Search Peter’s website:

Dr. Peter M. Sandman
Crisis Communication
(High Hazard, High Outrage)

For roughly twenty years I defined myself as a specialist in risk communication, not crisis communication. The distinction, I kept telling people, is that risk communicators deal with what might happen, while crisis communicators deal with what just happened or is still happening.

Of course the distinction was always pretty arbitrary. Some of my earliest risk communication work focused on the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. That certainly felt like a crisis, no matter whether the discussion centered on what had gone wrong at the power plant (a crisis communication issue) or on how much radiation might be released (a risk communication issue).

Still, I felt that crisis communicators needed expertise I didn’t really have – running evacuations, coordinating emergency responders, fielding thousands of simultaneous telephone calls, etc. I was comfortable working on “reputational crises,” controversies that felt like crises to my clients, but were simply hot issues to their stakeholders and the media. I was comfortable advising on potential future crises (worst case scenarios) and even past crises (recriminations). But real crises? I wasn’t sure I had much to say.

This changed after September 11, 2001. Like just about everyone else, I desperately wanted to help. After dozens of false starts, I wrote a long “column” for this website on “Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism.” Soon afterwards the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked me to help with anthrax communication, and then with smallpox and other bioterrorism communication issues. Other terrorism and crisis communication clients started calling. I found I did have things to say after all.

Roughly a third of my professional work is now focused on terrorism, disease outbreaks, and other emergencies.

My work on pandemics and other infectious disease outbreaks, in fact, has become voluminous enough to require its own index. Only a little of that work is listed in this index as well.

In May 2004 the American Industrial Hygiene Association released my CD-ROM/DVD, “Crisis Communication: Guidelines for Action.” It consists of nearly three hours of video by me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, divided into 25 key recommendations. The CD-ROM/DVD is not available on the site; you have to buy it from AIHA. But the handouts from the CD-ROM are on this site.

Topical Sections in Crisis Communication

Especially Important to Read

• Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial

  Website column

  Posted: February 11, 2009

  Arousing apathetic people to care enough about global warming that they’re actually willing to do something about it is a difficult precaution advocacy challenge. Activists are chipping away at that task with slow but significant success. But there’s another audience for climate change risk communication that I think activists aren’t paying nearly enough attention to: people who are in denial about the crisis because it threatens the way they see the world or because it arouses intolerable levels of fear, guilt, sadness, hopelessness, or other emotions. For people in or near denial, outrage is high, not low; the risk communication paradigm is crisis communication, not precaution advocacy. This long column builds a case that global warming denial is a growing problem, and that messaging designed to work on apathetic audiences can easily backfire on audiences in denial. The column focuses on six common activist messages that need to be rethought in terms of their likely negative impact on people who are in or near global warming denial: fear-mongering; guilt-tripping; excessive hostility to narrow technological solutions; unwillingness to pay attention to climate change adaptation; over-reliance on depressing information and imagery; and one-sided contempt for contrarian arguments.

• Managing Justified Outrage: Outrage Management When Your Opponents Are Substantively Right

  Website column

  Posted: November 19, 2008

  This long column tries to correct a serious oversimplification in my previous writing about risk communication. Outrage management isn’t just for calming people down when they mistakenly believe they have substantive reasons to oppose you. It is also for calming people down when they rightly believe they have substantive reasons to oppose you. Converting justified opposition that’s outraged into justified opposition that’s calm doesn’t (and shouldn’t) eliminate the opposition, but it does accomplish several things: It lowers the level of passion; it opens people up to the possibility of altruism; it gets them in a mood to negotiate; and it enables them to be more realistic in defeat or more generous in victory. While all the usual outrage management strategies apply, two strategies are particularly crucial when your critics are substantively right: acknowledging that they are right, and being candid about the distribution of power. The column also has an important “postscript” on the role of outrage management in a genuine high-hazard, high-outrage crisis.

• Empathy in Risk Communication

  Website column

  Posted: July 30, 2007

  Everyone knows risk communicators need to be empathic, but all too often empathy gets operationalized as telling people you know how they feel – or, worse yet, telling them how they feel. This long column argues that the essence of empathy is “sort-of acknowledgment,” finding a middle ground between obliviousness and intrusiveness. The column goes on to discuss ten elements of empathic communication. Some are pretty obvious (listening and echoing, for example); some are easy-to-learn tactics (such as suggesting that “some people” might feel a particular way instead of accusing your stakeholders of feeling that way); some are complicated and counterintuitive. The most complicated and counter-intuitive ones are grounded in the work of psychiatrist Leston Havens.

• “Speak with One Voice” — Why I Disagree

  Website column

  Posted: July 27, 2006

  This column dissects an issue – one of the few – on which I disagree with most risk communication and crisis communication professionals: what to do when there are differences of opinion within your organization. The conventional advice is to “speak with one voice” – that is, to paper over the disagreements. I urge my clients to let the disagreements show. The column distinguishes the ways of showing opinion diversity that really do undermine public confidence from the ways that (in my judgment) do not, and identifies many reasons why it is beneficial to let the public know that you’re not all on the same page about every issue. Perhaps most importantly, it details what tends to go wrong when organizations muzzle their staff in order to speak with one voice.

• Katrina: Hurricanes, Catastrophes, and Risk Communication

  Website column

  Posted: September 8, 2005

  When I wrote this column shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck, I didn’t realize that it would still be an ongoing disaster years later. So the column focuses on risk communication failures before the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to scare people sufficiently) and immediately after the hurricane reached New Orleans (especially the failure to acknowledge emergency response inadequacies and to communicate with victims desperate for information). I saw these failures not as unique to Katrina but as warnings relevant to the next big earthquake or infectious disease outbreak. This perspective may have led me to go too easy on the specific defects of Katrina response.

• Bird Flu: Communicating the Risk

  by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Published in Perspectives in Health (Pan American Health Organization), vol. 10, no. 2, 2005, pp. 2–9

  PAHO asked us to combine a primer on risk communication with a primer on avian influenza. The resulting article talks about the challenge of alerting the public to bird flu risks, then offers ten risk communication principles, each illustrated with bird flu examples. The PDF file also includes the cover, an editor’s note entitled “Communication: risky business,” and the contents page.

  (A Spanish language edition is also available. There is also an online version (same text, but easier to read than a PDF file) posted on the PAHO website. The entire issue is also there.

• Pandemic Influenza Risk Communication: The Teachable Moment

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: December 4, 2004

  This is the first column Jody Lanard and I wrote about pandemic preparedness. We wrote it when many experts believed a devastating H5N1 flu pandemic might be just around the corner – and so we thought so too. (We still think the risk is serious, but there’s much less sense of imminence as I write this blurb in mid-2008.) The thrust of this long column is how to sound the alarm. After a primer on why H5N1 is “not your garden variety flu,” the column proposes a list of pre-crisis pandemic talking points. Then it assesses how well experts and officials were addressing those points as of late 2004. The experts, we wrote, were doing their best to arouse the public. But governments and international agencies were undermining the sense of urgency with grossly over-optimistic claims about pharmaceutical solutions.

• Worst Case Scenarios

  Website column

  Posted: August 28, 2004

  Most of this long column is addressed to risk communicators whose goal is to keep their audience unconcerned. So naturally they’d rather not talk about awful but unlikely worst case scenarios. The column details their reluctance even to mention worst case scenarios, and their tendency when they finally get around to discussing them to do so over-reassuringly. It explains why this is unwise – why people (especially outraged people) tend to overreact to worst case scenarios when the available information is scanty or over-reassuring. Then the column lists 25 guidelines for explaining worst case scenarios properly. Finally, a postscript addresses the opposite problem. Suppose you’re not trying to reassure people about worst case scenarios; you’re trying to warn them. How can you do that more effectively?

• Three Mile Island – 25 Years Later

  Published in safety AT WORK, April 24, 2004, pp. 7–11

  When the Three Mile Island nuclear accident began in late March of 1979, I was asked by the Columbia Journalism Review to go to the scene and “cover the coverage.” The resulting article, “At Three Mile Island,” was written jointly with Mary Paden. This new article focuses on some of the crisis communication lessons I learned at Three Mile Island – lessons many corporate and government crisis managers have yet to learn.

• Crisis Communication: A Very Quick Introduction En Español: Comunicación de crisis: una introducción muy rápida

  Website column

  Posted: April 15, 2004

  This short column is made up of two lists. First comes a list of six “focus areas” of crisis communication – including the one I consider most in need of improvement: metamessaging. (This jargony word is the best I can come up with to describe all the content of crisis communications other than information content: how reassuring to be, how confident to sound, how to address emotion, etc.) The rest of the column is a list of 25 crisis communication recommendations – most of them about metamessaging. The 25 recommendations are discussed in more detail in my crisis communication handouts. But this column lists them all conveniently on one page.

• Fear of Fear:  The Role of Fear in Preparedness ... and Why It Terrifies Officials

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: September 8, 2003

  My government clients often tell me they want to persuade the public to take precautions against some risk … but not if they have to frighten anybody. Jody Lanard and I wrote this long column not just to argue the necessity for warnings to be frightening, but also to analyze the widespread official “fear of fear.” We explore its origins in officials’ justified concern that they will be criticized for frightening people, and in their unjustified concern that the people they frighten will find the experience permanent and unbearable. We also investigate a closely allied phenomenon, “panic panic” – the panicky feelings officials experience when they wrongly judge that the public is about to panic, and the unwise crisis management strategies they typically attempt in order to “allay” the public’s panic.

• “Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS” — And So It Should!

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: April 28, 2003

  Until it turned out less contagious than initially thought, SARS looked to many experts like it might very well be the devastating pandemic they had spent decades fearfully awaiting. When Jody Lanard and I wrote this column in April 2003, that was still an open question. The public’s SARS fears were entirely justifiable – yet many governments, experts, and even journalists were working overtime to dampen those fears. The column describes this “soft cover-up” of SARS over-optimism, tries to explain why so many officials were seduced by it, and offers both good examples of guiding the public’s fear and bad examples of trying to allay that fear. The column concludes with a list of 18 specific risk communication recommendations for talking about SARS.

• Duct Tape Risk Communication

  Website Column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: February 20, 2003

  One of the things the U.S. government got wrong after 9/11 was its failure to offer people things to do. So when it started listing some steps ordinary people could take to help prepare for the possibility of more terrorist attacks, Jody Lanard and I noted with interest the widespread disdainful response, most of it linked to the inclusion of duct tape on the government’s list of items a prepared citizen ought to have on hand. In this column, we analyze the reasons for this weird response, which we liken to a similar cynicism about anti-nuclear precautions in the 1950s. The column ends with suggestions for improving the U.S. government’s post-9/11 risk communication, starting with the need to ask more of people.

• Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication

  In Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2003

  This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. This one deals with the likely emotional impacts of terrorism (and other major emergencies), and how communicators can best help the public cope with these emotions. The focus is especially on denial and misery as more common emotional reactions than panic – reactions that may be mishandled if the communicator is over-worried about panic prevention instead.

  This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The The entire CD-ROM is available at http://emergency.cdc.gov/erc/erc.asp.

• Dilemmas in Emergency Communication Policy

  In Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2003

  This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. Based partly on my earlier Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action, this one deals with ten “dilemmas” facing emergency communication planners:

  • Candor versus secrecy
  • Speculation versus refusal to speculate
  • Tentativeness versus confidence
  • Being alarming versus being reassuring
  • Being human versus being professional
  • Being apologetic versus being defensive
  • Decentralization versus centralization
  • Democracy and individual control versus expert decision-making
  • Planning for denial and misery versus planning for panic
  • Erring on the side of caution versus taking chances

  For each of the ten dilemmas, my own position leans toward the first of the two poles – and the natural instinct of communicators in mid-emergency leans toward the second.

  This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The The entire CD-ROM is available at http://emergency.cdc.gov/erc/erc.asp.

• Obvious or Suspected, Here or Elsewhere, Now or Then: Paradigms of Emergency Events

  In Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2003

  This is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC’s CD-ROM on emergency risk communication. The usual paradigm for emergency communication is the obviously horrific event that is happening right here, right now. This article focuses on communication strategies to address six other paradigms:

  • Obvious/here/future
  • Obvious/here/past
  • Obvious/elsewhere/now
  • Suspected/here/now
  • Suspected/here/future
  • Suspected/here/past

  Among the topics covered are worst case scenarios, uncertainty, and dilemma-sharing.

  This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program for the Office of Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department of Energy and CDC. The The entire CD-ROM is available at http://emergency.cdc.gov/erc/erc.asp.

• Smallpox Vaccination: Some Risk Communication Linchpins   and
  Public Health Outrage and Smallpox Vaccination: An Afterthought

  Website columns

  Posted: December 30, 2002 and January 19, 2003

  In December 2002, I was asked to help plan and run a meeting on risk communication recommendations for the U.S. program to vaccinate healthcare workers and emergency responders against smallpox. The first column is an edited version of my introductory remarks. It addresses some familiar “risk communication linchpins” – paying attention to outrage, doing anticipatory guidance, expressing wishes and feelings, tolerating uncertainty, sharing dilemmas, riding the seesaw, etc. – all customized for the controversies I thought likeliest to emerge over smallpox vaccination. What I learned from the meeting was that most of the public health professionals implementing the smallpox vaccination program were themselves outraged that it even existed. So I wrote an “afterthought” on the sources of that outrage, and the need to deal with it lest it undermine the program … which, in my judgment, it later did.

• Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action

  Website column

  Posted: December 29, 2001

  Accustomed to naturally occurring diseases, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a difficult time coping with the anthrax bioattacks of late 2001. Since risk communication was one of its core problems, it asked me to come to Atlanta and help. This four-part “column” grew out of my Atlanta notes. If the CDC was adjusting to bioterrorism, so was I. I put aside my usual outrage management recommendations and developed 26 recommendations specifically on the anthrax crisis. These became the basis for my (sadly) expanding work in crisis communication, and for the crisis communication CD-ROM and DVD Jody Lanard and I ultimately put out in 2004. This column was my first extended discussion of most of these crisis communication recommendations, and it is my only published assessment of the CDC’s anthrax communication efforts.

• Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism: High Hazard, High Outrage

  Website column

  Posted: October 22, 2001

  It took more than a month after the 9/11 attacks for me to decide that I had relevant expertise to offer. (This column was first posted on October 22, 2001, revised and reposted on November 10.) My wife Jody Lanard crystallized it for me when she said, “You’ve been doing high-hazard, low-outrage risk communication and low-hazard, high-outrage risk communication for years. This time it’s high-hazard, high-outrage risk communication.” But this column isn’t my first crack at a list of generic recommendations for communicating in high-hazard, high-outrage situations; that didn’t come till my anthrax column a couple of months later. This one is more a meditation on the risk communication significance of 9/11, a very tentative first effort to consider how best to talk to people in the wake of that still-shocking event.

Other Articles by Peter Sandman

• Three Paradigms of Radiological Risk Communication: Alerting, Reassuring, Guiding (video)
  (Note: This link goes to a webpage off-site with links to three video files.)

  Three Paradigms of Radiological Risk Communication: Alerting, Reassuring, Guiding (audio )
  (Note: This link goes to a webpage on this site with links to MP3 audio files)

  Presented to the National Public Health Information Coalition, Miami Beach FL, October 21, 2009
  Posted: January 2, 2010

  Although this six-hour seminar was entitled “Three Paradigms of Radiological Risk Communication,” NPHIC asked me to go easy on the “radiological” part and give participants a broad introduction to my approach to risk communication, mentioning radiation issues from time to time. So that’s what I did.

  Fair warning: These are not professional videos. NPHIC member Joe Rebele put a camera in the back of the room and let it run. You won’t lose much listening to the MP3 audio files on this site instead.

  • Part One is a 90-minute introduction to the hazard-versus-outrage distinction and the three paradigms of risk communication.

    Direct link to off-site page with embedded video

    Link to on-site audio file index

  • Part Two runs 155 minutes. It discusses the seesaw and other risk communication games (thus completing the introductory segment), then spends a little over an hour each on some key strategies of precaution advocacy and outrage management.

    Direct link to off-site page with embedded video

    Link to on-site audio file index

  • Part Three is a 72-minute rundown on some key crisis communication strategies.

    Direct link to off-site page with embedded video

    Link to on-site audio file index

  See especially Part Three.

• Containment as Signal: Swine Flu Risk Miscommunication

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: June 29, 2009

  The swine flu pandemic started in North America, and by the time the virus was identified it was already widely seeded in the U.S. So the experts judged that it was too late to try to “contain” its U.S. spread; from Day One, the U.S. was focused mostly on coping with the disease, not stopping or even slowing it. Outside North America, on the other hand, an initial containment strategy made public health sense. But containment isn’t just a public health strategy. It is also a risk communication signal of enormous importance. Containment sends a signal that the pandemic can be contained and that it must be contained – that it is stoppable and severe. Instead of countering these misleading signals, the governments of many countries have issued misleading messages to match. This is doing significant damage to the world’s preparedness to cope with the unstoppable (and soon to be pervasive) but so far mild pandemic that is just beginning.

• The Swine Flu Crisis: The Government Is Preparing for the Worst While Hoping for the Best – It Needs to Tell the Public to Do the Same Thing! En Français: La crise de la grippe porcine: Le gouvernement se prépare au pire tout en espérant le meilleur – il devrait dire à la population de faire la même chose!

  Website column

  Posted: April 29, 2009

  When I started criticizing the government for talking about swine flu as if there were nothing for the public to do but watch and practice good hygiene, we were at WHO Pandemic Phase 3. When I started this column (this morning) we were at Phase 4. When I finished the column (this evening), it was already Phase 5. The focus of this column is why the U.S. government is reluctant to urge the public to prepare now for a possibly imminent pandemic, and why I think the government should overcome its reluctance and do it! If you’re skeptical about advising people to imagine The Big One, get used to that knot in their stomachs, and then get started on preparedness, read this column. If you’re not skeptical and want to know what I think the important messages for right now are, skip this column and instead read “What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five.”

  On May 21, 2009, Nature published a major abridgment and minor updating of this column under the title “Pandemics: good hygiene is not enough.” (An Adobe Acrobat file (707-kB pdf) of the complete article is also available.)

• Handling explosive emotions demands five acts of empathy

  Excerpted and edited for ISHN by Dave Johnson

  Published in ISHN (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), May 2008, pp. 1, 24, 26

  Dave Johnson, the editor of ISHN, admired my website column on “Empathy in Risk Communication.” But of course it was much too long for him to republish. So he excerpted the less complicated sections, made a few editing and formatting changes, and came up with a shorter, more accessible article.

• Media Sensationalism and Risk: Talking to Stakeholders with Reporters in the Room

  Website column

  Posted: September 6, 2006

  This short column discusses seven principles for understanding and coping with the media’s entirely appropriate inclination to focus on the most newsworthy things you say – an inclination often labeled sensationalism. Of particular importance is the problem this raises for outrage management. The very same meeting at which you hope to say responsive, apologetic things in order to help reduce the outrage of angry stakeholders will also be attended by journalists, who will naturally convey your revealing admissions to readers and viewers who might otherwise never know. Managing a controversy well, in other words, is in some ways antithetical to managing the news clips well. You have to decide which task is more important. The column recommends managing the controversy.

• Crisis Communication Best Practices: Some Quibbles and Additions

  Published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, vol. 34, no. 3, August 2006, pp. 257–262

  Since 2004 I have been working with the U.S. Government-funded National Center for Food Protection and Defense at the University of Minnesota. One of the projects I worked on was an effort to develop a set of consensus “best practices” in crisis communication. Matthew Seeger wrote up the results in an article entitled “Best Practices in Crisis Communication: An Expert Panel Process.” I got a second bite of the apple when I was asked to write one of four commentaries on Seeger's article. My commentary, posted here with permission, focuses on some things I think the group missed or got wrong: the importance of fear and other emotions, the need to trust and respect the public, and the over-emphasis on message consistency. Seeger's article and the other commentaries are available online from the publisher, but only if you pay. A much less detailed PowerPoint on the ten best practices is available without charge.

• How Safe Is Safe Enough: Sharing the Dilemma

  Website column

  Posted: April 20, 2006

  This short column has two goals. It introduces readers to the invaluable risk communication strategy of dilemma sharing – telling people you’re torn between options and not sure what to do. This strategy is fundamental to both crisis communication and outrage management, but it is seldom utilized, largely because it threatens management egos. The second goal of the column is to apply the dilemma-sharing approach to the specific problem of “how safe is safe enough.” Risk managers have no choice but to prioritize precautions and decide which ones they can implement. The claim to be taking “every possible precaution” is always a lie. Risk managers who don’t want to lie can use dilemma sharing to explain why they have chosen not to take some possible precautions.

• Risk Communications During a Terrorist Attack or Other Public Health Emergency

  Published in Terrorism and Other Public Health Emergencies: A Reference Guide for the Media (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2005), Chapter 11, pp. 184–193

  I have a two-page “essay” in this chapter (pp. 190–191) entitled “Public Reactions to Crisis Situations and Communication Implications,” which covers yet again material that is presented in more detail in “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication.” The rest of the chapter (on which I collaborated) is worth reading for its advice to journalists on how the public and the official sources are likely to cope with a terrorism crisis. The rest of the manual is mostly about biological, chemical, and radiological threats and the government agencies that try to address them.

• Superb Flu Pandemic Risk Communication: A Role Model from Australia

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: July 6, 2005

  On May 2, 2005, Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott gave a speech on pandemic preparedness. It wasn’t especially earthshaking; in fact, it attracted fairly little media attention. But Jody Lanard and I thought it was terrific – candid, alarming, tentative, all the things most official pandemic presentations were not (and are not). So we sat down to annotate the speech in terms of 25 crisis communication recommendations we had published previously. If you just read the speech, you’ll discover that good risk communication can sound just as ordinary as bad risk communication. If you read the column’s annotations, you’ll discover how extraordinary this particular speech really was.

• A Blind Spot for Bad Guys

  Website Column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: June 16, 2005

  This column argues that western society has a blind spot for bad guys – that our vision of an actionable emergency is an accident, not an attack. It discusses several examples, from the resistance to evidence that the 1984 Bhopal “accident” was probably sabotage to the opposition of the U.S. public health profession to the possibility that smallpox might constitute a weapon of mass destruction that could justify a vaccination program. The best example – detailed in the column – happened in April 2005, when it was learned that an infectious disease testing company had mistakenly sent samples of a potentially pandemic strain of influenza to labs all over the world. So a fax went out to all the labs telling them so, and asking them to destroy the sample – thus converting a small accident risk into a much larger terrorism risk. The facts were public at the time, but a society with a blind spot for bad guys simply ignored their implications.

• Public Reactions and Teachable Moments

  Published in Homeland Protection Professional, May 2005, vol. 4, no. 4, pp.14–16

  This article quickly covers some of the emotional reactions to crisis situations – ground covered in more detail in “Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication” and “Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication.” Some minor editorial changes made by the magazine’s staff have not been replicated here (only the ones I liked).

• Talking about Dead Bodies: Risk Communication after a Catastrophe

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: February 8, 2005

  After nearly every natural disaster (earthquake, flood, etc.), the survivors feel an urgent need to bury the dead, often in mass graves that later complicate everything from mourning to inheritance. Yet with some exceptions, the bodies of natural disaster victims are not a significant disease threat to the living, and burying them should therefore have a lower priority than other rescue and recovery tasks. International emergency response agencies do their best to convince local officials and local populations that this is so – but more often than not they fail. In this column, Jody Lanard and I discuss the reasons why the impulse to bury the bodies is so powerful, and offer some empathic ways to counter that impulse, rather than simply explaining the scientific data.

• Adjustment Reactions: The Teachable Moment in Crisis Communication En Español: Reacciones de ajuste: el momento enseñable en la comunicación de Crisis

  Website column

  Posted: January 17, 2005

  When people first learn about a new risk, they go through a temporary over-reaction that is natural, healthy, and useful. Psychiatrists call this the “adjustment reaction.” Having one is virtually a prerequisite to crisis preparedness. This short column outlines the characteristics of adjustment reactions. It advises crisis communicators to guide the public through its pre-crisis or early-crisis adjustment reaction, rather than trying to persuade people to skip this essential step toward being ready to cope.

• Tsunami Risk Communication: Warnings and the Myth of Panic

  Website Column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: January 6, 2005

  One of the reasons the Thai government neglected to warn its people in advance of the devastating December 2004 tsunami was a fear of panicking them. As if to prove this deadly decision right, a few days later there were warnings that aftershocks might produce another tsunami. Thousands of seaside residents fled to higher ground – and when it turned out there was no second tsunami, media reports said they had panicked. Jody Lanard and I had written before about the tendency of officials and journalists to misdiagnose caution as panic, but the tsunami impelled us to revisit the issue. This time we focused more narrowly on how rare panic is in response to natural disasters – or to warnings about natural disasters.

• Acknowledging Uncertainty

  Website column

  Posted: November 11, 2004

  This column is in two parts. Part One lists some basic tips for overcoming the universal temptation to sound overconfident; it’s a primer on how to sound uncertain instead. Part Two goes into detail on the toughest part of acknowledging uncertainty: deciding just how uncertain you ought to sound, and then coming up with words (or numbers) that capture the right level of uncertainty. It assesses five biases that tend to distort our judgments about how uncertain to sound, even after we have accepted the principle that we should acknowledge our uncertainty. Compare “I can’t guarantee that it’s safe” with “I don’t know if it’s safe.” Both acknowledge uncertainty – but very different levels of uncertainty. Which of the two is likelier to get said when the other would have been closer to the truth?

• Leading during Bioattacks and Epidemics with the Public’s Trust and Help

  by the Working Group on “Governance Dilemmas” in Bioterrorism Response

  Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, 2004, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 25–40

  I was part of a 30-person “Working Group” that developed a report urging leaders to treat the public more as an ally and less as a problem in crisis situations. The report was drafted by Monica Schoch-Spana of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who later redrafted it as an article for the Center’s Biosecurity and Bioterrorism journal. The writing is a little academic for my taste, but I think the recommendations are wonderful ... and the footnotes are invaluable.

• Practicing for The Big One: Pennsylvania’s Hepatitis A Outbreak and Risk Communication

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: December 4, 2003

  In late 2003, an outbreak of hepatitis A in Western Pennsylvania provided a neat case study of pretty good risk communication (not perfect, but not bad) about a pretty serious problem (not huge, but not tiny). In this column, Jody Lanard and I use Pennsylvania’s hepatitis outbreak to illustrate four basic dilemmas in crisis communication – dilemmas that are sure to come up in bigger emergencies: preoccupation with panic; trust and secrecy; over-reassurance; and anticipatory guidance.

• Risk Communication Recommendations for Infectious Disease Outbreaks

  by Peter M. Sandman Ph.D. and Jody Lanard M.D.

  Presented to the World Health Organization SARS Scientific Research Advisory Committee, Geneva Switzerland, October 20, 2003

  In October 2003, the WHO included social scientists (including me) on its SARS-fighting team for the first time. This invited paper has a list of 24 risk communication principles relevant to a possible second SARS outbreak or to any infectious disease outbreak; it also lists SARS-related risk communication research needs and has a short bibliography.

• It Is Never Too Soon to Speculate

  Website column by Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard

  Posted: September 17, 2003

  Risk communication and crisis communication professionals sometimes urge their clients not to speculate. But they can’t mean it literally. Speculation is talking about things you’re not sure about … and that’s pretty much what risk communication is. In this short column, Jody Lanard and I make the case on behalf of responsible speculation – that is, speculation that sounds suitably speculative (that isn’t overconfident); speculation that pays sufficient attention to dire scenarios (that isn’t over-optimistic); and speculation that explicitly addresses the difficult question of which precautions are appropriate even while the information is still uncertain and which precautions should await less speculative knowledge.

• Review: The Mad Cow Crisis: Health and the Public Good

  Journal of Health Psychology, January 2000

  This review of a book on England’s “mad cow disease” crisis is relevant for its discussion of how to communicate about a small problem that threatens to become a big problem. Think anthrax. As always, over-reassurance turns out to be the wrong approach.

• When Outrage Is a Hazard

  The Synergist, April 1995

  This short column deals with sabotage – and the important possibility that outraged employees can pose a hazard to everyone else. It was written (obviously) before 9/11, but resonates even more powerfully now.

• Scared stiff – or scared into action

  by Peter M. Sandman and JoAnn M. Valenti

  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1986, pp. 12–16

  This 1986 article aimed at helping peace activists develop communication strategies that wouldn’t deepen people’s “psychic numbing” about nuclear weapons. Though its political content is out of date, its prescription – anger, love, hope, and action – is relevant today to coping with public denial about terrorism. (For terrorism I would want to add to the prescription the need to acknowledge and share the underlying fears – what people are “really” afraid of.)

• Report of the Public’s Right to Information Task Force of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island

  Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1979 (#052-003-00734-7)

  After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed an investigative commission. One of the commission’s mandates was to look at public communications, both what sources told the media and what the media told the public. Having just published “At Three Mile Island” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I was asked to work with the commission’s Public Right to Information Task Force, chaired by David M. Rubin. The task force report, with 14 authors, has been out-of-print for decades, but was recently put online as part of a huge Three Mile Island “Resource Center” run by Dickinson College. The report constitutes a wonderful blow-by-blow account of a pretty typical example of corporate, government, and media crisis communication.

• At Three Mile Island

  by Peter M. Sandman and Mary Paden

  Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1979

  This was the first “crisis” I watched unfold. The themes have since become familiar (they are playing out now in the terrorism crisis):   The sources minimize the risk and over-reassure the audience; the experts are uncertain and disagree with each other; the public doesn’t panic but everyone keeps thinking it will; the color stories overpower the technical stories. (Writing this article in 1979 changed my career; see “Muddling My Way into Risk Communication.”) Includes two sidebar articles: “The local media feel the heat” and “The Inquirer goes for broke.” For a more recent perspective, see “Three Mile Island – 25 Years Later.”

Handout Sets

Interviews, Summaries, etc.

• How to Lead a Community during Times of Trouble (transcript)

  A roundtable discussion at “The Public as an Asset, Not a Problem: A Summit on Leadership during Bioterrorism,” Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, Washington DC, February, 2003

  In early February of 2003, I attended a wonderful conference on bioterrorism, focused on “the public as an asset, not a problem.” The panel I participated in was about “how to lead a community during times of trouble.” Most of the panelists had actually led their communities through various crises, from the 2001 anthrax attacks to Oklahoma City’s bombing; I was added, along with the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, so there would be at least two panelists whose experience was observing rather than doing.

• Planning for Bioterrorism Communication

  Minnesota Community Health Conference, September 2002

  On September 12, 2002, I gave a half-day presentation on “Planning for Bioterrorism Communication” in Breezy Point MN, at the annual Community Health Conference sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). The presentation was based on three chapters I was writing for an emergency communication manual soon to be published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The three chapters have now been posted, but this much shorter (nine pages) summary by MDH’s risk communication specialist Buddy Ferguson is still useful.

  Beyond Panic Prevention: Addressing Emotion in Emergency Communication (77 B)

  Dilemmas in Emergency Communication Policy (178 kB)

  Obvious or Suspected, Here or Elsewhere, Now or Then: Paradigms of Emergency Events (117 kB)

• Terrorism, Transparency, and Employee Sabotage

  Canadian Chemical Producers’ Association, June 2002

  After I gave a June 2002 presentation to the Canadian Chemical Producers’ Association on risk communication aspects of the chemical industry’s Responsible Care program, the CCPA’s Harvey Chartrand interviewed me for the organization’s members-only website. This excerpt from the interview deals with my views on how September 11 should affect chemical industry transparency, and on the relationship between terrorism and employee sabotage.

• CDC Responds: Risk Communication and Bioterrorism

  December 6, 2001

  This CDC webcast includes excerpts from a November 2001 presentation I made to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, plus live discussion of the issue by a panel of other risk communicators. For a longer written version of my CDC presentation, see my December 29, 2001 column “Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication: Guidelines for Action.”

• September 11 and Risk

  An interview published in safety AT WORK 30 October 2001

  This very brief interview discusses the events of 9/11. For a much (MUCH) longer treatment of the same topic, see my October 22, 2001 column “Risk Communication and the War Against Terrorism: High Hazard, High Outrage.”

• Nukes, the Freeze, and Public Opinion

  An interview by Mary Jones, Matrix (Rutgers University), Spring 1984, pp. 9–12

  In 1983–84, I took a sabbatical from my professorship at Rutgers University and worked on communication for the nuclear freeze movement. This interview was published in the Rutgers alumni magazine during my sabbatical. It talks about people’s fear of nuclear war and their reluctance to get involved in the peace movement. I have to say that both the world and my political values have changed some – though I do like the young man who gave this interview. What hasn’t changed much is my analysis of nuclear denial, which resonates today for current issues like the fear of terrorism. (The book I said I was writing, by the way, never got written; I still have a hundred or so pages of draft somewhere.)

Articles by Others

• Reporting Reality

  by Peter Martin (Canberra economics correspondent for The Age, Melbourne, Australia)

  Posted on his blog, January 20, 2009

  A different version was published in The Age, January 20, 2009, under the title “Bad news must be told.”

  The current economic meltdown is surely a crisis (high hazard, high outrage). And so the principles of crisis communication apply, including the crucial principle of leveling with people about bad news rather than feeding them over-reassuring half-truths. Unfortunately, most of those charged with responding to the world economic crisis don’t quite realize that crisis communication is a field. They’re making it up as they go along, and they rarely get it right. (I admit I’m not quite sure economics is a field; they seem to be making that up as they go along too.) It was a pleasure to see Peter Martin cite some of my work on behalf of candor about recession bad news – both the candor of the Australian government and his own candor in his economics writing for The Age, one of Australia’s leading newspapers.

• Crisis Communications to the Public: A Missing Link

  Chapter 5C.6 of Learning from SARS — Renewal of Public Health in Canada: A Report of the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health (the “Naylor Report”), October 2003

  One small section of the official Canadian government report on the lessons of SARS addresses public communication – and leans predominantly on the “scathing” assessment of Sandman and Lanard.

• What next? Insanity?

  by Judy Gerstel

  Published in The Toronto Star, May 30, 2003

  This is an almost shockingly lighthearted piece on Toronto’s SARS epidemic. It starts out with a weird focus on the question of whether SARS is God’s punishment, but winds up making some fairly solid points.

• SARS: How Singapore outmanaged the others

  by Alan Fung

  Published in Asia Times, Hong Kong, April 9, 2003

  I thought Singapore handled SARS risk communication a lot better than China, Hong Kong, or Canada. But I never expected to be explaining why in a Hong Kong newspaper.

• Weighing Your Risks of Becoming a Terror Victim

  by John Tierney

  Published in The New York Times Week in Review, March 23, 2003

  I’m quoted here on just one point, but it’s an important one: the need to get people accustomed to their fear of terrorism, to show them how to cope with that fear rather than trying to relieve them of it. (There, now you don’t have to read the article.)

• Teaching about terror

  by Robert Taylor

  Published in The BSCS Newsletter [Biological Sciences Curriculum Study], Fall 2002

  How should teachers talk to kids about terrorism? This short article has my views and the views of others.

• Vaccination Camp

  by Jody Lanard, M.D.

  Published in The Trenton Times, July 12, 2002

  I think this is my wife and colleague Jody Lanard’s first risk communication publication, a newspaper op-ed urging that people who want to be vaccinated against smallpox get sent to “vaccination camp.”

Selected Guestbook
Comments and Responses