Communicating in the Presence of Rare Events
Low-likelihood, high-consequence (“rare”) events present special challenges for effective communication and decision making
Low-likelihood, high-consequence (“rare”) events present special challenges for effective communication. Pre-event plans are often well understood and accepted but are quickly found to be not applicable or unacceptable as the rare event unfolds. The greatest challenge is that human thinking quickly evolves from a normal state to a survival state.
The nature of rare events makes them unexpectedly and disproportionately impactful. Rare events can usually be identified within the seven categories of crisis: economic, informational, physical (key plants and facilities), human resources, reputational, psychopathic acts, and natural disasters. Rare events are usually marked by colloquial comments like “I have only experienced this once in my life” or “No one could have expected this to happen.” Our communication approach must be modified to meet the changed psychological state of our audience.
Three Indicators of a Rare Event
There are three potential indicators that an event may be a rare event.
The first indicator is simply by examining the frequency of an event’s past occurrence. From the interpretive perspective, we can say that an event with a low likelihood of occurrence is one that should be considered rare if indeed it were to occur. For many events, we can look backward and determine the frequency of a class of similar event’s past occurrence and feel reasonably sure that it will not happen with regularity in the future.
The second indicator of a rare event is the way humans treat a potential event once it has been identified. By definition, rare events are events that are infrequent in their occurrence. People who are in power often believe the event (a rare event) will never happen, and if it does, they have the control to deal with such events just like any other emergency. People in power have access to corrective resources. Biases such as over-confidence bias are also in play.
On the other hand, people who are most likely negatively impacted by a potential rare event will want protection. The need for protection usually plays out in the form of a demand for more legislative or regulatory protection against the event. Outside stakeholders also become involved if there is a sense of disproportional or unequal impact and join the lobbying efforts of those that are most likely affected but who are not in power.
If people in power are minimizing the potential impacts from an event’s occurrence and if the people who are potentially most affected by it place great emphasis on protection, you have a good candidate for classification as a rare event.
The third indicator of a rare event is ‘crisis mode’. Sometimes we simply hear the term. Sometimes we move into formal procedures. But when you see the shift from normal mode to crisis mode, and the corresponding need to move back to a normal state, then you have yet another indicator that you have a good candidate for classification as a rare event.
Perceptions of Risk
People tend to overweight unlikely events and overestimate the probability of their occurrence. This is especially true if the decision maker feels out of control and potentially directly or disproportionately impacted by the event. The more vivid the description of a rare event is made to be, the more it is either feared or desired (like winning the lottery). This is one reason that the availability bias is a factor when planning for potential rare events like tornados or terrorism if such events have recently occurred and were heavily publicized. It is also the reason why fear is a popular line of messaging in a political advertisement — the more negative expectations that are established in the public’s mind, the more a given rare event will be over-weighted and the likelihood of the potential occurrence will be overestimated.
Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Paul Slovic are three pioneers that have explored the issues surrounding the psychology of rare events. Excellent sources of more detailed reading include Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory, Kahneman’s Fourfold Pattern, and Slovic’s “Perspective of Risk Posed by Extreme Events” and “Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics, and Science: Surveying the Risk‐Assessment Battlefield.”
In Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory, humans tend to be influenced by their expectations and emotions and make decisions under uncertainty that may be mathematically illogical. Prospect Theory is an alternative for the traditional decision-making theory, Utility Theory, which maintains that the decision maker acts on objective differences by using criteria (importance) weighting that matches the likelihood of the criteria occurring. In Prospect Theory, decision making is based more on perceived upsides and downsides that absolute differences in value under Utility Theory.
Kahneman’s Fourfold Pattern relates specifically to the combination of low and high likelihood related to high and low consequences (gains or losses). If the future likelihood of the event is perceived to be small but the potential loss is high (a rare event), then a decision maker with a low risk tolerance may act to avoid the event at all costs. The simple example is a politician who is willing to spend a disproportionate amount of taxpayer money to avoid the potential impacts of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or a pandemic. However, if the same politician perceives that the consequences are overstated or that he or she can control the mitigation of future events, then fewer resources will be allocated to the potential rare event.
Another way to look at rare events is based on choices from experience. People have often been affected differently from past rare events and therefore assign different probabilities and weightings in making their decisions. The perceptions matter more than the actual probabilities.
Slovic and Weber state “Risk does not exist ‘out there’, independent of our minds and cultures, waiting to be measured.” Risk is more subjective than objective. It is a concept invented by human beings to help understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. According to Slovic and Weber, “Subjective judgments are made at every stage of the assessment process, from the initial structuring of a risk problem to deciding which endpoints or consequences to include in the analysis, identifying and estimating exposures, choosing dose-response relationships, and so on.”
Another foundational observation from Slovic’s classic paper “Trust, Emotion, Sex, Politics, and Science: Surveying the Risk‐Assessment Battlefield” is “Danger is real but risk is socially constructed.” Risk associated with rare events impacts different people in different ways. Communicating both before and after a rare event is shaped by personal experience and perceptions.
Communicating Before a Rare Event
Communicating before a rare event is different than communicating after the event. In the planning phases, communication is best viewed in the Perceptual-Interpretive Framework. The communication is most effective when the three classifications are all addressed and in some cases are tailored to focus on the natural alignment of the specific audience.
For example, an interpretive-symbolic audience of engineers and science may prefer more quantitative reasoning supported by Monte Carlo analysis. Analytically, the expectations related to more regularly occurring events would be modeled with continuous probability distributions. However, rare events should be analyzed using discrete probability distributions such as the Binomial or the Poisson. The Binomial is used to model whether a rare event will happen (a yes or no type approach). The Poisson is a limiting case of a Binomial distribution when the number of trials, n, gets large and p, the probability of success, is small.
The interpretive-symbolic thinker will care much about the types of analysis and the specifics of the Monte Carlo analysis in the planning phase. The perceptual thinkers (general public) will care little about these details and the interpretive-conceptual thinkers (layers and policy wonks) will care little as well. So goes communications in the planning phase of rare events.
Communicating in the Aftermath of a Rare Event
All bets are off once the rare event happens. Those who believed that they were in control and that they had adequately planned now understand that their assessment was inadequate. Those who were not in control of the planning efforts now see their fears being realized. And the degree of the realization will differ, either negatively or positively, from that which was originally expected.
The situation is compounded by the fact that a ‘rare event’ is not one event, but rather a chain of cascading events. In other words, events with unexpected impacts continue to unfold after the initial event. The chain of secondary events following the original disaster prolongs the impact of the disaster and introduces new risks. For example, structural damage to facilities incurred during an initial event leads to additional safety, environmental, and public health risks until a system is brought back to its pre-event state.
Therefore, the public may accept a plan for addressing a rare event before its occurrence but will reject it once they experience the actual event and cascading events in the aftermath. The need for communication is large during the recovery phase of a rare event because the deviation from expectations is large. Communication must be truthful, objective, and regular as the system which experiences a rare event bounces back to its pre-event state.
Risk and resiliency communication in the aftermath of a rare event must be dynamic and continuously updated. Although the potential for occurrence is lower in the case of rare events, pre-event communication planning is more important than for higher likelihood, more normally occurring risks.
Summary
Rare events present special challenges to effective communications. Pre-event plans are often well understood and accepted but are quickly found to be not applicable or unacceptable as the rare event unfolds. Our communication approach must be modified to meet the changed psychological state of our audience.
