we give them all of this information and they look at it and they're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this, then the message isn't as motivating.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: We also measured a couple of other constructs that I think are really useful to think about in terms of this, but aren't explicitly included in the warning response model.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the first ones are what we were talking about earlier.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about self and response efficacy.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: So thinking about how capable do you feel of taking the action that's recommended in that message, then that response efficacy, how effective do you think that will be at keeping you safe?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: We also measured a couple of outcomes associated with trust in the organization sending the message.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we know that trust is important for how people uh kind of take in a message, and it can be really important to trust the organization that is the source of your message in order to help you kind of take that action.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we also think that getting a message that is in some way suboptimal can also have a deleterious effect.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it can be bad for trusting the organization in the future.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was about to say that was come on now.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Deleterious.
• 37:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 37:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: Deleterious.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: I will look that one up later, folks.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: You're not alone.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Delete.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: It could lead to it could lead to lack of trust or erosion of trust in the future, right?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if I get a bunch of bad messages from an organization, I might not trust them to give me good information in the future.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: So not only are we thinking about the effect for this hazard in particular, we're thinking about the next one.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what am I gonna have to do for that?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so those were the things that we were looking at across those different outcomes.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what we wanted to do is compare how each removal of each specific concept, content area, um, from those messages was gonna impact each of those outcomes.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And by and large, the kind of fascinating stuff that we found is that when you emit certain kinds of information, it has a more dramatic effect across a wide range of those different motivational outcomes than other kinds.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in particular, what we found is that uh including hazard information, so information about the name of the hazard, the impacts of the hazard, and guidance were the most impactful pieces of information.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be very clear that we found that the most the best way that you can do this is to include all the information.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all of those things, the complete message outperformed every other message every single time on everything, to at least some extent, uh, largely significantly uh in a statistical sense.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the best message is still the complete message, but there are pieces of information that are really worth emphasizing in the messages that we put together.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's if you if you have to omit something, make sure that it's not the name of the hazard, make sure it's not the impacts of that hazard, and not the guidance information.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Those things really drove people's efficacy, understanding, belief, and a lot of those trust variables.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So thinking about the future, when you want people to get your next message and believe it, believe that you're credible and trustworthy, then focusing on having those complete messages is really this this may seem like it's not a big deal to a lot of people who are listening.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: But before, when we measured hazard, we measured hazard and impact as one thing.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the so the academic process of getting something published, we write up a paper, we send it out to a journal for peer review, they send it out to people who are um who are familiar with the area of research, the methods, the theory, um, and can evaluate our study and give us feedback.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so we sent it out to the journal.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: They sent back the reviews to us, and we responded to the reviews by making some changes, because there are a few.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: But we got a second round of reviews.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the second round said, you need to emphasize the importance of this discovery that hazard and hazard impact are two different things.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I don't know how important that is, but clearly these are communication scholars who may or may not be in the warning space.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: They're always anonymous.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know who they are.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: But they were saying this is something that really needs to be emphasized.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it is very important.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it it it either extends the warning response model or it expands it.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's something where the way we were talking about these contents before, we now know a lot more about the importance of one piece that we hadn't previously emphasized.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I Hugh was talking about within the weather space, they've talked about impacts a lot in the past.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: And they they did a lot work on what they call impact-based warnings, which they truly are influential in people's understanding of the hazard.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: But impact-based warnings don't necessarily motivate people to take action because they're not including guidance.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: So a complete message has the impacts and the guidance and that partnering together, it's kind of like you increase people's fears about the impacts, you got to give them the guidance so they can be self-efficacious and take action.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean, this was a really big deal.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so I mean, theoretically, research-wise, like this this was super important.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um the things that didn't matter, like Hugh, you want to mention the, I mean, like the source and the time and the location, like what was that about?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we did see smaller effects from source and time information.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I want to be super clear that that I don't think in this case means that those things aren't important.
• 42:19
  unknown: Right.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Jeanette made an allusion earlier on to when we do an experiment, we're talking to people in a space where they're very comfortable, uh, they're making different kinds of judgments than they always make.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is a weakness of all experimental research, is that the context is just a little bit different.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't always pick up on things that people will encounter in the moment.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so for instance, one of the things that we would hypothesize about a source is that if you don't have the source, people are probably less likely to trust the message.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um we're pretty confident that this is true in the field.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen some examples of this in other places, but we didn't see a strong effect of that in this circumstance where emitting source didn't have as big an impact as we thought on things other than trust.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so trust in the organization in the future, it is kind of like, well, it's an anonymous organization.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: What do I know?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think in the the case where you're in a situation where you have to deal with this, um, in particular, source and time are things that you kind of make inferences about when you're taking a study online.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: If I don't tell you time information and I tell you this is the message, you're probably assuming that this is happening now.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the now doesn't feel as urgent when you're doing a message like this.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if you get something from a source, you're not expecting in an online survey environment where you're doing something for uh research purposes, you're not necessarily expecting to see the name of a real organization there that you know and trust and that you know members of.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so those kinds of things we didn't see uh the effects that we would anticipate in a research sense.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's pretty plausible reasons for why we may be underestimating the impacts that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those have in the real world.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I really don't want people to take away from that like source and time don't matter.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to include those.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've got strong reason to believe that they do matter.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just really difficult to pick those up in the experimental context.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you got me, I have to admit, experiments aren't good for absolutely everything.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's no substitute for doing some of that field research, going back to that qualitative space, getting back into just talking to people and having them tell you in words what matters.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we get a lot of the information that we that makes us confident that the source is important.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: I if I have, well, actually, I do, I have a little bit of funding that came back to me to my university position due to a grant that we're currently working on that's funded by USGS.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: And with that funding, I would love to design another little mini experiment where we learn more about the importance of source and also where source really belongs in the message.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because our early evidence said source should come first, and this is why.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I would love to replicate that.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean even if we did it with a student population, did an experiment or some sort of like card sorting thing where we had people move contents around.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um students, people who are between 18 and 25 are getting a hundred, two hundred alerts on their phones every day.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: That is a great population to talk to about how important is it to know who's giving who's sending you that message when you're getting so many things that you're just constantly swiping away.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's my next little mini experiment, and um hopefully we'll be able to do that.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: I can't wait.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on I'm just like taking all this in here.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's stuff that Jeanette and I, I mean, we've we've trained this for a while, and I've known this is coming.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I have a couple questions that a, how do people get it?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Number one.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and again, because you talk about it's published, and for those not in the academic space, I I you talked about it a little bit, but like, does that mean it's available to everybody?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you're out there and you're like, I'm published too, self-publishing does not count.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: Putting something on Wikipedia does not mean you're a published author.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, means you have too much time on your hands.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it's but for for this, like when they say it's it's been published in a journal, that that is very significant.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so then it gets to the question of uh how how can we apply it, right?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Bringing it back to pract practitioners.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you saying that the complete message is is what we need to do.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but this is the first time we've been able to hear actual evidence that talks about why each of these things is important.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you omit any one of these things, you are decreasing right the effectiveness of your message in in one form or another.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I I gotta say, one of the things that's probably most frustrating to me when we're out there training with people is when we go over portions of this.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: And granted, this is new.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you're hearing this, like this is brand new.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's a little grace, I guess, for everybody else, but now we know.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're doing a training and we're talking about each of these components, and you omit one, you're just like, well, I'm not gonna do that one because I it just because we don't, because my current template says we don't.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make sense anymore how you can stand on those thoughts or principles, right?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because Hugh, from what you're saying from the experiments, from the research, from the data, is removing any one of those things, it I I keep going to the basic terms, right?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't make it as effective as it could be.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Am I oversimplifying?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there's I think that's fair to say.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are uh there is a metric for everything that if you didn't include that in the message, it makes it worse in some way.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: How important each of those are in order to achieve your goals as a message writer may vary.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: So your mileage may vary on exactly how important each of these things are.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what we do know is that out of those contents, among the most important for all of these different um kind of motivations that we know from a lot of research that we've done are likely to lead to people trying to take some kind of action to keep themselves safe.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: That hazard name, the hazard impact, and the guidance are the most important things.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um where this gets really important is that we see a lot of messages that don't include any information about impacts.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, up until now, we haven't had as much evidence that as we do currently to advocate really strongly for including that impact information.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what we've got suggests that people are less likely to understand what they're gonna be facing, they're less likely to personalize that risk to themselves, and they're not gonna be able to make a decision with confidence on the basis of that when they don't have information about those impacts.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if they don't know how it's gonna affect them, it's gonna make it really hard for them to make that decision, which makes them more vulnerable to things like biases that we were talking about earlier, or to milling or information seeking, where they're going to spend precious time trying to gather the information that they need to make that decision easier for themselves.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the really strong takeaway from this is not just the extension that we need to make for theory in um kind of the research space, but it also has, I think, strong implications for how we think about uh prioritizing information in the messages that we put out.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be clear that it's one experiment.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're never gonna be 100% right in every experiment.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what we found here is really indicative of something that makes a lot of sense uh in the context of other research that we've done, research that other colleagues have done, and kind of the logic of um orienting messages towards helping people make themselves safe.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when all of those kind of come together and you get some evidence like this, it's it's I think prudent to start to put that into practice while we gather more information about how these dynamics um kind of change under different circumstances or with different populations in the future.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I know there's only been one experiment, right?
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's the point.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's only been one so far about this that's identified this.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't find any information that's contrary to what this is showing.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is one of those, like, if I could reach through this, whatever medium you're if you're listening or if you're watching this on YouTube and just shake you and say, why do we struggle so much with this concept?
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because we've been out there in training and we're we're saying, hey, because and I'm gonna focus not on on naming the hazard.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're good, right?
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I I say that, I'm gonna use the air quotes now, we're good, because some of us aren't, but overall we're getting better.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: But Jeanette, we've we've seen resistance to putting in impact statements or sometimes specific guidance because people don't want to um cause trauma or they they don't want to cause you know pseudo effects for for someone, and we'll take a hazardous materials, right?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: One that that we've done in training.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, well, I can't say any of those things that could happen to somebody because then they're gonna start calling 911 and they're gonna say, now I'm feeling all those things.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't necessarily want to call it pushback, but um maybe growing pains.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: But now you have the research, right?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: That definitively in this in this study shows the importance of it.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, how can we help practitioners take that next step and just become okay with it?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's so interesting because it it kind of reminds me a little bit about um like the disaster myths that we talk about sometimes.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like that people are gonna panic if they get an alert.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's not this is not accurate.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that people are gonna act irrationally when they experience an environmental cue of a building falling down.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's not irrational to run away.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um people are gonna be um, you know, they're not gonna self-organize.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: They're just gonna be, you know, uh malicious towards their neighbors.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: That is not true either.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: People always converge to help one another.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so maybe this is another part of one of those things that we think about human beings that it's a concern that we have, but maybe it's not as valid as we think it might be.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that the bigger concern that people probably are facing when they're trying to think about including impacts is okay, I have 360 characters, how am I gonna include all that information?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: And now you're asking me to come up with that information, and I have not prepared for it.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_02: I have not prepared to include that kind of information.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't even thought about the impacts.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: All I've thought about is how do I name the hazard?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes it's gonna be like a local incident, which is not clear at all.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: But this is the thing, you asked uh Hugh, like, how do we get this information?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we have the publications, we can make sure that people can get them.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_02: I always make a free version through the archives at the university so that people can have that.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's not typeset, so it's not pretty, like the the one that you would get from the journal, but it's the exact same contents, it's just not in the the beautiful version.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing that people can get that gives them the impact statement for every hazard that we've been studying is the warning lexicon.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: We have already done all of the work to identify the most likely impacts from the individual hazards that people are likely to alert for.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: This is a document that is the foundation for the message design dashboard and is freely available.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: We paid for it to be publicly available through the Natural Hazards Review, which is a journal, a highly ranking journal, engineering social science.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you could just look, you can go to my the Warn Room um website, you could go to my personal academic website, um, you could look it up through Google for um the warning lexicon, it click uh download, and it it's free.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: It will be downloaded.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: There's no paywall.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: The piece that you want is the supplemental material that provides to you 48 different hazards, and every hazard has an impact statement associated with it.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: And we also give you all of the guidance that goes along with the hazards.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's basically giving you the six different pieces of information that you need for your message.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: So if you walk through the warning lexicon process to build a message, it's on you to determine that you're gonna leave something out because it's making you work through the process every single time.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you're gonna have a complete message because you're using the resources that have been researched, built, paid for, published, and freely available to everyone.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that is the one resource that I advocate for every time.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's already got the impact statement built into it.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: So please, if you if you can't find it, send me a message and I will help you to get it.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_02: It has been downloaded almost 20,000 times around the world in the last three years.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic resource.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_02: Please you know, use it, get it, make use of it.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: Any other closing thoughts?
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I think this has been honestly, again, from the practitioner spot, Hugh, you didn't nerd out too much.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's the word that started with the D, I wrote it down.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Dela, is it deleterious?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's the one.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Deleterious.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: I will look it up and I will try to use it at some point.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but in in all seriousness, I hope everybody was able to capture not only as he talked about risk perception, right?
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: Which which I think is is valid, which I think plays into everything that happened within the study, but the now the why.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: And now you've heard about how they got the information, you've heard why it's important and what can be some of the negative effects if you do not put all that information in.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we say negative, or just will be less, less impactful potentially, or less effective.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I any effort I appreciate, and you I if you're putting messages out there, that's great.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm also at a point where I'm expecting you to do more now.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm becoming less forgiving because the information is out there.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: And just as Jeanette said, it's free.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: It is absolutely free.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: There, there isn't anything stopping you other than you know, it could be your policy, your you know, government decisions, whatever it may be, but the information is available.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and again, thank you, Hugh, for breaking it down in a way for us to understand.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I honestly think if you if you've heard this one, if you heard the the part one as well, it's really at a point where you can probably explain it to someone else as well and the importance.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're uncomfortable with some of the impact statements, like the one that I know catches people all the time is when we talk about an active assailant or an active shooter, where we list in there, it's like you could die, right?
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: By not following these these things.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this, whoa, we can't tell anybody that.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like that this isn't a surprise.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's trying to prevent other people from getting into that danger area where they could put themselves in that greater risk.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: So if it is new to you, I say welcome, right?
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you're already doing it, great.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and just keep spreading the word.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: But those are my final thoughts.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go around.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hugh, you want to go next, and then Jeanette can close us out.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm I'm just really grateful to be here, being able to talk about the work that we've done and uh kind of go back to school myself and and get some some good time in in thinking about how to break these basic concepts down uh for myself.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because we spend the more time we spend with the basics, the the better we're gonna be able to make decisions about how we do all these things in the future, which I think is true for everything, not just for research.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: But it's been a great opportunity.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: Really appreciate it.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_02: This has been a fun two-part series.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope that the audience that listens to the alerting authority has gotten as much out of it as I have.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've just really enjoyed talking through these theories, the methods, and sharing with everyone about our latest research and how important it is for shaping the way we think about alerts and warnings and moving forward in the future.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_02: So this is the Alerting Authority, where every second has a story, and we are so happy that we got to help share Hughes and our research story and yours today.