now our stories are myths and our
legends and our cultural histories teach
us that magic can be used for good or
evil for benevolent purposes where we
can try and improve the lives of others
or for more malicious intentions and I
think that communication is actually
quite similar at it’s very best
communication can help us to demonstrate
our love and our affection for one
another it’s communication that allows
us to share our stories and our daily
lives as we commune with our friends and
our families and it’s communication that
allows us to inspire others to come
together to face the most difficult
challenges that we see in a generation
however there’s a dark side to
communication communication can be used
to foster injustice and breed
intolerance it can also work to improve
the idea that hate is okay and it can
even be used to incite violence now it’s
my goal for our time together today to
discuss how yes communication can be
like magic but to more importantly
understand the roles of communication so
that way we can improve our ability to
be good communicators while also making
sure that those who might use
communication in a more malicious way
don’t cast their spells upon us so
that’s our goals for today now when I
talk about communication being like
magic I really mean it when we look back
at all those stories and histories magic
typically takes one of three forms the
first type is a magic of creation that’s
where the magician might pull a rabbit
out of a seemingly empty hat and then
there’s the second form of magic the
magic of transformation like alchemy
turning lead into gold and the third
type of magic that we see from our
stories and our histories is a magic of
control where we can actually cast a
spell and make others do our bidding for
us and I see certain parallels when we
talk about communication the first one
when we’re talking about a magic of
creating I see
as communication itself the basic
conception of communication is to note
that we might take an idea from our
minds and be able to put that same idea
in somebody else’s mind literally create
shared understanding that’s pretty
magical to me
the second form that magic of
transformation well that seems a lot
like the actual physical process of
communication as I see it you see when
we actually want to communicate anything
we go through an incredibly elaborate
process that it actually transforms the
energy that we use to create this shared
understanding so when I have an idea in
my head that I want to share my brain
sends an electrical signal down to many
parts of my body and more than 100
muscles are actually involved in me
producing speech sounds and these
muscles don’t just fire at random they
have to fire in perfect harmony and in
doing so they create pressure that
pushes air up out of my lungs and that
air travels up to my larynx and through
my vocal cords where I shape the volume
and pitch of my words and that air goes
further forward and is shaped further by
my tongue my lips my jaw even my nasal
passages all play a role in producing
those vowel and consonant sounds and
what started as an electrical impulse in
my brain suddenly travels out to all of
you as sound waves it’s been transformed
and those sound waves travel out and
they hit those big beautiful satellite
dishes of years that you have on the
sides of your head and those satellite
dishes of ears funnel those sound waves
down as vibrations and those vibrations
hit your eardrum and they go and hit
those three tiny bones that you might
remember from your seventh grade science
class the hammer or the anvil and the
stirrup right and it goes to your inner
cochlea which magically or seemingly
magically transforms those vibrations
back into an electrical impulse that
travels along your auditory nerve and
hits your brain and poof we have shared
understanding from my brain to yours
we’re able to see this magic of
transformation now it’s the third form
of magic that I really want to talk to
you all about today
in our histories we talked about this
idea of a magic of control right
hypnotism in this full form where we can
put you under a spell and get you to do
exactly what we want you to do and for
me as a health communicator and a wrist
communicator I’m fascinated in the idea
that communication can be like this
magic of control that there are things
we can do with communication that might
actually get you to barely even think
about what you’re doing and instead act
on a greater impulse let’s put it to the
test I’m gonna give you a classic test
that was developed in the 1920s on the
next slide you’re gonna see two shapes
your job is to tell me which shape
should be called bobba and which shape
should be called Kiki you ready here we
all right on three
I want everyone to seal out the name of
the shape on the left one two three Kiki
that’s correct and that makes the one on
the right buh-bah now how did I do that
right this is a classic test that shows
that yes I can predict exactly what’s in
your heads already right not fully what
this test helps to demonstrate for us is
that all of our senses are connected to
how we envision in the world right to
how we actually perceive and make
decisions in real life it’s called
synesthetic ideation a big fancy word
that notes that our senses are connected
now when you think about the
pronunciation of the words boba and Kiki
you’ll note that boba is a rounder sound
that you actually make a round shape
with your mouth which parallels boba the
amoeboid shaped image that’s on the side
over here right and Kiki has a higher
pitch and fall rate which generally
makes you think about a shape that looks
more spiky like our Kiki here
fascinating now we know that there’s not
full 100% control for communication the
magic isn’t fully real right
but it is still pretty powerful and as a
health and risk communicator I’m really
interested in the ways that we can
potentially use communication to
influence people to that next great
degree now I don’t want to scare you but
I’m gonna show you an algorithm alright
this is the general risk algorithm that
we use to actually calculate health
risks what it says is that risk is a
function of magnitude times probability
now if we break that down we’re actually
looking at two basic variables magnitude
and probability magnitude is the
likelihood or is the degree to which
something can cause harm to you the
degree to which something can cause harm
to you and probability is the likelihood
that that thing might actually happen to
you so we can actually grid this out and
look across at some different things in
the world and look at them and see what
kind of risk are they so we might have a
low probability low magnitude risk so it
doesn’t happen very often and when it
does happen the consequences aren’t that
bad so this is what happens when you get
a paper cut right it’s a very small risk
it’s not one that you typically read
major headline news about right it’s one
that when the risk actually happens you
deal with it you move on you put a
band-aid on you go back to work doesn’t
happen very often doesn’t even hurt very
much the consequences aren’t very large
however we might have a low probability
high magnitude risk doesn’t happen very
often again but when it does it’s much
more catastrophic these are our airplane
crashes right these are things that are
much more deadly but they still don’t
happen very often and then we might have
our high probability low magnitude risk
any allergy sufferers in the room I’m
with you I have to take an allergy pill
almost daily just so I don’t have the
itchy watery eyes right I’m even
allergic to my dog it’s not fair
right so I take a pill and I move on
with my life right the consequences
aren’t that dire but they happen quite
often right I live with the animal right
it sleeps on my bed so I have to deal
with it and then we have the high
magnitude high probability and what’s
interesting is that
times this particular type of risk
doesn’t get as much coverage when we’re
looking at health media as other types
of risk the high magnitude high risk is
cardiovascular disease World Health
Organization reports that cardiovascular
disease kills more people than anything
more people than anything die from
cardiovascular disease yet it’s other
things like airplane crashes that tend
to get a lot of our attention a lot of
the coverage when we look at the media
and that’s fascinating to me and the
reason why is because we need to revisit
what we know about risk in risk
communication we know that people don’t
necessarily understand risks like
experts do to just judge them on
magnitude and probability we add a whole
new variable all of us and that variable
tends to be outrage it tends to be all
of the other stuff all of the emotional
things that we bring to the table when
we’re judging a risk and some of those
we call affect and it’s what I want to
talk about for the rest of the time that
I have with you today is this concept of
effect now effect is the thing that
happens to us whenever we confront a
stimulus some other agent enters our
lives we have an instinctual and primal
reaction that’s effect it’s the thing
that drives us to understand and react
and then form judgments about the thing
that we confront every organism has
effect so you can imagine the jellyfish
and I hit a rock okay I’ll go this way
Oh hit another rock go back this way Oh
found a nice tasty fish right and I can
eat that fish well what happens when the
jellyfish bounces around in the ocean it
makes very quick primal sense out of
what it’s bumping into out of the
stimuli so effect is a psychological and
physical state that we go through and
it’s one where we process primal
emotions now humans aren’t jellyfish
right we’re a higher being we have more
complex emotions this is the emotional
color wheel that shows a lot of the
emotions that we portray and go through
in different times in our lives and we
have very complex emotions which are
tough and is difficult to deal with now
for me studying health and risk
communication I’m interested in
basically one of these for the most part
in my personal research and the emotion
that I look at when I’m dealing with
investigating effect is the emotion of
fear fear is an incredibly powerful
emotion and it’s an incredibly powerful
affective state that we process that
number one helps to keep us alive fear
keeps us away from danger because it
alerts us to danger well right we can
see the danger coming and choose to
react appropriately but sometimes we
don’t react in the right way so I want
to write here and now have you all feel
what that affects like by confronting
it worked now what just happened here
because it’s a very interesting thing
that just happened right I jump out and
go ah the basic most primal fear message
there is and every single person in the
room had that effect of reaction it
didn’t just happen in your mind it
happened in your body as well right and
you go back and forth between the mind
and body to make sense of what happened
the very first thing that happened was
you jolted right you had that visceral
reaction of fear and then you had a
cognitive process to figure out what
should I do with this fear now that I
have this effect of fear State and you
kind of turned and you looked and you
went okay am i a safe place yes this is
a safe place okay I can release the fear
by laughing right now if I showed up in
your bedroom at 3 in the morning tonight
and I left out of the closet you
probably wouldn’t be laughing then right
it’s a tricky case you have to
understand what that fear means given
the context and so we see that fear is
an incredible driver and it’s something
that we can use effectively to
communicate about health and risk but we
can also see that sometimes it goes a
little too far and sometimes we use fear
when we shouldn’t there’s one very
interesting historical case where in the
UK in the 80s cow’s brains were eating
the holes into themselves sounds very
very scary right and the pictures are
pretty gross basically what was
happening was cows were eating diseased
food and because of it the proteins in
their brains were folding upon
themselves and literally chewing holes
through their own brains now scientists
said well we need to educate the public
about this issue because there may there
may be a small chance that if people
then eat that cattle eat that beef that
they too could have an Associated
disease now scientists had a name for it
they called it bovine spongiform
encephalopathy bovine spongiform
encephalopathy right it’s a mouthful you
win an award if you
say it three times fast right bovine
spongiform encephalopathy now when they
started reporting about bovine
spongiform encephalopathy they noticed
that a lot of the public wasn’t really
concerned about this disease called
bovine spongiform encephalopathy right
why because it’s such a mouthful there
was a journalist David Brown in 1990 who
changed the term and he said you know
instead of describing what the disease
is
we should describe what it does and he
changed the term to mad cow disease
which is how you all know the disease to
be called what that did is it provided a
new touchstone that actually could
elicit a different fear response among
the public and they could then deal
appropriately with their own emotion
about it to make a decision about the
risk now interestingly when press
started coming out and demonstrating
that yes this disease might be dangerous
and yes it’s associated with another
long sounding difficult disease called
creutzfeldt-jakob disease which affects
humans in a very similar way when we
changed the name to mad cow disease we
saw people starting to pay attention and
you saw people starting to pay attention
in mass you saw people stopping buying
beef you saw people really angered about
the issue you saw people having protests
about the issue and the like and you saw
it even spilling over into other sectors
where it wasn’t just influencing beef
but even other types of meat when we
look at risks and we look specifically
at how the public comes to understand
risk there are two sides both sides are
wrong that’s the sad part there’s one
potential true risk that’s the best
understanding the actual risk that we
try to come close to and working with
our scientists right our toxicologist
our epidemiologist the like try to come
up with this number real risk true risk
representative risk that’s the line in
the middle and unfortunately when we are
trying to communicate with the public we
oftentimes are combating with people
being on either side of real risk and so
our job as communicators is to try and
bring them back to closer to that real
risk side so we have on one side
the attenuated risks these are the risks
that should be more feared by society
and aren’t for instance radon radon is
an odorless tasteless colorless gas that
is radioactive and is known to cause
lung cancer same thing goes for high
calorie diets there’s something that are
everywhere in our societies nowadays and
there’s something that needs to have a
greater emphasis of fear upon in the
public and then we have the other side
the amplified risks those are the risks
that the public views as not risky or as
risky but they shouldn’t be viewed as
risky they’re over amplified in their
risk perceptions and these are things
like y2k if you lived through y2k where
they thought that the entire world was
going to end when it the clock struck
midnight changing into the year 2000 I
have a friend his dad bought a house up
in the mountains and packed it was ready
to go just in case the world fell apart
right and child kidnapping is another
one where unfortunately a lot of people
are very concerned that strangers are
going to kidnap your children when we
look at the real data your child is much
more likely to be kidnapped by someone
you know or an immediate family member
all right so these are different kinds
of risks that are over amplified and it
brings us back to a tough part about
communication and risk communication
where as dr. Peter Sandman notes one
aspect of risk communication is figuring
out how to scare people right right and
then the next and other component of
risk communication is trying to get them
to calm down again and I think that
understanding that people are
purposefully and motivated ly trying to
get your eyes trying to get your
attention through using fear lets you
know that they’re trying to implement
that third type of magic on you that
magic of control when you’re reading
online and it says five things your
teenage daughter is doing that could
kill her right these are the types of
articles that are purposefully trying to
get your eyes and get your body to align
with what they’re saying through this
type of fear message so if you remember
and understand
that yes people are indeed trying to use
fear upon you you can become a better
communicator yourself by not using fear
messages when you don’t think you need
to and by being able to protect yourself
when other people are trying to put you under there