The risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different.
In October 2002, a sniper terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for three frightening weeks. The sniper (and, as it turned out, his teenage accomplice) shot 13 people. Ten died, and three others survived critical wounds.
I lived in Washington at the time, as I still do. The attacks changed the behavior of almost everyone who lived in the area. I personally witnessed a family sprint from the entrance of a mall to their car, serpentining the whole way in an attempt to offer a less-promising target. Four of the shootings took place at gas stations, so many people, myself included, spent as little time as possible outside their cars while pumping gas. I’d jump out the door, crouch down below the car as I swiped my credit card, jam the nozzle into the tank, and jump back into the car while the tank filled up.
Once the perpetrators were caught and the Washington metropolitan region returned to normal, researchers began to study the public’s behavior during the attacks. How did people react to the shootings? Did they change their routines? How so? How did information, or misinformation, affect their assessment of the danger posed by the snipers and therefore their behavior? Was their behavior rational or irrational? Did their actions reduce their risk of being shot? Or did they actually increase their chances of being harmed?
What they discovered intrigued me and helped to solidify my understanding of the issue of risk perception and assessment. Whole books have been written about the topic, but for our purposes, the conclusions drawn by a team of British researchers at the Centre of Risk for Health Care Research and Practice in London are most relevant: Many people, because they did not possess accurate information about the true level of the threat posed by the snipers, changed their behavior in ways that actually put them in greater danger of being harmed in other ways.
Some Washingtonians, particularly among those who lived near gas stations where several of the shootings took place, feared that the snipers would strike twice at the same location. So they drove to more distant gas stations—sometimes as far as 10 or 20 miles away. Because they spent more time on the road, they raised their risk of being injured or killed in an automobile accident. The snipers never returned to the same place twice, so these people’s real risk of being shot at their local gas stations was zero. Even if the snipers had returned, the chances that any single person would wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time were not much higher. Pedestrians who were busy looking around for signs of the sniper rather than paying attention to traffic raised their risk of being struck by a car. The family I saw sprinting and serpentining through the mall parking lot was much more likely to be hit by a car backing out of a space than to be shot by the snipers. Walking slowly in a straight line, as a family would have done under normal circumstances, would have been much safer.
Roughly five million people lived in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area when the shootings took place. The British researchers found that the chances of being shot and killed by the snipers had they been on the loose for an entire year would have been 1 in 53,325. As a Washingtonian, I was more than twice as likely to be killed in a car accident, an accidental fall, an accidental poisoning, or a random, run-of-the-mill murder. I remember jumping in and out of my car to avoid the incredibly small risk of being shot. I don’t recall strapping myself into the shower to avoid a much more likely fatal slip in my bathtub.
The strategies, skills, and techniques needed to break through and win people over in tough situations are rooted in an ever-evolving understanding of risk assessment and acceptance. Everything we’re going to discuss from this point on is designed essentially to help you convince your audience to accept a risk. So a quick primer on the basics of risk—what it means, how we assess it, how we decide whether or not to accept it, why we fear some risks more than others, and how all of this translates into how we perceive risk—is an essential first step. (For those who would like to delve deeper into the fascinating world of risk assessment and perception, the Recommended Reading list at the end of this book lists a number of sources on the subject.)
We usually think about risk in terms of a physical threat: being shot by snipers or hit by a car or succumbing to disease. Less obvious but equally relevant to communicating in tough situations are risks that come in the form of emotional burdens. What if you learned tomorrow that a company wanted to build a landfill less than a mile from your home? While the facility wouldn’t threaten your life or the lives of anyone you care about, chances are you’d feel a risk born of emotional burden. You might think you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your backyard anymore because the facility would be noisy and smelly. You might worry that the facility would bring a lot more truck traffic to your neighborhood’s already-congested streets. You might be concerned that your property would lose value.
Or say your boss tells you he needs to talk to you about a problem at work. You know he isn’t going to hit you, so you’re not going to worry about your physical safety. But the prospect of a conversation like that creates anxiety and stress—in other words, an emotional burden. When you walk into his office, you’re going to be worried for sure, and perhaps even angry and suspicious.
The risk doesn’t necessarily need to be aimed directly at you. The poor economy we’ve suffered through over the past several years imposes emotional burdens on millions of Americans, even those who haven’t lost their jobs. Simply the prospect of losing your job, or of someone close to you losing a job, is enough to create an emotional burden that becomes an imposed risk. As a result, our political leaders have been communicating in tough situations the entire time, because the economic anxiety a lot of people feel makes them angry, worried, and suspicious of everything politicians say.
All of these risks, both physical and emotional, change the nature of communication. If a company hopes to build that landfill, your boss wants to make sure you accept what he has to say and that you fix what’s wrong, and the president wants to be reelected, they have to find a way to convince you to accept the risk they’re imposing on you. Risk creates unique barriers to effective communication that do not exist in our normal, everyday interactions with people. We need to establish trust and credibility in order to break through those barriers and win people over.
As it turns out, human beings today are terrible risk assessors. That wasn’t always the case. Thousands of years ago, when our ancestors survived as hunters and gatherers, our risk assessment skills were finely honed. Run from the lion. Don’t eat those berries. Somewhere along the way, as we became more civilized and comfortable, our risk assessment skills atrophied. Some behavioral scientists theorize that our brains remain hardwired to fear and avoid risk but haven’t adapted to a society that’s far more complicated than those that existed not all that long ago. Others speculate that our senses are dulled because we’ve succeeded in making everyday living so safe and secure.
To paraphrase Peter Sandman, one of the world’s foremost experts on communicating about risk, this lack of risk assessment skills leads most of us to fear relatively harmless behaviors and disregard far more dangerous ones. To illustrate the discrepancy between “real risk” and “perceived risk,” it helps to think in terms of how dangerous something is to you (toxicity) and how much of it you’re likely to come into contact with (exposure). How we perceive the interaction between these two factors often leads to inaccurate assessment of what really poses a risk and what doesn’t, as illustrated in Figure 4.1.
FIGURE 4.1 What Scares Us Isn’t Always What Threatens Us
Toxicologists define risk as a function of toxicity (how dangerous something is) and exposure (how likely people are to be exposed). People are notoriously poor risk assessors, as this scatterplot shows. Which of these substances or activities do you worry about most? Many probably lie in the left quadrants, which contains the least-risky examples. Which should you worry about most? The ones that lie in the right quadrants. Understanding the difference is critical for communicators who want to win people over.
Barbara Longsworth
Consider plutonium. The bad news is that plutonium, particularly if you inhale it, is extremely toxic—lethal, in fact, even in tiny doses. The good news is that very few of us will ever be exposed to plutonium. Now consider rat poison. It’s also very toxic if ingested. Unlike plutonium, rat poison is in plenty of people’s cupboards. If you ask a toxicologist which substance presents a bigger risk, she’ll tell you it’s the rat poison, because the chances of exposure are much higher.
But what scares you more, plutonium or rat poison? My guess is most people would say plutonium, even though rat poison represents the bigger risk. Bruce Schneier, an expert in security risk, has used other examples to illustrate the point: anthrax versus the flu, terrorism versus street crime, flying versus driving. Which scares you more? Probably the first risk in each pair. Which is more dangerous? Most definitely the latter.
Peter Sandman invented an elegant but powerful equation that helps to explain the difference between real risk and perceived risk:
Risk = Hazard + Outrage
Sandman essentially substitutes “hazard” for toxicity, or how dangerous something is. He uses “outrage” as a broader variable for exposure, one that takes into account the many different ways that a risk can anger and worry people and make them suspicious. If risk simply equaled hazard, I would argue that I didn’t need to write this book and you don’t need to read it. No one would need special strategies, skills, and techniques to communicate, because people would understand the true nature of different risks and would not become angry, worried, and suspicious nearly as often.
Outrage is a function of the many different factors that influence risk acceptance. People use dozens of factors to assess whether they’re willing to accept a risk. While experts generally agree on which ones have the most influence for the average American citizen, it’s impossible to know which factors will affect which people the most or the least. It’s also important to remember that few people assess risks consciously. They don’t necessarily know they’re doing it. It’s mostly instinctual, and effective communicators are adept at figuring out which factors are at play in any given situation.
Drawing from the work of noted experts Dr. Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and David Ropeik and Dr. George Gray at Harvard University, this section describes the factors influencing risk assessment that my firm believes to be most important when you’re trying to win people over.
Of all the factors that influence the acceptance of risk, the most powerful is trust. If we trust the source of a risk we feel is being imposed on us, we’re much more likely to accept the risk. Some research suggests that we’re 2,000 times more likely to accept a risk if it comes from someone, or something, we trust. The classic example is driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 32,000 Americans died in motor-vehicle-related accidents in 2011. The lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the United States is about 1 in 75. We’ve all known people who lost their lives this way. I’ll never forget my high school classmate who lost her life in an accident within view of our school. Or my dad’s boss, who was killed in a freak accident on his way to work one morning. Getting behind the wheel is one of life’s most dangerous activities. If driving were a food, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would regulate it out of existence tomorrow. Yet when was the last time you hesitated when you got behind the wheel because you were afraid of being hurt or killed? That’s because we trust ourselves as drivers, which incidentally plays into the next influence on risk acceptance.
This explains why establishing trust with someone who is angry, worried, and suspicious is so vitally important. People feel that way in part because they think we’re imposing a risk on them. Real or perceived, it doesn’t matter. If they trust us as a source of that risk, they’re 2,000 times more likely to accept it. That means they will be less angry, worried, and suspicious, and we will be more successful in winning them over.
Two powerful influences on risk acceptance, control and understanding, often work in tandem. Along with trust, control helps to explain why we don’t hesitate to drive. When most of us get behind the wheel, we feel we are in control. In August 2011, the insurance company Allstate asked 1,000 Americans to rate themselves as drivers. Close to two-thirds, 64 percent, rated themselves as excellent or very good drivers. Most of us think, “I’m a very good driver, and as long as I’m careful, I’ll be fine.” Anyone going slower than us is a moron. Anyone going faster is a maniac. We’re Goldilocks behind the wheel; everything we do is just right. Perception versus reality comes into play here, too. The truth is, we don’t have as much control as we think. Many people killed in car accidents are doing nothing wrong. They’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone else does something wrong.
Many people who are afraid to fly cite a lack of control as a primary reason for their fear. Courses designed to alleviate these fears are built in part around helping fearful flyers understand how a plane works and what pilots do. While understanding does not equal personal control (those who take these courses won’t be able to fly the plane), it does mitigate the perception of the risk. When the plane goes up or down or left or right or experiences turbulence, they’ll know why and how. They’ll have greater confidence that the pilots truly are in control, on their behalf. When we’re trying to win people over, we need to raise their level of understanding of whatever risk they believe we’re imposing on them. It’s not enough to say, “Don’t be afraid, because we’ll take care of it.”
I learned the hard way that the strategies, skills, and techniques necessary to break through and win people over can be important even when dealing with young children. I have two kids, an older son and a younger daughter. Before my daughter was born, my ex-wife and I did a lousy job of preparing my then four-year-old son for his sister’s arrival. Sure, he knew she was coming and that he was going to have a little sister. But I never explained what that was really going to mean. That the baby would cry a lot. That she was going to sleep in Mommy and Daddy’s room until she was old enough for her crib. That Mommy and Daddy would have to pay a lot of attention to her. That sort of thing. After his sister arrived, my son experienced awful night terrors. Looking back, I should have recognized that even at four—in a very subconscious way, to be sure—he felt that a new sister imposed a huge emotional burden on him. I’m convinced the transition would have been much easier had I helped him understand how a little baby in the house was going to change things and given him a sense of control over the situation.
By the way, the lifetime risk of being killed in an airplane (or space-related) accident is about 1 in 5,000. Driving is roughly 60 times more dangerous than flying. Which scares you more? Does control or understanding have something to do with it? Research shows that a sense of control can increase the willingness to accept a risk by as much as 1,000 times. Understanding is not quite so powerful, but it’s an important factor, too.
Many years ago, I worked with an organization that represents medical professionals who use small amounts of radioactive isotopes to diagnose and treat disease. At one of the group’s meetings, a local television station asked one of its board members for an interview about a controversy involving a common medical procedure. Let’s call the board member Dr. Pierce. Regulators recently had decided that the procedure wasn’t effective and that insurance companies would no longer be required to cover it. The society believed the procedure was effective and wanted to overturn the decision—or at least convince people they should consider paying for it themselves even if their insurance wouldn’t pay for it. In helping him to prepare, I urged Dr. Pierce to spend as much time as possible talking about the procedure’s benefits. For the people watching the TV program, the risk was an emotional burden in the form of a financial liability: if I have this procedure, it’s going to cost me a lot more now that my insurance won’t cover it anymore. But if people recognize the benefits of a risk, research shows that they will be as much as 1,000 times more likely to accept it.
This was only part of the challenge, of course. Dr. Pierce also had to convince people that the procedure was effective, contrary to the recent regulatory ruling. But before he could win people over to that argument, he had to break through by identifying, acknowledging, and minimizing his audience’s perceived risk. He also had to be careful about the nonverbal messages he was sending. We’ll visit with Dr. Pierce again when we explore the importance of nonverbal messages in Chapter 6.
Most people are about 500 times more likely to accept a risk if they choose—or volunteer—for it, rather than being forced into it. The choice v. force factor plays a strong role in our perceived risk of driving. No one coerces us to get behind the wheel. We choose to drive. That’s not true for many risks. If an electric company decides to build a power line in the field behind your house, that’s hardly voluntary. Chances are you’re going to perceive that power line as a risk on many different levels: power lines are ugly, so they’ll ruin your view (an emotional burden); some studies find that power lines may negatively affect property value (a financial risk, another form of emotional burden); and other studies suggest electric and magnetic fields generated by power lines can be harmful (a physical threat).
To overcome the choice v. force factor, it’s crucial to give members of the community many chances to be heard. We counsel our siting clients to hold numerous public meetings and information fairs, maintain open and frequent contact with community leaders, and provide numerous channels (e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc.) that people can use to ask questions and provide input. Some people will oppose a controversial new facility no matter what, of course. But many, if given the opportunity to express their opinions and share their concerns, are more open-minded. They may not necessarily volunteer to host a new facility (although that can happen, especially if multiple communities are competing for the economic development and jobs—in other words, benefits!—that a facility will bring), but they will become more willing to accept the risks associated with it. And that will make it easier to win them over.
You don’t have to be in the business of siting controversial facilities to use this risk acceptance factor to your advantage. Say you’re giving an employee a challenging new assignment, something you know will test her abilities. Though positive, that’s a risk in the form of an emotional burden. Instead of starting off by saying, “I have a challenging assignment for you,” try asking, “Are you interested in taking on a challenging new assignment?” Now you’re not imposing the risk. You’re giving her a choice, and an opportunity to volunteer. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, her answer is going be yes. And if her answer is no, well, then it may be time for a different sort of conversation.
Research by Slovic and Gray and others shows that risks that affect many people are more acceptable than risks that affect only a few. Compare two of the risks we’ve discussed: driving a car and living near a power line. Driving affects just about everyone. The risk, though very high, is shared widely and equitably. Any one of us can be the victim of a bad, even fatal, car accident. The risk associated with living near a power line, while very low, affects only the people who live near it. From their point of view, they’re bearing a disproportionate share of the risk. It’s not fair. Like the choice v. force factor, fairness and equity can affect risk acceptance by as much as 500-fold. Interestingly, it’s not only the few people affected by the risk who feel this way. Even those not affected directly will be less likely to accept a risk imposed on a select few.
When trying to win people over, ask these questions: Are you imposing an inequitable risk? How are people going to react? What can you do to make it fairer? The challenging job assignment may represent an unfair risk, from the employee’s point of view. She may wonder why she’s being singled out, even if you see it as a career-advancing opportunity. To overcome this concern, you need to empathize with her (more on this critical skill in Chapter 5). Provide her with the tools she’ll need to do the job. Tell her you picked her because you know she can get it done, and that you’ll be there to help her and allow her to ask questions. Not only will the conversation be easier, but the chances that she’ll complete the assignment successfully will be much higher than if you simply said, “Go do this.”
A couple of years ago I took up flying. The first lesson is called a demo flight. After my instructor took me through preflight (a 10-minute process during which he showed me how to check everything from the amount of gas in the tanks to the air pressure in the tires), we climbed into the cockpit. We ran through a prestart checklist, and he showed me how to start the engine. Then he turned to me and over the whine of the propeller very calmly said, “OK, taxi out to the runway and take off.” I looked at him like he was crazy, but he assured me he wouldn’t let me do anything wrong or dangerous. I was sweating. My heart was pounding. I’ve never been so nervous and worried—not to mention a little suspicious of a flight instructor who would let me “drive” a plane on my first day. In the end, everything went well, and as the plane lifted off the ground, all my angst disappeared. After a few months, I soloed. I no longer feared preflight or taxiing or taking off. I didn’t really think about it at all. Climbing into the cockpit and taking off became as familiar as getting behind the wheel of my car. (In fact, driving got to be a little boring after I had experienced three-dimensional, traffic-free, 120-mile-per-hour travel.) What I had perceived to be a very big risk melted away in part thanks to familiarity—and in part to a sense of control and understanding.
Because people tend to fear the unknown, familiarity has a strong influence over risk acceptance: If we are familiar with a risk, we’re 200 times more willing to accept it. Smart companies that operate controversial facilities recognize the power of familiarity. My firm has done work for a big energy company in New York charged with cleaning up an abandoned, contaminated site. The cleanup was controversial, with some residents accusing the company of making things worse rather than better. We counseled our client to be more proactive in reaching out to the community. The company brought local officials to the site and showed them what they were doing. They launched a new, more user-friendly website. They invited reporters to a big public meeting at the town’s high school. By raising residents’ familiarity with their operations, the company reduced their fear.
Remember the movie Jaws? Released almost 40 years ago, it single-handedly raised shark attacks to the very top of the nation’s collective list of things to fear. Beach resorts on every coast reported lower attendance that summer, and to this day, people hum the movie’s iconic theme song and make jokes when they swim in the ocean. Media at the time picked up on the public’s new fascination and began to report shark attack stories from all over the world. They still do.
When Jaws came out in 1975, the lifetime risk of being attacked by a shark was about 1 in 60,000—even less than being shot by the snipers in Washington, D.C. Today, the lifetime risk of being attacked by a shark is about 1 in 60,000. In other words, the real risk hasn’t changed at all. What changed was the perceived risk, fueled by massive publicity launched and sustained by one very successful summer blockbuster movie.
As it turns out, sharks are not even close to the greatest risk you face when you spend a day at the beach. Driving there represents by far the biggest danger. The risk of drowning is about 1 in 1,100, while the risk of dying as a result of sun or heat exposure is about 1 in 13,000. And if you decide to take a bike ride: 1 in 5,000. Chances are none of these will happen to you, but a shark attack is the least of your worries.
Research clearly shows that people fear human-made risks more than natural ones. While I haven’t seen any specific studies addressing it, I’ve always believed that this factor played into the controversy several years ago regarding the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. It started with the publication of a 1998 study in the well-respected medical journal Lancet that purported to show a connection between the two. The article spread like wildfire, and parents around the world began to refuse the vaccination. The only problem was that the study was completely wrong. Subsequent studies found no connection, and while the authors of the original Lancet article ultimately retracted it, the damage was done. To this day, a significant number of parents refuse the MMR vaccine, putting their children at much greater risk of contracting one of the diseases. In fact, even if the Lancet study had been proven true, the greater risk still would have been to go without the shot. The fact that the viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella are natural while humans created the vaccine that protects against them must, in my opinion, have played a role in this particular misperception of risk. Research shows that origin can influence risk acceptance by a factor of 200.
Risks that generate inordinate amounts of fear also can affect risk acceptance by a factor of 200. As I’ve mentioned, my firm does a lot of work in the nuclear power industry. We’ve learned that one risk that creates dread for many people is radiation. It’s invisible and insidious, and one of the enduring images of the 20th century is of mushrooms clouds rising high into the sky. The March 11, 2011, Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan reminded everyone of the dangers of radiation. Tens of thousands of people living near the plant were forced from their homes not by the earthquake or the tsunami, but by radiation leaking from the broken plant.
Radiation also serves to illustrate how different risk factors can work for and against one another. We fear what I’ll call atomic radiation because it inspires dread, but also because it’s human-made. The truth is we’re exposed to radiation all the time from natural sources all around us, including radon in the ground and energy from the sun. But we tend not to worry about those nearly as much. We receive a relatively significant amount of radiation when we get x-rays on our teeth, but when was the last time you worried about the lead apron that the technician draped across you before he took the x-ray—or the fact that he stepped out of the room before pushing the button? Perhaps because you trust your dentist and you recognize the benefits associated with dental x-rays? Another time when many of us expose ourselves to relatively high levels of radiation is when we fly, because we rise above a good portion of the protective shield that the earth’s atmosphere provides. I’ve never heard anyone cite radiation exposure among the reasons that they’re afraid to fly, but a case could be made that the radiation you receive on a plane is the most dangerous part of the trip. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
As Paul Slovic has written, because we are genetically programmed to care for our children, we are far less willing to accept risks we believe affect them disproportionately. This factor played a strong role in the Alar scare of the late 1980s. Alar was a chemical that farmers used to make apples stay ripe longer, until the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a report declaring it to be an unacceptable risk to children. Parents all over the country erupted in fury. They forced stores to pull apples and apple products from their shelves and schools to stop using them in lunches served to students. In the end, their reaction turned out to be way out of proportion to the risk. Once the initial furor subsided, many studies, including one published in 1990 in the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that Alar was perfectly safe. But the real risk didn’t have a chance against a perceived threat aimed primarily at children, and the chemical is banned from use on food products to this day.
Concerns about children can be so powerful that we’re even less likely to accept risks that may affect future generations. Depending on whether we have children and how old they are, this factor can affect risk acceptance by a factor of 200 to 1,000.
We tend to fear risks that threaten to cause a large number of casualties all at once more than those that result in the same number of casualties spread out over a longer period of time. That’s why studies show that most of us fear terrorist attacks like the ones that occurred on September 11, 2001, more than we do random street crime. We’re much more likely to worry about the former, even though we’re much more likely to suffer from the latter—even in cities high on the target list of terrorists, including Washington, D.C. Risk acceptance can be affected 500-fold by this influence factor.
To close out our risk primer, let’s engage in an exercise that will show how these risk factors change perceived risks into real risks. We’ll compare driving and living next to a power line. We know that the real risk associated with driving is about 1 in 100. I couldn’t find a reliable statistic on the risk associated with living near a power line, probably because it’s so low, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s 1 in 100,000. That’s even less of a risk than the one posed by the snipers (or by sharks).
Start with trust. Do we trust ourselves behind the wheel? Yes. As the Allstate study tells us, most of us consider ourselves to be excellent or very good drivers. So what happens to our perception of the risk of driving? Because we trust the risk of driving, our perception of the risk goes down by a factor of 2,000.
So a real risk of 1 in 100 becomes, in our minds, a perceived risk of 1 in 200,000. In other words, the trust factor leads us to believe that driving is 2,000 times safer than it really is.
Now consider the power line. Do we trust the company that wants to build it? Probably not. Power companies are big, faceless corporations that only care about making money, or so we think. They’ll do and say whatever it takes to get the line built. They don’t really care if the line is safe or not. Besides, power lines are big, ugly, and scary. Since we don’t trust the source of this risk, our perception of the risk goes up by a factor of 2,000. Rather than a risk of 1 in 100,000, we perceive the risk to be more like 1 in 50—or 2,000 times riskier than it really is.
Look what happened. By applying only one of the factors that influence risk, we turned the very real risk of driving into a perceived risk that’s less likely than a shark attack, being hit by lightning, or even being killed in a fireworks-related accident! The opposite happened when we applied the trust factor to living near a power line. What is actually very safe became, essentially, an imminent danger.
Applying other factors such as benefits, familiarity, and control would only make driving seem safer and living next to a power line seem even more dangerous. In fact, many people who live along a proposed new power line’s route will just assume that if it gets built, they’re going to die. That’s why so many people fight so hard to stop the construction of controversial facilities that will almost surely do them no harm, but so few give driving a second thought.
Think about some of the other risks we’ve discussed. How do these factors play into the fear of flying? Or terrorism attacks? Or smoking? Which ones make the perceived risks higher? And which make them lower?
People become angry, worried, and suspicious when they believe a risk is being imposed on them. We may know that the risk isn’t real or at least that it’s very small. But that doesn’t matter. If people perceive the risk to be high, we have to communicate with them as if it were real. Later in the book, we’re going to explore traps that people fall into when trying to win people over, and how to avoid or escape those traps. It’s appropriate to preview one of them here: the trap of risk comparisons. In tough situations, communicators often try to compare the risk they’re imposing with something more familiar in an attempt to make people feel better. This can easily backfire, and we’ll discuss how to handle risk comparisons in Chapter 9.
Now that you understand how people assess risk and how that plays into the all-important equation of perception equals reality, it’s time to begin exploring at the strategies, skills, and techniques that will help you win over people when they’re angry, worried, and suspicious of everything you say. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the criteria by which people judge whether or not you’re trustworthy and credible, and you’ll begin to learn what you can do to make sure the answer is yes.