Mental Models

Risk Communication

An important facet of crisis management is proactively preparing people with the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to respond to future crisis events. However, because crisis events (e.g., earthquakes, terrorist acts) are rare and make demands on people that fall outside the realm of normal experience, the mental models people bring to the process of interpreting, comprehending, and using information in such circumstances are ill suited both to anticipating the nature and implications of future crises and to interpreting and using the information about future crisis events. It therefore becomes important to understand the role mental models play in risk communication.

All groups involved in crisis management possess mental models that guide their understanding of crisis. However, the models of the scientists who conduct hazard analyses, the emergency managers who use hazard analyses to develop crisis management strategies, and the general public who receive risk information differ. This introduces considerable diversity in how information is interpreted and used—or not used. These differences contribute to explaining problems associated with getting people to act on risk information even when that information is accurate and, objectively, has important implications for people.

Scientists operate at the most objective level of analysis, when compared to emergency managers, the general public, and the media. However, even scientists working in the same discipline can use different theoretical paradigms to inform their [Page 613]work and interpret data. Scientists translate their findings about potential crisis events into probabilistic statements about the characteristics of future events (e.g., frequency, return period, duration, magnitude, intensity). These probabilistic statements generally contain some degree of subjective interpretation even though science is often very quantitative. Emergency management professionals interpret scientific data through professional, social, political, and economic lenses to estimate what could happen and to guide the construction of their mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery plans. They also communicate the outcomes of their deliberations to citizens both directly (e.g., via public education) and indirectly (e.g., via the media—which add their own interpretation). Members of the public, in turn, interpret information from scientific and civic sources (both directly and indirectly via media analysis) to determine whether they will act and to determine what they should do and when. Interpretation thus occurs at several levels.

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