SHE Pod Season 2 Episode 3: Claire Hooker on Risk Communication Values

4:36AM Apr 3, 2021

Speakers:

Kathryn MacKay

Claire Hooker

Keywords:

people

paper

communication

pandemic

values

risk

self determination

determination

practice

perceived

laughs

written

matrices

ethics

aeroplane

sense

claire

listeners

definitions

issues

Hello, everyone, and welcome to SHE Research Podcast. I'm your host, Kate MacKay and today I'm joined by Claire Hooker. Hi, Claire.

Hi, Kate.

How are you?

I'm excellent.

That's so good.

It's 2021.

Brand new year. Three months in. (laughs). Today we're meeting to talk about a paper written by Claire Hooker with Julie Leask, both at the University of Sydney and the paper is entitled 'Risk Communication Should be Explicit About Values. A Perspective on Early Communication During COVID-19' and this is published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. So Clare, I wonder if you could give us an overview of what the paper is about??

So with this particular paper I want to talk more about the context in which it was written than it's content on it's own. The first thing that struck me in re-reading it in order to talk about it today is that it describes events that occured almost exactly a year ago. Very much exactly a year ago. And I was reminded quite sharply of aspects and elements of that early pandemic experience that are no longer very present. And at the time, the paper was written, which was at about mid last year, I wrote it in order to start to set out a new approach in risk communication, that I think is going to be developed over the next few years. And that will make quite a startling and revolutionary difference to this as a field of practice. And that is by making values explicit, and by advocating for and trying to understand how best to include values in as a component of what we do when we are doing practical risk communication. So normally, when we talk about risk communication, values and ethics are never explicit. Risk communication has been a extremely pragmatic field of practice... field practice more than of scholarship. And to the extent that it has been an area of scholarship, it has been almost entirely drawn out from experimental cognitive psychology, and particularly oriented around understanding that communication needs to be adaptive to responsive to and aware of the various heuristics and biases that impact on how people perceive and respond to risks. But every aspect of risk communication, recommendation and practice are actually intensely value-laden. And that together with fairly recent research that demonstrates just how deeply some things, phenomena that I'm going to call 'values', although there will be those among our listeners, hopefully, who would like to quibble with the definitions of those terms, because they come from different schools of thought and disciplinary areas of practice. So there's some that are termed moral foundations that cut through evolutionary psychology and anthropology, some to do with what are, I think, poorly named as cultural worldviews, but regardless of the way in which you define them, increasingly, we see that these are actually dominant in how people appraise information, perceive risks, and tailor their responses accordingly. So this paper was written to start a process of engagement with all of those issues.

That sounds really exciting, especially the idea that this could really revolutionise risk communication. That seems really exciting.

Yes, I think so. I think, given the data that we now have, about just how dominant people's value systems are in how they process information, and how they select their preferences about how to respond to risk, I think the capacity to speak to that has enormous potential. It also has enormous potential pitfalls. And working out what those are and what if anything can be done with them is also something for an upcoming urgent and important research agenda. But in this particular paper, I was grappling with the issues that were present at the very beginning of the pandemic, which very roughly I would stereotype... straw men characterise... as sort of January being about xenophobia and racism against Asian people. And then February being about panic-buying (laughs). And then march being about the concept of herd immunity and the linked very callous representations and treatment of people with disabilities and people who were aged, people perceived to be vulnerable at that time to COVID-19. And so this paper is specifically address the practical issue of - could we have communicated better in ways that would have minimised the impacts on people in those three categories of issues across those three months as events unfolded? And would that have made for greater capacity for public sense making feeding into public support for the development of containment policies for COVID-19, or possibly even for better containment policies of COVID-19.

On that, in the paper, you talk about... well, you talked about different values, but one in particular that I found very interesting, and that you focus on in the paper is about self determination, and ability to shape and enact oneself. So this is more than whatever autonomy or liberty might be. And you talk about it in terms of a sense, during the pandemic, at the beginning of the pandemic as loss of control, and how that one important value for all of us. Yeah, I do think that self determination, as you've defined it as a universal sort of value. However, you reacted to that loss of control, that was still the one kind of value. So you could, you could react by wearing a mask, or you could react by going and protesting wearing masks (laughs). But those two opposed reactions were coming out of this sense of loss of control that was connected to the value of self determination. And I thought that that was a really insightful analysis and observation.

Thank you, well, I can't really take much credit for it in that... one thing that cognitive psychology has provided with us with is a clear sense that risks are perceived to be higher where they are perceived to be beyond people's control. So the classic original version of that is that people feel more scared flying in aeroplanes than they do driving their cars, even though the chance of them dying in their car just exceeds the chance of dying in an aeroplane crash by a factor of I'm not entirely sure how much...

Orders of magnitude.

Yeah orders of magnitude, very large. And so. So but but what people haven't done, or what the research hasn't done, is systematically analysed how many of the other so-called cognitive biases that affect risk perception, in themselves actually derived from dilemmas around loss of control in the context of the complexity of contemporary societies. That's one area that I think is very definitely under-explored. Risk communication has taken it as axiomatic that we need to establish trust, and we do but hasn't talked about why. And a big part of that 'why' is the fact that in a complex, contemporary society, we have no capacity to exert control. And the only way we can do that is to use proxies. So we are forced into being mostly outside our capacity to control anything and to rely instead on how to make judgments about trust. And the way we do that, of course, is very strongly around our values. But understanding that basic sense of how that drives our need to enact our values in matrices that are formed in to do with our social circumstances. So the social circumstances and the matrix of values that go with that for somebody who is a anti-mask protester are very different from those of us who are communitarian and egalitarian and, and well-versed in public health measures. But but all of us are effectively defending a system of values that describes what we think of as a way of life that is of benefit. What I'd actually like to say into that is that - and I didn't have as clearly in the paper - is that a lot of my thinking, and the language that I was really groping after in this publication, came from engaging deeply with theorizations of self-determination as foundational to the development of any health policy and practice with First Nations and Aboriginal communities. So there in those circumstances and enacted in the international treaties for Indigenous peoples, the concept of self-determination in that very broad sense, which is very different from those very thin notions of liberty and autonomy was key, but they are deeply deeply communitarian, and communal societies. So self-determination was a concept that was in those circles, speaking into a very, very non individualistic understanding. So I, I could not, I think I would need several years to think it through anyway. But I had a great sense that because responding to the pandemic is a incredibly communal project for societies whose dominant narratives are individualistic, but whose people crave and engage in various forms of communal existence, then, an articulation of self determination that included the many people whose so called vulnerabilities leave them out of the accounts provided around autonomy and liberty was, in my view, an intrinsically important aspect of this communication that needed to be addressed. And what really struck me, and again, not represented in this paper, which had a very small word limit was just how different the the ethical framework for pandemic response it's formally written into the New Zealand pandemic preparedness government documents is to the formal documents that the ethics frameworks that exist for the formal formal documents for pandemic preparedness in other English speaking nations. And the New Zealand version actually has this far less academic, far less defined, far more inclusive community and betters approach that also, in my view, speaks to somehow a renew articulation that might sit around self-determination where self determination is not focused only on an individual self, the selfness is different in that context. I apologise for taking us so well beyond what was in print.

(laughs).

But listeners, I had warned our host that this paper was a first step for me in starting to think out how we might start to grapple with these issues. And it was in that sense, although it has some practical lessons that I still think apply, in that I do think we could have minimised - not avoided entirely but minimise - though the most negative aspects of those three issues, the racism, the panic-buying and the stereotyping that followed, and the disturbed discussions of herd immunity by applying a much more broadly understood values-based approach to risk communication, but outside that it's a paper that seeks after a new conversation, rather than provides any kind of answers.

Yeah, I think that's really exciting. And it's, it's as a as a beginning, you even say in the paper that this is a sort of this is a beginning on something new. And I think that that's very exciting. And you've got to start somewhere.

Right! So I hope our listeners will join me in using it as a means to grapple with these sets of issues.

So then let me ask you two questions. The first question is, what do you hope that readers will take away from this particular paper? And then the second question would be, what's next?

Yes. Okay. So what I hope, I hope readers take away two things from this particular issue. One is, I hope they take away a sense that there are really exciting questions to be asked about what it would mean, if we may values explicit in risk communication practice, and how we might go about doing that usefully and effectively. So that's what I hope they take away that these theories are really potentially exciting and involving, and I mean that in a in a, in a broad sense, in that everybody has a role to play in that conversation. What what are the next bits? Well, there's clearly work for people who do have a, shall we say, canonical understanding of the normal approaches within bioethics to the ethics of pandemic planning to start to grapple with these particular issues. But I hope that that occurs in a genuinely multidisciplinary way. That is, I hope the project isn't to tie down definitions actually, because I think that might become a constraint on the way in which this can speak into the many community-based contexts, where those definitions are likely to never become tidy in practice, because of the ways in which people use language colloquially. And because and because I reread ethics frameworks documents at this time and suddenly found them dissatisfying in a way I hadn't before. I felt they needed renewal. So, so there's that. But the way in which it's going to move forward, from my perspective, is to do a lot more empirical work that explores, sometimes in ways that feel crude to me, methodologically, but again, provide a beginning, the relationship between the matrices of values that people hold, and the ways in which they reflect on, reconsider, and engage with decision-making in relation to various health risks. And so together with various colleagues, I have a number of projects of that kind in funding pipelines now. Fingers crossed.

Yes, yay. We'll cross our fingers too, me and the listening audience.

Absolutely.

Crossing fingers (laughs).

I'm sure it works if every listener crosses their fingers.

Well, is there anything else that you wanted to say?

No, but not at this point, except to say that I hope people enjoy the paper and find it something that provokes thoughts further down the track that we can engage with them.

I certainly found it very thought provoking.

Thank you.

You're welcome. Thanks for joining me, Claire.

Thank you, Kate, for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of SHE Research Podcast everyone. You can find the paper that we've discussed linked in this episode's notes along with the transcript. SHE Pod is hosted by me Kathryn MacKay and produced by Madeline Goldberger. You can find our other episodes on Spotify, Radio Public, Anchor or wherever else you get your podcasts of quality. Thanks again for listening. Bye.