1. This has been a week of contentious meetings, angry online debates, and complex conversations about school re-opening.
One key topic: how risky is it to return to school? The literature on risk perception may help to increase understanding and improve communication.
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One key topic: how risky is it to return to school? The literature on risk perception may help to increase understanding and improve communication.
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2. I think the brilliant work of Paul Slovic, as described in his article "Perception of Risk" in 1987, makes it clear how we are talking past each other when sifting through data on the health risks associated with returning to school.
science.sciencemag.org/content/236/47…
science.sciencemag.org/content/236/47…
3. Slovic found that there was a large gap between how risky people thought different activities were and what experts thought. But his key insight was this is not because the public was ignorant - it was because people saw risk as more than just expected number of fatalities.
4. In particular, characteristics such as familiarity, degree of control, catastrophic potential, and equity influenced the relationship between perceived risk, perceived benefit, and risk acceptance.
5. In other words, a risk that is unfamiliar, highly uncertain, outside of one's direct control, unfairly distributed, and with large catastrophic potential will be considered much worse by people than "the numbers" would say. Sound like any virus you know?
6. This means a few things. First, when people say that the risk of dying from COVID-19 is less than driving a car (or some other common activity), they are not acknowledging that risk is not unidimensional. Those types of comparisons are unhelpful and will lead to more argument.
7. Second, this also means that trying to "educate" the public about the level of risk is unlikely to succeed absent true dialogue that acknowledges the value of knowledge from all parties.
8. A great quote about Slovic's work: "Just as the public should take experts’ assessments of risk into account, so should experts respect the various factors, from cultural to emotional, that result in the public’s perception of risk"
thepumphandle.org/2013/01/16/how…
thepumphandle.org/2013/01/16/how…
9. Does this help us figure out whether and when to re-open schools? Probably not. But hopefully it helps us to bring down the temperature a bit and have more productive conversations, which can't hurt right now.
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