Beyond ‘facts’

I always open my science and risk communication classes with an exercise. I ask my students if they eat burgers. All but one or two will join the chorus: Yes!

“But,” I tell them, “Facts show that burgers are high in saturated fat, sugars, and sodium.”

“We know!” the class throws up its collective hands, “Our doctors, parents, and teachers all say the same thing.”

“The facts objectively say that burgers are bad,” I remind them, “You know the facts, so why do you keep eating burgers?”

The students’ responses vary. They don’t eat burgers all the time. They eat vegetables, too. Can’t they treat themselves once in a while for a job well done at school?

“So you’re not going to change your behavior because of the facts,” I deliver the death blow, “But you expect other people to make decisions based on them? What makes you so special?”

The students often react with a gasp, then another intake of air to show that they’re about to respond. Sometimes, the students try to extricate themselves from “the lay public” (i.e., “everybody else”) because they “know better.” They then fall deeper into the debate, and question why “knowing” is automatically “better,” and why “objectivity” is “good.”

Most of the time, the students pause as they realize that science and risk communication isn’t what they think it is. It’s not about conveying facts to a lay public so that people can make informed decisions. The field is bigger, deeper than that.

In another session, I ask the students to tell me how comfortable they would be if they had one inch of floodwater in their house. The students who are used to floods simply shrug; the students who live in affluent, less-flood-prone neighborhoods look at me in horror.

“Objective numbers!” I remind them, “One inch is the same for all.”

“One inch isn’t the same for all,” is the general reply, as the students realize that every numbers-laden message that insists on being “objective” is actually imposing a reality rather than recognizing the many realities that we face as we deal with hazards.

I owe the course’s insights to, among others, Brian Wynne’s landmark 1996 research “May the sheep safely graze.” Wynne’s work questions the value of “objective facts in the media” especially when those who advocate for such “facts” also believe that using numbers and standardized language automatically allows messages to be interpreted the same way by all audiences.

Newer communication research, as a whole, has largely abandoned the idea that there are singular messages that will be clearly understood and that the job of a communicator is to be “absolutely clear.” This can never happen when any message is meaning-laden, and when our many publics have complex lives and cultures.

For example: in communicating just the numbers to talk about nutrition, health communication also carries with it the culture of scientists, who use numbers to make decisions. Communicating just the numbers also tells the audience, “This is how we expect you to make your decision—not through emotions or experiences, but through this data.”

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Whether the communicator intends to share this last message is immaterial. This is why a fact-laden message will often lead to some people responding with, “Do I look stupid to you?” The response is shorthand for: Yes, I know the facts, but my life is more complex than facts. Why should I care about your facts when you don’t care knowing about my life first?

Last week’s flooding exposed, yet again, the complexity of flooding as a hazard. While scientists insisted that the information had been released early, the levels-and-standards-based warning messages do not represent the complexity of everyday life.

The messages don’t resonate with people who are forced to live in flood-prone areas because they have to be near work and can’t afford to live farther away, or those who have to go to work and use faulty public transportation because their bosses will dock their pay, or those who have nowhere else to go when the floodwaters rise.

Blaming people for throwing trash in the waterways? An empty scolding when people are forced to live in abject conditions in the city because their farmlands were bought out to build a subdivision; emptier still when the buyers of those farmlands don’t even get sanctioned by the government. A pathetic admonishment when people have low wages and can afford only to buy smaller packages of essential products; pathetic still when the producers of such products aren’t penalized for adding to the trash.

Someone online said that we shouldn’t make the floods a class issue.

But what else is it, when people are told that they’re uneducated and dirty by the same government that put them in that position? What else is it when people have to deal with flooding, while a vice president and her family have the luxury of leaving the country for a vacation?

Fact-based messages mean nothing and impose the class issue further when we penalize poverty but accord privilege to those who exacerbate it.