Risky Talk: Recent Episodes
Ilan Goodman
How can we best communicate the risks and the evidence on the most pressing issues of the day – from genetics and nutrition, to climate change and immigration? David Spiegelhalter is joined by the world’s top experts to tackle urgent, practical challenges which affect us all.
From anti-vaxx propaganda to partisan political news and wild covid conspiracies, social media is awash with dodgy, even dangerous (mis)information. Who is pushing this content online, what are they trying to achieve and how can we stop it - without censoring free speech?
David is joined by a panel of info-warriors fighting for a less toxic and more truthful online ecosystem:
Chloe Colliver is a specialist in disinformation and extremism online. She’s the Head of Digital Policy and Strategy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Laura Edelson co-leads the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University which tracks the spread of misinformation via paid advertising and partisan news sources on platforms like Facebook.
Will Moy is the CEO of FullFact, the UK’s premier fact-checking charity. They call out politicians, journalists and misinformation going viral online, as well as working with Facebook as an independent fact checker.
Sander van der Linden is professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of misinformation, The Truth Vaccine.
They discuss;
3:50 Who is responsible for creating and promoting misinformation on social media?
10:55 What are the incentives driving social media platforms - and why do they often lead to algorithms which amplify misinformation?
18:49 How does FullFact’s partnership with with Facebook work?
25:19 Why is misinformation often so compelling and persuasive?
30:20 How can we distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy communications?
36:42 How should fact checking articles be constructed? Should they be boring?
41:05 What kind of regulation could help fix the situation? Should we ban certain kinds of content - or enshrine broad principles in law? How good is forthcoming UK and EU legislation?
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Excess deaths, vaccine harms and lockdowns: how should experts communicate about these complex, politically explosive issues? Michael Blastland quizzes statistical duo David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters on what they’ve learnt while writing a weekly column for the Observer. They explore the importance of context and comparison, the trustworthiness of sharing uncertainty and the power of a good analogy.
The graphic discussed in the episode - which compares the potential harms and benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine - can be seen here: https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/latest-data-mhra-blood-clots-associated-astra-zeneca-covid-19-vaccine/
David and Anthony’s columns are collected and expanded in their new book Covid By Numbers: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446/446585/covid-by-numbers/9780241547731.html
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Politicians and civil servants are hungry for data to help design effective policy. How do we best collect and communicate this evidence - to support good governance and public accountability? Joining David to explore interactive dashboards, misinformation and what’s not in the data are:
Professor John Aston - former chief scientific adviser to the Home Office, now Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life
Dr Laura Gilbert - Chief Data Analyst at No. 10 Downing St
Professor Diane Coyle CBE - Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Statistics need care and context - but journalists are under pressure to craft engaging stories. Is there a way of doing both?
Joining David to explore how you turn data into a clear and compelling story are:
Caelainn Barr - Data Projects Editor at The Guardian
Tom Chivers - Science Editor at UnHerd and the author of How To Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)
Paul Milner - Programmes Director at National Numeracy
Check out Tom’s Statistical Style Guide at howtoreadnumbers.com and sign up to the campaign!
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Communicating about vaccines has never been higher stakes. How do we do it well?
Joining David to explore the importance of scientific rigour, listening and building relationships are:
Professor Heidi Larson - Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project and the author of Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start — and Why They Don’t Go Away.
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and creator of the Vaccine Knowledge Project.
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Chemical spills, food scares, terrorist attacks and, of course, pandemics: How can we help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication - even while evidence is scant and uncertainty predominates?
Joining David to share their experience from the frontlines are:
Professor Brooke Rogers OBE - Behavioural scientist at KCL, and SAGE participant advising the UK government on the coronavirus measures and risks to national security.
Professor Lord John Krebs - former head of the Food Standards Agency where he dealt with BSE in sheep, dioxins and a series of food scares.
A full transcript is available here.
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Chemical spills, food scares, terrorist attacks and, of course, pandemics: How can we help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication - even when evidence is scant and uncertainty predominates?
Joining David to share their experience from the frontlines are:
Professor Brooke Rogers OBE - Behavioural scientist at KCL, and SAGE participant advising government on the coronavirus measures and risks to national security
Professor Lord John Krebs - former head of the Food Standards Agency where he dealt with BSE in sheep, dioxins and a series of food scares.
David Spiegelhalter:
When confronted with a sudden crisis, a terrorist attack, a chemical spill, a food scare, or indeed an outbreak of a new infectious disease, good communication is crucial to an effective response. Of course we're still navigating our way through the coronavirus pandemic so we've all been on the receiving end of crisis communications quite recently, I will certainly be covering that. But we'll also be considering crisis communications more broadly, trying to pull out principles of best practice that can be applied across very different scenarios. How can governments and other organizations help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication?
David Spiegelhalter:
My guests today both have extensive experience in a range of different crisis situations. Prof. Brooke Rogers, OBE, is a social psychologist whose work focuses on events like chemical, biological, and nuclear accidents or attacks. She advises the UK government on risks to national security and public health and she's currently advising them on the public response to coronavirus measures. Brooke, welcome to Risky Talk.
Brooke Rogers:
Thank you, David.
David Spiegelhalter:
Prof. Lord John Krebs originally made his name as a zoologist, but in the year 2002 he became the first chairman of the newly created Food Standards Agency, where he was on the frontline dealing with risks to food safety, including mad cow disease. Welcome, John.
John Krebs:
Hello, David. Good to be here.
David Spiegelhalter:
How great to have you both with us. Brooke, I'm going to come to you first to get a sense of the work you do. You're a member of several groups which advise the UK government on issues of national security and public health. Can you explain what kind of situations you plan for and what kind of advice you provide?
Brooke Rogers:
I have to frame the role that I hold across several different organizations as an independent academic role, they're not paid roles. And I am there to challenge, to question, to try to generate or provide evidence when needed, so all of the comments that I'll make today are very much in my independent academic role from Kings College, London, I not speak on behalf of government. In response to your question, we tend to work with the National Risk Register, which is the public-facing view of the risk landscape that we're considering for the UK.
Brooke Rogers:
And we very much look across the range of events from fluvial flooding, for example, or chemical releases, terrorist attacks. We would look at pandemic influenza and other types of pandemics, a heat wave, intense cold, drought. We look across the board and say, "Where can we place this in terms of likelihood or plausibility and impact on the public?" And try to put that into a framework that then can enable the experts advising government to provide advice for the government to make decisions about the advice that they then cascade down to the local level.
David Spiegelhalter:
Where does your experience as a psychologist come into this?
Brooke Rogers:
I would say that one of the best examples would be through the Behavioral Science experts in the Cabinet Office. And we're a motley crew of behavioral scientists and we look at the risks scenarios that are being used for each risk and threat. And we look at the language that they're using, the way in which they're framing members of the public, the assumptions that they're making about public behavior and we bring evidence to bear on those conversations. Sometimes we challenge the language and we, I would say, have seen quite a change in the way in which they're understanding public reactions. And we've also challenged the measures that they're using and have provided evidence and sent papers up to the government chief scientific advisor and made a case for changing the measurements they were using to understand the impact on the public.
David Spiegelhalter:
Oh, that is so much for covering there. But let's look at actual SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. I was on it back in the days of volcanic ash for heaven sakes, and of course now it's got a lot of work to do, never had such prominence. What's your role?
Brooke Rogers:
SAGE is not really a membership group, I would say that we're participants and that is underpinned by several other groups. We have SPI-B which is more of the behavioral science approach, we have SPI-M which is our modeling group and we have NERVTAG, which is looking more at the epidemiology and so on. And we bring those lenses together and each group also has many subgroups that work underneath it so there's a layering effect, we can target the questions that we're being asked to consider.
Brooke Rogers:
And quite often those questions can be broad. We've been working with them to make them a little bit more focused as we move along and in many cases we will suggest where we'll look for the evidence if it exists. Sometimes it won't be directly around pandemic response, we'll have to look at other types of infectious disease and say, "It looks like this will happen." And other times we're very much suggesting principles that should be applied for this communication for understanding behavior moving forward.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay. I think it's worth just emphasizing from what you said that the job of SAGE is not to tell the government what to do, it's to provide evidence and projections to help them make decisions. Okay, John, you had an exciting time when you're at the Food Standards Agency, what kinds of things did you have to respond to in your communications?
John Krebs:
Well, David, I'd divide them into three categories. There are risks that were identified where we knew there was a risk, probably very small and something where you've got to tell people that could be a risk but we're not asking you to do anything different. And a classic example of that was acrylamide. So in about 2001, 2002, some Swedish scientists discovered that if you cook certain kinds of food, particularly starch-containing foods at a high temperature, like making chips or French fries, then you create this chemical called acrylamide which can be carcinogenic. So when you discover that do you say to people, "Stop eating chips?" Do you say to people, "Cook your chips to low temperature so they're not nice and crisp and possibly burn yourself on the fat while you're measuring the temperature?" Or do you say, "This is not a new risk, we think it's very small. Be aware of it but carry on doing what you were doing before."
John Krebs:
The second kind of risk is one which is a public perception of risk but doesn't actually exist scientifically. And the case where I found that most difficult was GMOs. In the late '90s and early noughties, there was a huge campaign by the green groups against GMOs and many people became fearful that GMOs were bad for their health. And I discovered it's not enough to say the science says that the GMOs that you may be exposed to are completely safe because it's an emotional issue not a scientific issue. And then the third kind of situation was we simply don't know.
John Krebs:
And the classic example for me was BSE in sheep. We knew that mad cow disease was in cattle but we didn't know whether or not mad cow disease had also infected sheep. And the government of the time was very nervous about us even mentioning that. But I took the view, it's better to treat people as adults and say, "Look, there could be this risk." And we thought a lot about how we'd express this idea of there might be a risk but we don't know, and then what we did there was to say, "There could be a risk, we simply don't know at the moment. We're not advising you to stop eating lamb, but if you want to that's up to you, but we are on the case and we're doing research to find out the answer and we will get back to you very soon."
John Krebs:
That in a way he was trying to treat the population as an adult group who would understand risk and uncertainty. That in itself was a risky approach but I think it worked. The best answer is, "We simply don't know but we're onto the case." Sometimes you've got to recognize that people's perception of risk diverges from the pure science, GMOs, and sometimes you're communicating, "There could be a risk. It's small but we don't necessarily want you to do anything different about it."
David Spiegelhalter:
Wow. John, you covered a lot of stuff there and we'll come back to some of it-
John Krebs:
I'm sorry I-
David Spiegelhalter:
No, no, that's fine. The acrylamide as well... I think you know way after you left I think the Food Standards Agency had a rather ill-judged campaign-
John Krebs:
Toast-gate, I think it's called-
David Spiegelhalter:
Yeah, yeah, the killer toast, which was really, I think taking the wrong approach-
John Krebs:
Absolutely.
David Spiegelhalter:
... To dealing with these risks. Okay, so one of the things we ask everybody in our podcast is to step back a bit. Why are you doing this in the first place? What is your actual aims in doing this? What's it trying to achieve? And I think in the Winton Center we go on about, we're trying to inform rather than persuade. And I'm interested with both of you of where in that spectrum you operate. Brooke, what are you trying to do in your work?
Brooke Rogers:
I would say that my career, my life has really been about enhancing opportunities for informed decision-making. And it was really as quite a young academic when I started attending... I attended something called a sand pit, and I was still a postdoc and I had the chance to meet practitioners, government practitioners I would have never met before, I hadn't the confidence to meet before. And they locked us in a hotel with people from different disciplines. And we learned about how the challenges that these organizations had and the way in which they were thinking about them.
Brooke Rogers:
And I felt that quite often the solutions were being drawn primarily from the physical sciences with very little thought about how publics or how people who use those tools would think about them or respond to them. And I also felt that when the public we're considered that Hollywood-esque assumptions were being made about their behavior, their appetite for risk, their perceptions of risk. And so I thought, how can we generate evidence from between members of the public, which is where we started with our work, practitioners more on the frontline and the policy makers. It's just trying to bring more reality to those plans and policies that are being made and the hope that they will trickle down into practice and into the way in which we engage with members of the public and let them engage with our processes as well.
David Spiegelhalter:
John, Brooke mentioned very strongly that she was interested in informing people so they could make better decisions. How does that fit in with your work at the FSA?
John Krebs:
Well, the FSA, our watch word was we put the interests of the consumer first. And supposing a problem crops up with food, you've got a range of actions you could take. You could ban it, get it removed from the supermarket shelves, you could give people warning, say, "This is there but it's potentially dangerous." Or you could try to inform people as Brooke was talking about and enable them to make informed choices. I think my objective in communicating risk and uncertainty where we weren't banning, we weren't advising people not to eat something, was to say, "Here is the information we've got, use it in your own way. This is our advice." Our advice might be, "Carry on as normal or if you're worried about it shift to eating something slightly different."
John Krebs:
But really, I agree with Brooke when she said what's key in this is transparency. Because I think transparency, complete honesty is one of the pathways to building trust, because in the end it's all about do people trust you? Do they think this guy's a shyster? He's just pulling the wool over our eyes or is he somebody who tells it straight? And telling it straight over and over again is one of the ways to help to build that trust.
David Spiegelhalter:
What about in the virus particularly the period we've gone through, or even going through now where actually there is quite a lot of guidance, instructions, and even laws that are there, to measures to control people's behavior in extent. Brooke, how do you feel the responsibility that you need to provide the evidence to back up those instructions?
Brooke Rogers:
Certainly. And it's been interesting from the SAGE point of view because the way in which they operated in the past it's always been very rapid. Let's say for Ebola, I think they only had four meetings and so by the time the response was over the information was released but there wasn't a huge public appetite for it and this was part of a much, much larger government communication system. And I would say that all of us are very, very keen on transparency. And it was a bit of a shock but when we saw how long this engagement would carry on for all of us transparency is key, and I believe very strongly that Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty have been advocating for that.
Brooke Rogers:
It took a little bit of time behind the scenes to change that structure to enable it but our desire is to have it as real time release of information as close to real time as we can and that redaction would be the exception, if it ever needed to happen it should be because of security implications. I think that science should be a conversation between scientists but also I'm so desperate, I love opening science up to the public. I go into schools and things like that so it should be a conversation with the public as well.
Brooke Rogers:
And when decisions are made, and we, we do not make the decisions the decisions are political, they have to balance quite a few things so we are one piece of information going in. I do think for any decision across the board it's important to recognize the information that you're drawing upon and to give the rationale for the direction that you're moving in. Because as the science brings in new information we need to be able to consider that for any event and to adapt our response in light of new evidence. So you can have that conversation and say, "We suggested this. We were going with this, new information has come in and therefore we are now changing our advice and these are the implications for you in your daily life."
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay. If you are telling people to do things for transparency you do need to provide a reason for that and not just an authoritarian diktat. John, have in your work, were you in a situation where you were really telling people, you wanted to tell people to do things?
John Krebs:
Most of the time if we actually had such a clear view that something was unacceptable, and I gave you an example of that, was a red paint dye called Sudan 1-
David Spiegelhalter:
Oh, yeah.
John Krebs:
You remember that that was added to paprika pepper imported from Southeast Asia, because the brighter the pepper the better its market value. When we discovered that this carcinogenic paint dye had been added to paprika we simply said all the products got to come off the shelves. And I can remember at the beginning I was told, "Well, this will be about 50 products." And then an hour later, "Actually when we said 50 it may be 500." And the thing grew and grew, but we felt we had no option. The way I played that was in my mind, supposing we said to people, "Carry on. It's okay that the pizza sauce you were buying or other products contain this carcinogenic red dye but we think it's okay," that would not have played well.
John Krebs:
There's a case where the instruction was from us to the industry, "Get rid of this product straight away." But in the more nuanced cases... I'll give you another example. During them foot and mouth crisis when there were all these dreadful funeral pyres of sheep and cattle being burned all around the country, it transpired that the dioxins that were coming out of the funeral pyres might be landing on the grass and from the grass into the cattle, from the cattle into the milk, from the milk into butter and yogurt and so on. Should we tell people to stop eating butter and yogurt, to stop drinking milk? Or do we say, "There's this a possible risk we don't really know the answers yet, carry on as normal. If you're worried about it drink low-fat milk because dioxins are fat soluble. If you drink low-fat milk you reduce the risk and we'll tell you when we find out the answer." And the answer was a few weeks later, it wasn't actually getting into the milk for some reason.
John Krebs:
I think there are different examples of telling people not necessarily strictly what you should and shouldn't do but giving them clear advice and options. And in cases where we had no alternative but to simply cause something to be taken off the supermarket shelves, that's how we handled it. But again, I totally agree with Brooke that openness and transparency is an absolutely essential part of all of this.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay. We've had a strong message so far about openness and transparency. Now let's move on to talk about listening. Brooke, you mentioned before the importance of engaging with the audiences, how do you go about doing that?
Brooke Rogers:
Well, I think that this is where academics and scientists can come in really handy and were very useful with this. Our work, the work I've done in collaboration with several colleagues in the past is focused on the importance of co-production. Even in security spaces we've published around this, looking at protecting crowded places. And I think that for every risk or threat we're considering that there is an opportunity for co-production to take place.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay. Just to clarify, co-production means coming up with guidance that's being put together by experts but working with members of the public.
Brooke Rogers:
Now, when you say that to a government organization who's trying to respond very rapidly to a risk or threat that has a great deal of uncertainty, sometimes I worry that they shut down and I think we just have to get the job done, we just have to give guidance immediately. But I would argue that their guidance will be more effective if they build in that co-production. And my colleagues and I have done quite a bit of thinking around how to enable that in the usual way that we do this with our longer-term research projects but also in real time during an emergency. And I think that right now during this extreme event, during the pandemic and also in the future, we need to really get them used to thinking about and building co-production into the policies and guidance that they're creating.
David Spiegelhalter:
Oh, that's great. Yep, a message I think we all agree with. But I've got to ask you one thing, the crosses the question you might be asked by journalists, "Do people panic?"
Brooke Rogers:
The main message is that panic is rare even when there's an extreme event. And there are studies that show that actually when people should be taking something very, very seriously, they overestimate their ability to get out of it and possibly don't realize the danger and don't engage in the protective behaviors so that threat perception isn't activated. So yes, panic is real but I think to always assume panic means that you put yourself on a different footing in terms of the communication that you share, if any, and the way in which you frame it and then in the way in which you talk about risks and threats.
Brooke Rogers:
And instead we would argue in the evidence that we generate with our view that our public responses need to be understood across a range of behavioral responses from under-response to over-response and everything in between. I'm very keen on understanding the sustainability of those changes in behavior that we see as well when we encourage them or advise them how long can that last. We don't have a lot of evidence around that. So yes, panic is real, it's incredibly rare, we need to understand behavioral response across a scale of range of behaviors and to prepare for that range of behaviors to take place.
Speaker 4:
I really like the idea of not just categorizing everybody in one group and realizing people do respond to very differently. We've heard from Brooke about the importance of listening to the audiences. In your work, how did you get that feedback? How did you see whether your messages had been successful?
John Krebs:
Well, first of all it's how do you construct the message? And I'd give you one example. When we were wanting to talk about the possibility of BSE in sheep, we sat around in the office and we said, "Well, actually, what this is, it's a theoretical risk. And we tested that out on focus groups. Do you know what theoretical risk means? And no one had a clue. They thought it was something that people in white lab coats did in laboratories.
John Krebs:
First thing was get the vocabulary, get the lexicon, right? Having done that and produced our message we did extensive surveys using MORI or other opinion pollers, A, did you hear the message? B, did you understand what it meant? And C, did you respond to it? With the case of BSE in sheep it turned out that about 65% of the population knew that something had been said about BSE in sheep which is quite remarkable actually. They didn't know who said it but that doesn't matter, they knew something had been said.
John Krebs:
And when we asked people whether they changed their eating habits or results, most people said, "No," a few people were eating less lamb, and a few people are eating more lamb, which is quite interesting. That's how we both constructed the message with feedback from the users and we then surveyed what the message had conveyed and how people responded to it so we could learn a continuous learning experience.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay, John, I mean, you've already said how you dealt with the possibility of BEC in sheep. I mean, actually I quote your advice as a set of bullet points. Can you again summarize for the listener, if you had to just bash it out to an audience, how would you deal with some potentially really threatening situation like that? What are the sort of steps you'd go through?
John Krebs:
Well, I think the steps are first of all, to try and describe in the simplest possible terms, what the risk is, what we know about it. In the case of BSE in sheep the message was it's possible that BSE has got into sheep, we simply don't know, but then to say what you're doing about it. So, "We are on the case, we're trying to find a solution we'll get back to you very soon," and also at the same time to give people some clear guidance. Because simply shrugging your shoulders and saying, "I haven't got a clue, gov," isn't terribly helpful. You're saying, "We don't know, we don't think it's a problem but we're working it out. In the meantime our advice to you is this." I think it's those three elements, being honest about uncertainty, being clear that you're on the case trying to work out what the problem is and what the answer is and to give people choices but with some guidance in the meantime.
David Spiegelhalter:
Right. Now, let's talk about the coronavirus pandemic. Brooke, you've been in the thick of things advising the government and monitoring the public response to the crisis. Can I ask, what's played out as you might've expected and what's been a surprise to you?
Brooke Rogers:
I tend to look for positives even when we're murking through all of the negative impacts if we're thinking about coronavirus. And we cannot understand all of those negative impacts without also understanding that we're seeing changes in terms of prosocial behaviors and helping behaviors. And we have a project underway in that area right now so data is being collected, looking at the scale of prosocial helping behaviors, looking at the way in which communities have come together.
Brooke Rogers:
You're seeing the WhatsApp groups, you're seeing that the different services can't even cope with the number of volunteers that they're receiving. And that there will be certain changes to life that can have some positive benefits for people. How long they will last, I don't know, whether or not these connections that people are building with their communities that hopefully will make them stronger than ever will last beyond the pandemic, we don't know, we're asking those questions.
David Spiegelhalter:
Were you surprised by the amount of prosocial behavior?
Brooke Rogers:
In terms of the scale of the prosocial behaviors, yes, I'm surprised, pleasantly surprised. But we haven't really been able to consider the scale, the full scale of a pandemic before we knew it would be bad but we didn't think about this across the entire nation, across the world. In terms of level of adherence that has been really, really interesting as well. I would say that in spite of the media framings and the pictures and the angles that they use with people crowding into spaces, the media rhetoric, the media story wants to be about basically public bashing saying, "Oh, look at all these people misbehaving." But the data shows that a large, large, the majority of people were actually following the advice and doing their best to protect themselves and other people.
David Spiegelhalter:
Again, that's the impression I get and I get so angry at these zoom images of people on beaches when they're actually properly distanced. Again, were you surprised I think by people and the distancing and the shielding and things like that, how much people embraced that apparently willingly?
Brooke Rogers:
Perhaps that's surprised than people who don't work in this field or think about this often. I've always been an advocate of the ability of members of the public and the willingness of members of the public to actually listen to information and engage in protective behaviors, protective for themselves and protective for others as well. Again, it's a scale of it's being able to work on the scale and think about the scale and capture data on the scale that is making it more of a surprise to me. But I did expect to see that members of the public would behave in a very rational way.
Brooke Rogers:
Now we need to think about the length of time that we are asking to them behave. And there's been a lot of finger-pointing, et cetera, about behavioral fatigue from supposedly behavioral scientists. And that did not come from the work of SPI-B but I do think that while we would say it didn't come from us that data needs to be collected on that, that we need to explore that concept and see if evidence can be provided in order to inform that conversation.
David Spiegelhalter:
Now, John, you've retired from working with the government now so you're in a perfect situation to say how you think they've done in terms of their communications through this crisis. Now, I've got to say I was watching Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer at the start of this and he seemed to be going through the checklist you gave earlier. I thought it was rather good. I thought, "Oh, he's been listening to John same as I do."
John Krebs:
I'm sorry.
David Spiegelhalter:
How do you feel it's being dealt with in general?
John Krebs:
I always go back to Bob May's guidelines for scientific advice and policymaking, and he had a number of points but the three points that I always remember were openness and transparency, acknowledging uncertainty and incorporating the wide range of views. Scientists don't agree, that's just a fact of life. We don't all sit there and say, "Yes, we agree absolutely." There are scientists that have different views about the nature of the disease, how it should be handled. And if you asked me to score on a scale of one to 10, I wouldn't give them a 10, I think it's changed over time but I would give them somewhere around seven to eight.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay. Now, here's the tricky bit because I think maybe you feel the same I do, it seems to have changed over time. So it seems to be more political involvement as what was being said at the briefings and so on. Let's just get there some final words on, rather than communicating directly to the public which is what we've been talking about, which is it's got a clear idea about that. What about including the politicians in this discourse, what is your advice on that?
John Krebs:
I think you've got to tell it straight. As Brooke said, ultimately the politicians are paid to make the decisions. And the prime minister actually has said that last week when he was announcing further release from lockdown measures. He was saying... Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were saying, actually this could be risky, it could be dangerous. Johnson quite correctly said, "Well, I'm a politician I'm paid to make these decisions, the scientists are one form of input." I think with the politicians one's got to be A, clear about what the science says and B, not get sucked into supporting a political decision that doesn't have a scientific backing.
John Krebs:
It's fine to say, "Well, you made the decision because you're worried about unemployment in the catering sector, or you're worried about the Daily Mail headlines, that's your problem. My problem is to tell you what the scientist is saying." And I think sometimes there'd be occasions when Patrick and Chris have been standing next to the politicians. The politicians have said things that go beyond the science and I would have wanted had I been there to grab the microphone and say, "Hang on a minute, this is your political view but it's not the scientific view. Thank you very much, minister."
David Spiegelhalter:
Do you think that's an argument for actually having really quite separate communications from the scientific community?
John Krebs:
It's a real difficult one that, David, because Chris and Patrick were pleased to be standing there with the prime minister at the beginning and it showed that they were right in there with Number 10, but it carried with it the risk that they could be sucked in supporting political decisions. And if you asked me what I would have done, I can't honestly say whether they've done it differently other than hoping that I would have the guts when these politicians misrepresent the science or went beyond it, that I could just say, "Hang on a minute," to the press conference, "This is not what the science is telling us this is what the politicians are telling us." But it's a really difficult one and I wouldn't want to dis what Chris and Patrick have done because I think they've been very courageous in a very difficult situation.
David Spiegelhalter:
Okay, Brooke, can I turn to you on this? You're still working with the government on this stuff at the moment so I'm not going to ask you to evaluate their performance. But can you say something about how that relationship has gone over the crisis, this sort of pipeline between the scientific advisors and the policy makers?
Brooke Rogers:
We are learning about how to frame our information in terms of length of reports, in terms of fronting up that guidance. I mean, if you look at the SAGE minutes or the SPI-B and it's et cetera, were quite punchy sometimes in terms of really, really highlighting where we're concerned. We work very, very collaboratively and I think that most of us actually feel that that is only some of the most effective work. When we bring we break down those barriers and we create task and finish groups between, let's say the modelers and the behavioral scientists so that we can understand one another.
Brooke Rogers:
In terms of managing that pipeline between science and the policy makers, I think that you just have to accept that you are there to advise. The advice will be hopefully listened to but they're also taking advice from many other areas and making the decisions, the politically-based decisions on that. If they're publishing our work it's my hope that people will look at those minutes, look at those notes and look at those reports and they'll see what we're really saying and understand that decisions are being made based on other things. So it can be, I guess people would say very frustrating if you put your heart and soul into developing some advice and then you're not always sure where it's going, who it's going to.
Brooke Rogers:
We do know that other departments are looking at the advice and it is being picked up along the way, but it's balancing it with the information that the politicians are actually receiving from many different groups, that's some of that difficult balance. So I'm there, I'd say for the long game, really trying to work from the inside to bring evidence to bear, to challenge the processes where they don't work to reinforce the processes where they do, and to just ensure that the next time we have an event to deal with. That the things that we have learned are kept in place to enable that conversation and that pipeline between science and policy to be maintained.
David Spiegelhalter:
Oh, well, that's what I'd like to finish off with. You specialize in a wide range of catastrophes and disasters, which of course haven't happened yet, this is a crisis that we're in the middle of. What is going to be the impact of this? Do you think, or what do you hope will be the impact of this in terms of briefly planning for the inevitable further future catastrophe?
Brooke Rogers:
I think that this is an opportunity dare I say, to look at the processes, to look at that relationship between science and policy making. To look at the way in which information and data is shared within departments, between departments and what is done with the information that we're bringing and how does that cascade out through the rest of government and how does it make its way up out to the politicians and the policy makers. I think that we are basically rewriting that system and reinforcing, creating a new system. While some of us go and have a little break someday from the very, very full on engagement, that the next event and the continuation of this event will just mean that we're more effective, that we're more efficient and that we are able to be transparent.
David Spiegelhalter:
Well, that's a nicely optimistic message to draw things to a close. Thank you so much, Brooke and John, it's been a great conversation. I think we've pulled out some valuable lessons about the importance of transparency to build trust, engaging with the public, co-production of guidance and about navigating the tricky relationship between science and politics. It's time say a deep thank you to my guests, Prof. Brooke Rogers and Lord John Krebs, and say goodbye from me and the Risky Talk team.
The public appetite for scientific evidence during the coronavirus pandemic has been voracious. But communicating it well is a fiendish challenge. How can governments give clear advice while also acknowledging uncertainty? How can scientists debate complex evidence while supporting strong interventions? And how can the media scrutinise public health measures without undermining them?
Joining David to navigate the principles and pitfalls of communicating evidence in a pandemic are:
- Victoria Macdonald, Health and Social Care Editor for C4 News
- Tracey Brown OBE, Director of Sense About Science
- Professor Christina Pagel, Operational Research at UCL and member of Independent SAGE
Access the full transcript here.
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
The public appetite for scientific evidence during the pandemic has been voracious. But communicating it well is a fiendish balancing act. How can governments give clear advice while also acknowledging uncertainty? How can scientists debate complex evidence while supporting strong interventions? And how can the media scrutinise public health measures without undermining them?
Joining David to navigate the principles and pitfalls of communicating evidence in a pandemic are:
Victoria Macdonald, Health and Social Care Editor for C4 News
Tracey Brown OBE, Director of Sense About Science
Professor Christina Pagel, Operational Research at UCL and member of Independent SAGE
David:
Communicating science and evidence in a public health crisis like the current pandemic raises a huge number of really tricky ethical issues. We want the media to share crucial public health guidance, while also criticising that same guidance where necessary and holding the policymakers to account. Can we have it both ways?
And what about governments - they want to communicate clear and simple health advice - but how much should they acknowledge the sometimes complex and uncertain evidence behind some of that advice?
And finally for scientists and academics: should they publicly challenge evidence, or does that risk undermining measures intended to keep us safe?
It’s a minefield, as many of us have been discovering, and everyone has been having to find their own way through. But what can we learn from the last 6 months to help us go forward into the next 6, and other public health crises to come?
I've got a brilliant panel of guests with me who've all been in the thick of things in different ways. Victoria McDonald is the Health and Social Care Editor for Channel 4 news and she's been reporting on the crisis from the beginning – and is recording from the rather noisy news desk at Channel 4! Victoria. Welcome to risky talk.
Victoria: Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
David: Tracey Brown OBE is the director of Sense about Science an organization which campaigns for transparency in policy making. Welcome Tracy.
Tracey: Hello,
David: And finally Christina Pagel is the professor of operational research at University College London, and a member of Independent Sage a rebel group of scientists offering evidence based policy advice to the government, and whoever else wants to listen, as an alternative to the official ‘Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’ or SAGE which we’ve heard a lot about here in the UK. welcome Christina.
Christina: Thank you. I'm not sure we're rebels, but thank you…!
David: So each of you is an expert in a different part of the communication process with a range of different audiences. So Christina, let's start with you. You're a scientist communicating science to policymakers as well as the public. Can you tell me a bit about your role with Independent Sage: why it was set up and how you see the scientists’ role in communication during a public health crisis like this?
Christina: Sure. I think with Independent SAGE, it was set up right at the end of April at a time when we didn't know SAGE membership, there weren't any SAGE minutes and it became increasingly impossible to tell when the government said we're following the science to assess that, were they following the science? And it felt like they'd moved by that stage from the kind of very clear, stay home message, to stay alert, which was a lot vaguer. And so the kind of thing was set up to try and communicate what we knew about COVID, to have a conversation with the public about policy options over the coming months, but also to kind of provide just advice and what we thought could be ways forward in the pandemic. And it was always intended to be kind of constructive looking forward and not critical looking backward.
And my role, I'm guessing I was asked on because I do a lot of mathematical modelling in healthcare, although I'm not an epidemiologist, but my role has become a lot more about the communication side. So for instance, since the government stopped doing its daily press briefings, we started a weekly briefing on Friday where we kind of just go through the latest government figures and just explain them. And I take that really seriously. I think it's really important that I get it right, but also show where we don't know things, where data is missing, as well as what data there is and what it's showing.
David: So how much do you think your role has changed to communicating directly to the public rather than giving government advice?
Christina: So when we first started, we didn't really know exactly where it was going to go. And it just seemed that as we started, the more we carried on the less the government was doing in terms of communication and the more confusing things got. You had the Dominic Cummings thing, which muddied the waters in terms of communication. Then you had lots of openings, you had schools, shops, bars, and now gyms, face coverings, where there's been a lot of really confusing messaging.
And so what we've been really trying to do is say, well, this is the evidence that we know about COVID. And as far as possible, we try and use SAGE minutes that have now been published to support that evidence. And this is what it might mean, and these are the risks, and these have potential benefits. And we've started these public consultations on YouTube where members of the public can come in, they ask questions, we take questions from Twitter, we respond. I think actually that's been quite unique and it seems to have created, we've got quite a following now, people say, "We really find it very useful, the kind of explanations you're giving."
David: So you're exploring communication as a two way process?
Christina: Yeah.
David: So I'd like to come back later to how you dealt with the media. I'd like to move over to Tracey. So your organisation Sense about Science has been advising government on better communication of its scientific reasoning and decision making process. How do you think the government, what do you think they should be doing in this context about telling the public about why they're doing what they're doing?
Tracey: I think one of the biggest challenges here is the way that government internalizes the public that it's talking to. What Sense about Science does is we make the public interest case for sound science and evidence. So that's the perspective that we're looking at this from. And the challenge we have is that the public that is internalized by government, particularly when you have such a huge centralization of communications as you have in managing the pandemic is one that you sell a message to. So it's not one that is interested in the evidence. But there is a public that's kind of missing from government communication, which is the one that I think encapsulates most of us at the moment, are trying to reckon our way through what does this mean for me? There are many different kinds of risk messages that are coming across, what we're seeing around us, what our common sense might tell us, and so on.
"..the public that is internalized by government is one that you sell a message to. So it's not one that is interested in the evidence. But that public is missing from government communication, which is the one that I think encapsulates most of us at the moment."
And that's something that I think is missing. So my concern is that that's got worse. What started out very much with a tone of levelling with people that we really don't have the facts at our fingertips, we're going to find our way forward. The best we can say at the moment is we're getting the best advice and this is from whom. And then from there, what you've seen is this kind of concentration of control and messaging in a way that just does not open up the discussion in a way that people need in much more nuanced way.
David: I know that Sense about Science has always had their Ask for Evidence campaign, way before this crisis, of in a sense encouraging the public to demand the reasons for what's being recommended for them or what they're being instructed to do.
Tracey: Yeah. And that's been a very good thing. But I mean, who do you ask? That's been very difficult, actually. There were no public-facing government platforms for sharing information in a way that would actually respond to people's questions, no interaction. The daily press briefings was all there was, and I don't think they were very satisfactory for journalists, nevermind the rest of the public. So now I think Parliament has got its act together, that's at least a good thing. There are MPs now raising those questions through the floor of the house, and you've also got the committees becoming very active.
David: Very interesting. Now I'd like to come over to Victoria now, as a news and health journalist, you're often communicating science to the public acting as this intermediary between you all these different communicators and their audiences. How do you see yourself in this role? You've got the government, you've got the scientists, you've got the public. What is your role when it comes to encouraging the flow of information between all of these?
Victoria: I saw my role at the beginning as, obviously, trying to weave my way through this barrage of information. And I also saw my role as needing to be pretty calm and measured, especially in the beginning when people were frightened and trying to distinguish between the scary stuff that was coming out and the more practical briefings that we were getting right at the very beginning. It was enormously helpful. And you had that feeling that even if they couldn't answer your question, it was because they probably didn't know the answer rather than that they were holding things back from you. Of course, that has changed as the pandemic has gone on and our need for transparency has become even greater. The tension between the politics and the scientists has become ever greater. We have had to go to different sources like independent SAGE or the Science Media Centre, and to speak to the scientists themselves rather than trying to take the government interpretation of the science. The messaging has been very difficult and as the person that has meant to convey that messaging it has sometimes been an absolute nightmare.
David: I think this is extraordinarily important. All of you have raised the issue of listening to the audience, getting feedback, understanding their concerns, but also the difficulty of actually doing this in practice. And maybe it hasn't actually improved as the crisis has gone on. Now, this podcast is called Risky Talk, so let's talk about the communication of risks. This is incredibly difficult, of course, because we're talking about people dying and thinking about these health risks can be very frightening. And communicating the real size of these risks is difficult. On the one hand, you don't want people to overestimate it and be over anxious, and on the other you don't want people to be careless. Now, Tracey, you've recently co-signed a letter accusing the UK government of failing to be clear about the risks. How do you think the risks should be communicated by governments?
Tracey: Well, I think there are three things. One is that quite simply there is a reluctance clearly to talk about things that are low risk or lower risk. And obviously there's always that defensiveness of being afraid that you might say something that then turns out not to be quite that true and all that kind of thing. And being accused of being accused of underplaying a risk feels to politicians always far worse than being accused of overplaying it. So I think that's kind of the modus operandi of government at the moment is to behave that way. The problem of course, is that people's real lived experience isn't that, it is that it's much older people who are most at risk.
There is a danger that if you're very generalized and not telling younger groups that they're far less at risk of having serious disease and dying, then that you flatten out that risk and then perhaps people aren't taking as seriously the quite extreme threat. So it's a much older group, particularly those with underlying conditions. So I think that's the first thing, is just to be much more clear and differentiated. I mean, indoor outdoor risk is a good example of that too, which is that studies are finding that sort of in the region of 97 to 99 point something percent of transmission events have happens indoors or if outdoors, then in the kind of confined spaces like events that have sort of similar conditions to indoors.
At the same time that's going on, we've got politicians being derogatory about pictures of people crowding on a beach. Again, very confused kind of messaging about what's safe where and so on. So I think some just straightforward clarity about those risks would be good. I think the other thing that is needed is a bit more information for people about what is being factored in. Vitamin D deficiency appears to be a really big part of this picture. Does government know about that? Are ministers taking that into account? Is it in their briefings? I mean, that's the kind of thing that people need a bit more information about what is government thinking about and how is it weighing up different factors?
And then finally, I think there's a feeling of lack of candor about the way that different types of risks are being traded off. And for example, the concerns that people have had about the people who have not been going to hospital for other conditions, there's definitely some evidence that's pointing to some pretty unpleasant outcomes there. The concerns that people have about the huge impact on people with dementia of being socially isolated. The concerns being raised about children not being in school, in terms of development and so on. And so I think those sorts of trade offs, people are assuming government's making them, but we don't know whether or what basis they're making them. And so I think that is a very important area for more straightforward conversation.
David: Something I've been very interested in is the low risk case. Because there is this massive gradient in terms of the risk to the individual according to their age, and younger people, in particular school kids, are actually of extraordinarily low risk, which I've pointed out and have been criticized for. Do you feel there's been a deliberate policy in effect to not say that to people? Because it might lead young people to say, "Oh, well, I don't care it's nothing to do with me. I'm just going to go out and ignore all these messages."
Tracey: Yeah. And there's the irony, isn't it? At a time when government is asking for people's trust, what it also communicates is that it doesn't trust the people with the information. And this idea that people were... this sort of zoning in on a handful of people partying in a pub and things like that, that's the kind of picture of this wanton abandonment with which people have behaved. And so I think there's an element of that. I do think there's probably somewhere, in some cases, a lack of confidence with the data and governance. So I think there is a lack of confidence in saying clearly to people, this is where the risks are most worrying.
"At a time when government is asking for people's trust, what it also communicates is that it doesn't trust the people with the information."
David: I'd like to come to Victoria on this because you're communicating to the public. How have you found reporting the government claims about the scientific basis for their decisions when actually the government, they're not scientists? How have you found that?
Victoria: Well, it's been very difficult of course. And that comes back to this tension between politics and science. And you could also see at one point where the ministers were beginning to think, "Oh my God, what if we've got this wrong? Okay, we better blame the scientists." And so it was all about that whole thing at the Downing Street briefings of saying, we're following the science. And of course, then you couldn't see the science, which proved very frustrating, until SAGE started publishing its papers, but they were somewhat after the effects. So the interesting one there was on schools, for instance. So we got those papers on the day that they announced the school closure. So you could actually see what had been discussed at SAGE and compare it with what the government was doing and what the political decisions were as opposed to the scientific decisions. And where there has been difficulty with transparency has on the whole been on the political side.
David: I'm very interested in this because I've also been intensely irritated by the briefings. And this phrase, following the science, makes me want to scream and shout because it suggests that science is some monolithic body of facts that's leading the way and telling everyone what to do when it's far from it. It's uncertain and contested. I've been trying to think of a better phrase, something like, we're listening to scientific opinion, might be a fairer from a political perspective.
"And this phrase, following the science, makes me want to scream and shout because it suggests that science is some monolithic body of facts that's leading the way and telling everyone what to do - when it's far from it!"
Christina, this obviously is so relevant to independent SAGE. I was just wondering how have you managed with dealing with the media with reporting to the public, with being that voice for this independent group of scientific opinion?
Christina: I mean, I have to say the media side of it was something I wasn't expecting. And everyone on independent SAGE is now on the media quite a lot, the others more than me, and I haven't really had much experience before this. And I think part of it is because you just don't have many of the SAGE scientists going on media, you don't really have the government commenting. And so there has been this kind of first from news and radio, TV to kind of go on and explain things. There's been things from News Night to I went and did the Daily Mail health show, and a lot of it is just literally trying to kind of condense what I've done from reading the SAGE minutes, from reading the evidence, from listening to my experts on independent SAGE, to looking at all the government data and reports, looking at what's going on around the world, and trying to condense it and say, this is where we are. This is what we know about the risks.
A lot of stuff around social distancing, duration of contact, indoor versus outdoor, face-to-face versus side-to-side. This is where we are in terms of infections. This is what we don't know. This is how well tests and trace is working, kind of mediocre. And this is where we are in comparison to other countries and where we could be. And that's kind of ended up what I've been doing. And some of it has been quite standard kind of public health messaging, which is a bit odd as a mathematician, but on the other hand someone has to do it. And I felt like if I have a platform to be able to say to people, please try and remember, hand-washing, don't touch your face, a bit of social distancing where you can, then I should be doing that.
David: You've actually found yourself in the role of giving people public health advice. But we know that so difficult because for public health messages to be effective, they've got to be clear, and simple, and trustworthy. And that's pretty easy for uncontroversial advice like hand-washing, but what about what we're dealing with this new virus where the evidence can be very uncertain? What about face masks, for example? Classic case, scientific communities there's quite legitimate argument and discussion about the uncertainties, but does actually airing that discussion undermine or enhance public trust in the evidence and their willingness to wear masks? So how can these discussions be held?
Christina: I can start because Independent SAGE literally just released its document on masks, face coverings. We had a public event where we took questions from the public and explained our position, which is that we do think face coverings should be used, that there was a lot of uncertainty in the evidence, the evidence that isn't great, but the balance of evidence is growing towards masks being a good public health intervention, mainly in protecting other people from you if you were infected. But we emphasize that it's not a silver bullet and it has to come with a big public information campaign on how to wear them, when to wear them, what kind of materials, that it's part of a suite of other protective behaviors like social distancing, hand washing, not touching.
So it has to kind of come together and it has to be done in a way that's not punitive, so that there are people who are legitimately not in a position to where face coverings and we shouldn't be creating a situation where they're attacked or feel ostracized because of it. We have to understand that. So in a way that's kind of how we've been trying to do it is say, okay, well, face coverings is one part of how you would protect your population from COVID.
David: So Christina, you're describing a direct communication from the science community to the public?
Christina: Yes.
David: Victoria, so how do you think the media should deal with these sorts of discussions about the evidence? Do you feel that there's a conflict between the public health message and this nuance?
Victoria: Well, it comes back to the whole messaging problem in a way. Is that you needed one or two very succinct, very stark messages to persuade everybody to socially distance, to stay indoors, to protect the NHS. And I think as the pandemic has gone along, it has become clear that this hasn't worked entirely well in terms of the subtleties that lie behind it, I don't feel has been particularly well-communicated. And maybe it's because they know that the government polling showed that, for instance, stay at home, protect the NHS played very well. But maybe there is a way of making the message more subtle now that people have become used to this pandemic and used to the idea that it requires something from all of us. And it goes back also to this idea of differential aging risk, because you could tell young people, yes, you are less at risk, but what you can't tell them is how much they put at risk their grandmother. And that's where the communication becomes very difficult.
David: So, Tracey, do you think the government and some sections of the media have underestimated the public's ability to take on this nuance around evidence and messages?
Tracey: Well by and large I think people are pretty good at that stuff. The best people to take care of your grandmother is you. And I don't think that, when you look across what's been causing the high numbers of deaths in the older age group, it isn't the reckless behavior of their grandchildren. And people have really taken to heart that need for social distancing. You've had people who haven't met their new grandchildren until sort of six weeks or eight weeks in or still haven't. And so I don't think there's any reason for anything that we're seeing around us in terms of people's behavior to be overly concerned that people haven't got the message on that one. And it's quite possible, in a sense, by emphasizing who isn't at risk, you can also emphasize the incredibly high risk to older people.
But David, can I say something about this whole sort of mask situation and what's also being communicated there? The purpose of the government's introducing masks into shops is ostensibly, and then what I hear behind the scenes as well, to get people to be more confident about being able to go back out, because 60% in polls are saying that they're scared of going and conducting themselves in normal life. Government's big concern is to try and get everyone back into normal life to try and reduce the economic risks to everybody and so on.
But what, of course, happens is that we take our risk readings from the things that are going on around us. And if we see everybody covered in masks, then it actually reinforces the idea that that's a very dangerous place to be is in your local supermarket. And I think we need to look at that on balance. If the government's purpose here is to give people more confidence, I'm not convinced that actually mandatory mask wearing is going to deliver us that. It might deliver us other things that people are saying in terms of transmission, but I'm not sure that it's going to convince people.
David: Well, that question of what is the aim of the communication is a really key point here. At the Winton Centre, we're always banging on and on about the difference between aiming to inform people and aiming to influence them to change their behavior. As you say, public health information, and in fact, almost all of what government is used to doing with its communication, is trying to influence and persuade. Perhaps it's been a bit too successful with persuading people to stay at home. And what you are aiming for changes, of course, what success looks like to you. So can I go around the table and ask, what would you see as a measure of success for different kinds of communication? Tracey, what do you think the government should be trying to achieve in it's communications?
Tracey: Well, I think at this point in time, it's quite an enabling thing, isn't it? So, people are very aware of the need to resume some of their activities, all of their activities, particularly when it comes to work. You only have to have a quick scroll through Facebook or Instagram to see the extent of people's troubles with having kids at home for 24 weeks and I think it's an enabling thing that people need in terms of day to day life. And many of us, in many ways, take responsibility for other people too. Some of us manage other people or have employees or colleagues to look after, run buildings, all sorts of things like that. So I think at the moment, there is a real hunger for decision making and you see it at the level of local authorities as well, trying to sort of decide which events can go ahead and which can't. We're making many, many decisions from individual level through family, through community, up to government. We're making so many decisions or having to make so many decisions and people do not feel like they've got what they need at their fingertips.
David: So it's actually very much what we try to do when we're helping people with health advice. It's crucial for people to feel that they've got the information available to enable them to make an appropriate decision.
Tracey: Yeah. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to agree it's the right one.
David: Yeah. It doesn't mean you're all going to do the same thing, but at least you feel you've got the better information. Christina, what about you? The communication that you're doing, both direct to the public and to the government, what would be a success for you?
Christina: Success for me, honestly, is if the government improved its own messaging, because they're the ones that should be explaining to the public about what's going on. And for instance, say they've launched this test to trace system, but how many people would actually know that if they have symptoms, they should get tested? If you go right now to gov.UKcoronavirus, it has five bullet points at the top and it doesn't mention getting tested. It says, stay at home if you've got symptoms. And you have to really search through the pages before you get advice on that.
And the whole way it works is you have to find as many people as you can with COVID and ask their contacts to isolate, and we're not doing that. We're not capturing how many people that we're not testing. And we also aren't capturing how many people are isolating at the other end, and isolation of contacts is an entirely voluntary thing, and it's a really hard thing to do when you feel totally well. But that is absolutely key to stopping spread. And without real communication about why should you be isolating if you're contacted, what are the benefits? How does it work? How does it help? How can we help you do it? You're not going to get that. So it's that kind of criteria that I would measure success on.
David: Good messages, appropriate messages, prominently provided.
Christina: Yeah. And also to kind of disadvantaged groups or ethnic minorities, we know that they are much less aware of even the symptoms of COVID, social distancing measures, all of that stuff hasn't really been provided to kind of different contexts.
David: Victoria, as a journalist, how do you measure your success?
Victoria: Well, I think the channel measures the success, but I did get promoted partway through this, so I'm hoping that's an indication that I'm doing a reasonably good job. Right at the beginning, I also took a decision to say on air, I don't know the answer to this. As time has gone on, I can't say that because there are many avenues now that I can go to, but right at the beginning it was such an uncertain science, such an unknown virus, I took the decision that I needed to be almost an open about where we could get the information and when we couldn't get it. And of course, because I come from New Zealand, I looked very closely at what's happening there in desperate hope that I can one day get back to see my parents without going into two weeks quarantine.
And I've been very impressed at the messaging there which was, at the beginning, "Look, we just don't know. It's still too uncertain." And I think that needed to play a bigger role there because everybody knew that it was a new virus, that there was a great deal of uncertainty, and also that some advice at the beginning would change as the science became better. We're running in parallel in a way. There's the public health message, and it's about trying to find the right public health message, also running on parallel what's the science that backs it up? So for it to be really successful, you need to have them say, for instance, this is why it's two meters here, why it's one meter at the WHO, why it's one and a half meters in other countries, and have it much better explained rather than just us journalists having to say it, actually have it there in the public health messaging,
David: I suppose I'm interested in both things you said there, first is the need to acknowledge uncertainty. Something we go on about all the time about being open about uncertainty because that's part of being trustworthy, but also the need to give, in a sense, confident messages out to the public. And they are quite difficult to reconcile. I mean, Christina or Tracey, do you think we can communicate uncertainty without losing trust? And if so, how do we combine that with confident, clear messages to the public?
Tracey: Well, I think that the crucial thing with public health advice is that it needs to be simple in the sense that when it's directive, it needs to be kept quite clean and tidy. So we know this from the past of communicating risks to pregnant women. For example, we know that when there were attempts to try and tell them about every little thing they might have heard of as potentially posing a hypothetical risk in pregnancy, what happens is you see a drop off of people taking folate, because what they start to do is pick and choose from the list of risk mitigations that are presented to them. Which is kind of a similar worry we have now, isn't it? That hand washing kind of disappears down the list of 20 other things that you've been told to do that are a bit more complex.
So directions should always be really simple and kept to the minimum of the most important ones, they should be really prioritized. Explanations can be messy. And I think that's where you share, in an accountable way, this is about accountability for your decision making, and that's where you share the different things you're taking into account, the different weight that you're giving them, and create the expectation that that can change. One of the things that I think, both Victoria and Christina have sort of referred to this in different ways, at the start of the pandemic there was definitely a we we were all in this together, there was a public expectation that new stuff would emerge and the picture would change. And I don't think that's particularly gone away actually, if anything, I think we're all sort of looking forward to seeing what's going to emerge about the next year and the whole discussion about herd immunity coming back and so on.
So I think there's an openness there. One of the most exciting things I think about the kind of discussions that people have got into is so many people that you would never have dreamed of being in a discussion about the nature of uncertainty with, are up for it. I had an online discussion with a bunch of MMA cage fighting warriors about this question of uncertainty and the data. I mean, it wasn't a discussion I imagined having at any point in my 20 years of trying to talk about risk communication.
David: Okay. We're coming to the end now and I'm going to wrap up by asking a simple question to each of you, maybe not so simple. What do you think is being communicated well, and what's been done very badly during the pandemic? By all the different sort of actors in this drama. Let's start off with Tracey, what do you think the government has actually done quite well? And what do you think it has done really badly?
Tracey: I would say, besides what I just said, that the hand washing message at the beginning was good, was really, really good, really clear. Everyone got it. What has been probably the worst communication has been around schools, and school children. And there's been talk of super spreaders, there's been all sorts of things going on that are just patently untrue. And I think government has given no serious leadership in this area, either to the communication of the risk or to the management of the risk.
David: Right. Okay. Victoria, what do you think the media have got right? And what do you think the media has made a bit of a mess off?
Victoria: I can't actually think of a mess. I'm sure other people could, in a way that I think the media has on the whole been quite responsible in its reporting. And I think part of that has been that we have had very good background briefings. We've had the briefings from you guys, we've been helped along the way. Also it helps, to a degree, that many of us have been health journalists or science journalists for a long time. So from my perspective, as awful as this is and as distressing and frightening, I personally fell this is all my years of health journalism coming together, being able to understand epidemiology, communication, public health messaging, and so on. It's been interesting.
David: Victoria, I can't resist asking you then, how do you feel as a health journalist when the political journalists start getting to ask all the questions at the briefings and so on? What do you feel about the political journalists or the general journalists getting involved in all of this?
Victoria: Those briefings were a little bit frustrating, not least because Channel Four News quite often didn't get a question either from the political editor or the health editor, which was a bit sad. But, yes, there was a frustration on our part because we felt, I think as health journalists, that we would have had more direct questions to the chief scientific advisor, or the chief medical officer, rather than trying to score a political point, as it were.
David: Yeah. I would agree with that. Can I also say that as someone who's been trying to work with the media throughout this, it's been going, in general, very well indeed. I think partly because the media, they so need the scientists that they've been quite nice to us. Okay. So, Christina, what do you think, I know it's a huge thing, the scientific community is a great, massive, diverse thing. What do you think they've done well in terms of communication? And what do you think has been communicated badly do you think?
Christina: The scientists that I have seen on the media or in newspapers, I felt like actually they're doing a pretty good job of communicating how much this is a new disease and how we're learning about it and where the uncertainties are. What I think has been done less well, and I don't know this is the job of the scientific community, is explaining how given the uncertainties and the evidence, how you then make decisions. So given that, say, we had uncertainty around the role of children in transmission of COVID, how does that then feed into whether you decide to open schools and how you do that safely? So I think that has kind of been missing. Can I just say one thing, my bugbear of communication in general is this idea that we should all use common sense. Because I don't think there's anything common sense at all about a pandemic. We're actually being asked to do things that are deeply unnatural, like not hugging people, not talking to people face-to-face, staying away. I just think common sense is actually counterproductive and really, really unhelpful.
David:
David: Yes, that’s a very good point.
So just to sum up, then – I think we agree that governments, scientists and the media all share similar roles when communicating in a public health crisis like this.
When the evidence is clear and uncontroversial, like handwashing, then we can be clear and simple in our messaging – with an aim to change behaviour - but give people the reasons behind the messaging too.
When the evidence is uncertain and emerging, we should all be upfront about that – tell people what we know and don’t know at the moment, try to update it as quickly as we can, but in the meantime try to help people weigh up the risks and benefits to make the decisions they need to.
And when difficult policy decisions are being made, everyone should be transparent about the basis of the decision: that one harm is being weighed against another benefit.
It’s quite a change for governments, who are not used to this kind of messaging, and it’s hard for some journalists, who are perhaps not used to dealing with really in depth scientific research. And it’s hard for scientific researchers too, who may not be used to communicating to policy-makers or the public.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that many mistakes have been made. I just hope that some of these lessons might be useful to communicators of all kinds in the next few months.
Many thanks to my wonderful guests, Victoria Macdonald, Tracy Brown and Professor Christina Pagel for helping us through this most difficult of topics and at such a busy time too.
It’s goodbye from me and the Risky Talk team.
For leading climate scientist Dr Tamsin Edwards, probabilities and possible futures are part of her everyday work. She joins David to explore uncertainty in different aspects of her life: as a statistician and mathematical modeller, as a communicator about possible climate futures, but also as a cancer patient faced with a life-changing decision.
Tamsin and David explore
- Why 'all models are wrong but some are useful'
- How Tamsin engages with climate change skeptics and Extinction Rebellion campaigners
- Communicating projections for different scenarios - with climate change and Covid-19.
- What she learnt as a cancer patient 'at the pointy end of probability'
Connect with Dr Tamsin Edwards on Twitter.
Views to share? Get in touch via Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
A full transcript of this episode can be found here
For leading climate scientist Dr Tamsin Edwards, probabilities and possible futures are part of her everyday work. She joins David to explore uncertainty in different aspects of her life: as a statistician and mathematical modeller, as a communicator about possible climate futures, but also as a cancer patient faced with a life-changing decision.
David: In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr Tamsin Edwards all about confronting uncertainty - as a climate scientist as a communicator, but also as an individual in her personal life.
This is a more intimate episode than usual and we weave together some different threads. We cover how Tamsin has dealt with communicating uncertainty in climate science and how she found listening to the perspective of the audience including those with deeply sceptical about climate change very important in learning how to communicate, but we also explore Tamsin's personal experience after a medical diagnosis forced to confront serious, but uncertain risks to her health.
Tamsin welcome to Risky Talk
Tamsin: Hi happy to be here!
David: Now you and I are both ‘uncertainty nerds’! People often think the science delivers cold hard facts that everyone agrees with, but what place does uncertainty have in your work?
Tamsin: I think the best way I've heard it put is that uncertainty is the engine of science. we couldn't do science without it. It's the idea that we are at the bounds of knowledge is both why we need to do the science and what's exciting about it.
"Uncertainty is the engine of science"
I got interested in uncertainty kind of right from the start of when I went into climate modelling, actually through joining a project which had a statistician involved - which was perhaps relatively unusual at that time – through a mutual friend of ours called Jonty Rougier, and I just got I got kind of bitten by the bug really. Of uncertainty, of exploring possibilities of being kind of open to not just thinking about the things that we didn't know, but trying to anticipate the things that might happen that we haven't yet, you know, the unknown unknowns and all of that, and the almost kind of philosophical aspect of trying to predict the future when we have all that uncertainty in how something behaves in something as complicated as the planet with a relatively limited amount of data to base it on and there's always going to be kind of limits to our knowledge. So I yeah, I just really kind of fell in love with the subject.
David: You specialise in developing models for climate systems, but your blog is called All Models Are Wrong. Okay! Why did you call it that?
Tamsin: Well, some people may know there's a famous quote 'all models are wrong, but some are useful' by the statistician George Box.
David: It’s got its own Wikipedia page!
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
Tamsin: Which has its own Wikipedia page! So I stole it from that. And it came about actually, I was always interested in that quote and I was already working in the idea of uncertainty, but it came about through some Twitter conversations about how one should communicate climate science, I guess to the public and climate prediction.
There was this kind of split view around the idea of kind of trying to increase confidence in in climate predictions by emphasizing all the things we were really certain about and the stuff we were really sure about you know. There's all this kind of very hardcore well-known well-established physics at the at the core of these big climate models and emphasizing all the ways in which we think very carefully about the models and we test them and we you know, put lots of work into that versus the risks of doing that too comprehensively and saying we were sure to the point of absolute certainty and emphasizing scientific certainty and what dangers that can lead to in terms of when the evidence-base does change, when our understanding changes, when we have different predictions coming out in the media that might appear to be contradictory when we understand and discover something new.
We then put ourselves at risk of people saying - but we thought you were sure about that but now you've changed your mind!?
And actually as well as being interested in uncertainty for my research. I'm a firm believer in communicating the idea of uncertainty in cutting-edge research to the public to try and help resolve some of those difficulties around apparently contradicting and changing evidence - because evidence is apparently contradictory and changing because that's the nature of uncertain knowledge!
David: In a previous podcast we did on climate change, one of our guests Anthony Leiserowitz said there's a double standard: that somehow people and politicians expect us to be so certain about things like climate change, and yet when you think about policies like Brexit or anything like that - actually there are huge uncertainties! And everyone seems to be able to accept those. What do you feel about that?
Tamsin: Absolutely. I mean, obviously we're always making decisions under uncertainty, but I don't know how much I've seen people really saying you need to narrow your error bars on a prediction, something as explicit about uncertainty of that. It kind of runs much more deeply.
I think that it's much more about the fundamental kind of tenets of what you're saying not about “oh, we'll wait until you can predict global mean temperature in the year 2100 to within 0.1 degree Celsius, as opposed to, you know, one point four degrees Celsius. It's much more about well the assumptions that go into that and the testing and the potential for groupthink and cognitive biases. So I don't normally see it as “reduce your uncertainty”. It's much more kind of fundamental than that.
David: So it's not a matter of the width of the error bars, it’s more people thinking, “Do you even know what you're talking about?”
Tamsin: Yeah. Do you even know what you're talking about, or are you lying with some agenda? Are you manipulating the results in some way? This kind of thing? And yeah, so and so are the kinds of questions I get asked I guess when I give a climate talk from people who kind of lean a bit skeptical, or get asked on Twitter ,isn't sort of oh, well, your prediction isn't credible until you narrow your error bars. It's about will have you forgotten that this other thing might drive climate or have you added some bias correction to the data that has made it, you know systematically wrong, that kind of thing.
David: Yeah. So it's to do with systematic errors due to not including an important factor or just your model being wrong, which as you said, “all models are wrong!”
Tamsin: Exactly, right? And that's all I really wanted With the blog name and the blog feed, you know, as well being about uncertainty to kind of confront that head-on. So it was partly about how do we come up with the error bars? Because that's kind of interesting and useful to talk about but also it was about how do we test those assumptions? How do we evaluate our models? How do we incorporate knowledge and check for systemic biases group think this kind of thing and really actually say look I want to talk about uncertainty and I want to examine the thought processes, and I want to lay it all out in the open so that we can have a conversation about you know to make it transparent about how these decisions are made about which things were more confident about and that have been sort of tested very thoroughly, and which things are more difficult because there isn't the data or we don't have such good understanding.
David: Okay. Can I ask you more general question? What do you think at the moment with the way that all the discussions going on about Covid 19, about which there's quite a lot of, you know, basic disagreement about what should be done. And is a highly skeptical movement as well. Do you think that, you know, the uncertainty about the science is being communicated well or not?
Tamsin: I think It's been good that the UK government have sort of been placing chief scientific and medical officers in the briefings public-facing every day and been trying to sort of include some of that quantitative data on the predictions, and they've been trying to make it clear that the mortality rates don't include everything and have some time lag. So there's definitely probably better efforts to make things clearer than I feared there could be but at the same time there's a lot of things that I think are not very clear.
Lots of people seem to be very surprised about the time scale likely for these lockdowns, this idea that we have a review every three weeks that people are kind of getting their hopes up about the lockdown stopping every three weeks. But when I had a look at the original Imperial report by Neil Ferguson team, it was very clear that, you know, the assumptions in those initial predictions that drove, as I understand it, that initial lockdown was several months for the first lockdown, followed by a lifting, followed by another lockdown, followed by a short lift, followed by another lockdown- and this would go in and out of lockdown based on the Intensive Care capacity for perhaps two years, with a majority of the time in lockdown!
So that seems to me a really key piece of information that hasn't been communicated and it's not that that's a policy but it's obviously part of the evidence base that has gone into the policy.
David: Exactly and I do feel that the you know, the critique and discussion about all these things has not been that great to be honest, and the journalists have almost seemed to be more much more concerned with blaming people rather than actually looking at examining what people are saying and critiquing the data and the assumptions being made and so on.
Tamsin: Actually, there's a parallel with climate science that… well for a start the fact that predictions do get revised as we get more evidence and more data in, so that's not such a flip-flopping or some kind of weakness. That's a good thing. You know, we should be changing our predictions as new data comes in, but also that particularly it's sort of relevant to climate science the difference between I guess a scenario of a particular policy intervention, versus a sort of uncertainty range for a particular policy intervention or particular model or a particular study. So what I mean by that is that original Imperial study had the sort of predictions for no policy at all versus a sort of partial suppression, versus sort of full lockdown and those were very different numbers, but they would sometimes get communicated as “ They can't make up their mind if it's this number or that number”, or another study would come along with a different number and they say “well, you know, these people can't make up their minds” - but they were comparing two different scenarios! So I think there's a subtlety around that that idea of making predictions under particular scenarios.
David: I agree that there's a difficulty in communicating some conditional predictions. As if that's your prediction of what's going to happen. No! That's the prediction were this to be the case. Something that within science, we’re so used to talking about these conditional scenarios, what-ifs and which when it turns into communication it becomes that's the prediction. It happened recently with the Office of Budget Responsibility making the dire, you know forecast- it wasn't a forecast it was a scenario for the possible economic harms of the lockdown and they explicitly said “this is not a prediction” and everybody said “that’s what they predict is going to happen.”
Tamsin: Absolutely. It is about partitioning the uncertainty isn't it? I mean in climate change the equivalence is the scenarios of different greenhouse gas emissions in the future. So , you know, as climate scientists, we cannot predict what the future policies will be over the next century. So we make predictions for the high greenhouse gas emissions for the medium and the low conditional on those emissions - and that's because we can't, you know, we can't predict those. But what we can do is try and predict how the physical system of the planet and the atmosphere and the oceans will respond to a given scenario. But again people will say how can you how can you predict what people will do or emissions will be but it's a different thing.
David: So what we're really concerned with here is the communication. You're one of the lead authors of the next intergovernmental panel on climate change - IPCC - report, which will receive extraordinary attention.
What's the point of the report and how well do you think they have communicated their work - particularly in terms of the uncertainties the possible scenarios and so on?
Tamsin: The IPCC assessment reports started in 1992, and they really gather the evidence base for the world's policymakers to think about climate change. Every sort of five to seven or eight years we've had new assessment reports, and the next one is going to be the sixth assessment report. And these things are now enormous dense, volumes of information - and they don't even capture every part of climate science! They're just really a sample of the key changes and they tried to explain and contextualize, you know, what we've learnt and what the impact of different policy interventions would be on climate change.
The idea is to be ‘policy-relevant not policy prescriptive’ is the phrase, so they present the predicted climate change under different greenhouse gas emissions.
There's been an interesting change in how we think about those predictions in recent years because of the Paris agreement setting things up in terms of a temperature target. So we often used to think about greenhouse gas emissions or concentrations particularly as a limit - We've got to keep to 550 parts per million of CO2, something like this and you may notice that we don't really think in those terms anymore. We think much more in terms of the probability of keeping to the 2 degrees warming, or the one and a half degrees of warming since the pre-industrial period. And, of course ,that's a different way of thinking about it. You have to map out all the possible ways in which you could limit greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would then lead to only two degrees of warming, or less or say a 2/3 probability of that - not even a hundred percent probability! So actually instead of thinking of a forward direction, of if we have high or low greenhouse gas emissions, what would the temperature be? The new reports the special report on one and a half degrees? Warming was a lot more about “what would greenhouse gas emissions need to be to maintain a warming limit of this”.
David: Which I suppose does make it relevant to an outcome measure. That is the one that people are basically interested in.
Tamsin: Well a very simplified metric. Obviously, I mean global mean temperature is a incredibly kind of coarse way of thinking about climate change, but it's a useful sort of ballpark metric of change. I guess. It's a summary of change that doesn't incorporate everything but it's a scale on which to kind of act on.
David: So one of the things that we bring up in every one of these podcasts is what's the purpose of this communication of the science, and the uncertainty about the science. And to put it really quite crudely - are you trying to inform people or are you trying to persuade people of the importance of action over the threat we’re facing? And I think, you know, it's been claimed within climate science those two things have sometimes got rather muddied, which one you're trying to do. How do you see that balance?
Tamsin: It's a really good question. I have been I've been involved with it IPCC just for a couple of years, and they are very much, as I say, almost their hallmark is ‘policy-relevant not policy prescriptive’. They are not aiming to persuade. Now you could argue that some of the communication around some of the recent special reports has been a bit sort of ‘if we are to do X. we must do y’ so, that's a sort of that still a kind of a conditional framing. If we are to meet the Paris agreement temperature limit of one and a half degrees, then we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly. If we are to preserve Arctic sea ice or the natural, you know, the land that we have in the forest around the world, we need to act quickly. So that's still a kind of a conditional, you know, there's an assumption that we want to, keep to the Paris agreement or that we want to preserve Arctic sea ice or that we want to preserve the world's forests. So I think that's a bit that's a bit more straightforward because they're still a kind of a conditional sort of persuasion if you like.
And what I have been doing a bit more in recent years is trying to work out how to give scientific advice to Extinction Rebellion, who’s communication goals are not the same as mine, I would say. In the sense that, I mean, my own particular goals as a climate scientist are to increase public understanding of climate science and the risks of climate change without advocating particular action. So I try quite carefully to preface “if” we're to keep to the Paris agreement, then it implies this or requires this, and to make clear that those risks are important and real - and that's why people might want to take action on climate change.
For Extinction Rebellion, obviously, their aim is very much to get people out on the streets, to put pressure on politicians often. They have particular goals like achieving net zero in a particular year, for example, they have as one of their stated aims. And so to that end they will often emphasize the worst case predictions. To kind of give emphasis - and they're not really interested in communicating the full range of climate predictions, or the full range of uncertainty, but to use the worst-case to motivate action. And I I'm not uncomfortable with that as long as they're clear about that, and so that's the advice I try to give them, I try to sort of say well it's okay to say x as long as you give some context that this is, you know, really the highest end. Or, often the things that get passed around the activists are quite off-the-cuff comments and back-of-the-envelope sort of informal comments made by scientists, and sometimes not even scientist, but sort of related people and again, you know, that's not so bad as long as you make it clear that that's what it is that it hasn't come from a big peer-reviewed body of evidence by all of climate science.
David: But do you think they listen to you?
Tamsin: I would say it's mixed. I would say some definitely do and some people less so. So I think some people don't want to mess it up. They don't want to present science that's wrongm because it does damage trust in what they're doing and it is a problem if they get called out on it, and I have done that, I have you know publicly said when I thought they were wrong and that's not good for them, right? They want to avoid that situation. But on the other hand, there's always a subjective line between how clearly and transparently they are communicating that additional context.
David: You're very special, I think, because you both have engaged with the activists campaigning against climate change, but also you're engaged with climate skeptics in a way that I don't think I could have the patience to do. You know, what's your, what's your approach? And you know, I think you’ve said something that - we all would like to know what to say when we meet a skeptic, but you think the better thing is to say, you know, what should you ask a skeptic? What do you mean by that?
Tamsin: Yeah. Well, I think people always say, how do I persuade climate skeptics, or what should I say, and I, you know, the quickest way I can condense what I think into one sentence is to say: it's not what you should say. It's what should ask. Where did you get that information from? Why do you think that? Why do you not trust the climate scientists and it's and it's you can learn a lot about you know, was it some trusted friend? Was it some particular article they read? Was at one particular thing that didn't ring true for them that set them off down that path? And, you know, and other thing I would say is very much to make it a bit more nuanced than where I am the person with all of the truth of the good information and I'm let me tell you all of it and dump it on you!
David: All the letters after your name!
Tamsin: Yeah exactly, that argument from authority. And sort of assuming that everything they say is wrong or has bad, you know this phrase, ‘bad faith motivation’, but actually to acknowledge that usually it's much much more complex. And that your typical kind of climate skeptic or contrarian or whatever has a bunch of stuff that they are understanding correctly, and agreeing with you on climate science. And then there are other things that they don't ,so it's really important to partition that rather than just a blanket, sort of, “You’re wrong, let me tell you how you're wrong.”
David: You seem to exemplify something that we've said before on the on these podcasts which we always repeated at the Winton Center - which is that first rule of communication is to shut up and listen. Listen to who your audience is, where are they coming from? Why are they thinking what they’re thinking?
Tamsin: Yeah. I'm not always successful, you know on a bad day and I'll be as grumpy as anyone but yeah, I think that's it. And I've been trying to think about where that why that instinct comes actually where it sort of came from and they're the best conclusion I've come from is that my dad was a therapist. No.
David: So you follow the good therapist, sort of cliché of saying ‘tell me more’?
Tamsin: Yeah, well sort of! And I don't mean that to sound patronizing, but it's much more about of just thinking - well, everyone has everyone has a reason for acting the way that they do, and everyone has an internally consistent set of reasons for believing the things that they do, and it’s about understanding the root of that and why it diverges from your way of thinking, while trying to hold in your mind the possibility that you might not have the correct way of acting and believing in things. Now, often, you know, as a professional climate scientist who has spent many years studying this, I'm not saying I always think that every climate skeptic could be as right as me, but it's about it's more of a mindset of saying, well to this person everything they've read and everything they've understood has entirely confirmed this particular set of beliefs about me and my science, rather than kind of blunder in and say well you're an idiot, you know, what's your agenda? You know - try to understand how it is that they can see you in the same way that you are seeing them. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.
David: Okay. I'd like to make a change of topic but I don't think it is such a big change because you've discussed, really, how you bring your personality and your humanity into dealing with climate scientists, the uncertainty and the skeptics, and I hope you don't mind me asking about your experience with cancer. It may seem like a just a massive jump, but to you, I don't think it is and don't think it is either - because we're dealing here with uncertainty but on a more local, personal scale. And so I'd like to ask about that, how your scientific approach to uncertainty, to acknowledge what we don't know, has influenced your approach to the experiences you've had with your disease.
Tamsin: Oh hugely. I was diagnosed with bowel cancer just over two years ago, after sort of being ill with kind of serious IBS type symptoms kind of battle symptoms. So I ended up with emergency surgery - half my colon taken out - and chemotherapy for six months during most of 2018. And I’m two years or clear now, I'm not having any treatment so that's all good.
But there were so many interactions with my work and that cancer, and I don't know if it's the same for other scientists and statisticians who have had similar experiences. Statistics, risk and probability feel very different when you're at the sharp end of it, when you're trying to talk about it in a in an abstract way.
And of course, that's the problem with climate change, isn't it? Climate change feels very distant. It's a long time in the future often. The worst people are affected far away from us in developing countries and so on. And so when you're at the pointy end of probabilities. It does feel different, and I found loads of aspects of it interesting. I found I got surprisingly muddled about my own statistics, because of sort of chemo brain and fear and motivated reasoning of wanting to believe the good statistics and ignore the bad and all of that stuff. I suffered. And I was interested to know to find out that I had personal risk thresholds that I thought were acceptable. For example sort of 10% or less chance of recurrence of the cancer I felt was a sort of manageable, but 50/50 was very much not manageable. And my own personal probabilities lay kind of somewhere between the two, roughly halfway between the two.
And I was also interested in the way that there was a trade-off in risk of the treatment that I had to incorporate. So there was the added chance of survival through chemotherapy, which was not quite as high as I thought it might be compared with the surgery - that did most of the work, just chopping the tumor out did most of the work - and then the chemo is just a bit of extra bonus on top of that. But of course the chemo is a very comprehensive poisoning, and has its own side effects of which some can be permanent.
And the one that they particularly focus for my treatment was neuropathy, or nerve damage in your fingers and toes. and it’s a cumulative effect - the more sessions, the more cycles of chemotherapy you take of my kind, the more likely becomes the permanent nerve damage. And it can be life changing. It can mean you’re unsteady on your feet, or you can't do up buttons, or you know, it can be quite difficult if you take it for a long time. And so trading those probabilities.
Now remember think I remember really noticing the change in how I felt about those probabilities. From the start when my fear was only about my mortality, so I thought ‘I'm going to take the full six months. No questions asked , I don't care what happens to my fingers and toes. I just want every little point one percent of survival probability that I can get’. By the time. I got towards maybe four and a half to five months into the chemo when the damage to my fingers was becoming more apparent - and you have to slightly predict. It's not real-time. You know, it's a, it's a trajectory that they have to sort of predict. And as it starts to get worse and you feel the physical sensations, the very weird alien changes in your body and think well, these are only going to get worse. Even if I stop the chemo now they could be permanent or they could certainly last for years. I found myself actually, you know, in tears in the oncologist’s office and he said ‘let's stop that particular treatment’. He said it won't you know you taken most of it. It won't make very much difference to your survival. It could make a big difference in your neuropathy and I stopped it.
And so that was a change in trade-offs as I went through. Yeah, but I've always tried to be quite open about all this stuff. I think it's interesting to draw those parallels as well with, you know, lots of people see risks in climate policy and it is it going to affect their quality of life. Is it going to damage the economy? So trying to draw those parallels between the long-term benefits versus potential short term difficulties of action, it was kind of helpful
David: How - I asked this both professionally and personally, because - did you know? – I had prostate cancer and radiotherapy, - but I have never have chemotherapy, and I think that's the one I really would be starting to think about those trade-offs.
At our Winton Centre we put the front ends on risk calculators for women with breast cancer, men with prostate cancer in which we give the probabilities of increasing your 10-year survival if you have chemotherapy. And we’ve got numbers on that. We haven't got numbers yet on what the side effects might be either short-term or long-term. They have to be described much more qualitatively and people have to make their own trade off judgments. Do you know in Cambridge, for example, they’re quite clear that if there's less than a 3% increase in overall survival at 10 years they don't recommend chemotherapy. And you know at five percent they would recommend it, and in-between it depends very much on that on the individual. So, you know, it's recognized that you should demand quite a lot before you would be willing to undergo that.
Tamsin: Yeah, there was a similar trial in bowel cancer. A big european-wide trial around those trade-offs, and they decided that for a lot of sub stages of bowel cancer they would only give three months of chemotherapy with a very low risk of permanent neuropath, but I was unfortunately just in the higher risk category, so they basically recommended the six months.
But I do think that it seems - and I may be wrong - but it seems as if there isn't always the joined up evidence available for that. So for example, the other place I talked about these stories was on More Or Less, and actually my main oncologist who had presented with me with all these statistics was also on the sho,w and he said it was actually quite unusual to see a patient so long after their treatment had finished and to be able to ask them ‘how is your neuropathy now?’, you know, six months or a year after their treatment had finished.. So although that evidence may be gathered through other methods, still to actually have that opportunity of saying, you know, how does it feel ,how do you feel about your neuropathy, they don't have the chance because you're out the door as soon as you've had the treatment, you know that they can't take an interest because they have to move on to the next patient.
David: You and I want these numbers. We would like to see these probabilities, even though as you said, you know how we read them most is hugely influenced by our current emotional state, and both about the potential benefits and the potential side effects. Do you think this is something that should be routinely available to patients, even those who are not obsessed with these ideas as we are?
Tamsin: Well in my very first session with my oncologist here, he gave me the full PowerPoint that he gives to his medical students because he realized quite the level of numbers that I wanted. He did stop short of emailing me the power point. He said I couldn't have a copy, but obviously they have to make very quick judgments about what information people want and can cope with.
David: Yeah. I mean, I I'm so pleased to talk to you about this because I know after my experience I feel enormously motivated that everyone should have this kind of information available. In numbers as well, and presented in the best possible way. And maybe people just don't want to see it, don't want to know, but I feel your experience is extremely encouraging
Tamsin: It’s a very difficult and a very subtle trade-off isn't it. Your short-term feelings are all about mortality all about survival and in a way your quality of life afterwards is secondary. But there's obviously a risk level at which it becomes more important. So for example, if your chemotherapy was incredibly damaging and toxic and only made a small impact to your survival and you are basically likely to survive anyway, you might think it wasn’t worth it. But if you had a very low chance of survival, you just take it no matter.
David: There’s an important point there, that even if somebody doesn’t want to see the numbers, by talking like that you can illustrate there is a choice, there is a decision, there is a point at which you would flip. And so it makes you realize that actually I think it should empower people to say, well now I can choose - on which side of that of that threshold do I lie?
Tamsin: And of course it's about expectation and support isn't it? I mean the NHS and the cancer charities, it's hard for them to keep supporting you for years and years afterwards, especially if you're not even undergoing any treatment, so it's really about managing expectations. Even if you would make the same decision either way, it's about knowing that the next few years could be quite severely affected in that way.
David: So just finally, something I've always interested in as a statistician, I would like to put things in numbers, but what we've been talking about today - so much of it we're not able to put into numbers, because a lot of its to do with fundamental lack of knowledge or you know, where our ability to predict just isn't good enough. How do you feel, then, about putting things into numbers versus putting things giving a qualitative feel for how bad something might be?
Tamsin: Yeah good question. I think I think hooking things on a few numbers can help. I think I mean one of my great feelings about science communication is that, I'm a great believer that it’s always possible to communicate something complicated. It's just hard. It just takes more time to think about how to construct that in a way that is both approachable, but also accurate. And has some kind of echo, or pointing towards the caveats or the simplifications that you're making. And so it's not about a sort of numbers versus not numbers. It's about it's about almost like a two-layer communication. It's about giving those key points while not trying to give the impression that that's all there is to the story, it’s saying well, it's a bit like this or you know, there are some other factors involved or here's the way we I can think about it broadly speaking and those are the kinds of phrases you can use.
David: And you use the word ‘story’, and I think that is absolutely the right thing. We're talking about narratives that are engaging for people and that can combine those elements of something perhaps fairly hard and numerical and a much broader perspective.
Tamsin: I think there's been a great kind of a great leap in understanding in last few years certainly in my field but in lots of fields about the importance of storylines and narrative.
"Because it's not just about sort of helping people to understand, it's about exploring possibilities isn't it, imagining the future. It's about putting ourselves in the place of, this future or that future."
David: Tamsin Edwards, thank you so much indeed for this wonderful conversation, which I've enjoyed a lot and I've got a huge amount out of, and I hope people listening to it will have too, so again Tamsin thanks so much.
Tamsin: Thank you so much for having me.
Connect with Tamsin on Twitter and check out her blog.
The unfolding coronavirus pandemic is a story driven by numbers. But how reliable are the numbers we have? What can the data really tell us – and what are the major areas of uncertainty?
In this special episode, recorded on 1st April, Michael Blastland and Professor David Spiegelhalter help us separate the signal from the noise.
- Why the absolute numbers of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid 19 are dodgy, but the rate at which those numbers change is still a useful indicator.
- Why Norway vs Sweden is an unfolding natural experiment: neighbouring countries with broadly similar populations, but Norway has gone into strict lockdown and Sweden is being relatively relaxed.
- There are usually around 600,000 deaths per year in the UK. When we look back, will Covid 19 have caused many excess deaths – or could the figures for 2020 end up looking similar to a bad flu season?
- How can we think about our personal risk of dying from Covid 19? David sets out how getting Covid 19 multiplies your existing level of risk depending your age: it provides a “pulse” of heightened risk over a short period.
Full transcript available at:
https://riskytalk.libsyn.com/transcript-of-coronavirus-understanding-the-numbers
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
The unfolding coronavirus pandemic is a story driven by numbers. But how reliable are the numbers we have? What can the data really tell us – and what are the major areas of uncertainty?
This is the transcript of a special episode of Risky Talk, recorded on 1st April. Michael Blastland and Professor David Spiegelhalter help us separate the signal from the noise.
Michael
Hello, and welcome to a special edition of a Risky Talk with Professor David Spiegelhalter. Except that many of you will know, I'm not David Spiegelhalter, and not because he's isolated with Covid 19. No, David is here or rather, at one end of a line with me, Michael Blastland, at the other. Plenty of distance between us. David, welcome to your own show!
David
Grand to be here.
Michael
We're doing it like this this week simply because the team who made the podcast decided we wanted to hear more from David on Risky Talk, where he's usually asking the questions. This time, he'll be answering them. And what we want to hear about especially at the moment, guess what, given that David's a world leading statistician, are his thoughts about coronavirus or covid 19: Where we are now, what the data we have can tell us and what it can't and how we should think about the risks. Now, we're having this conversation based on data available up to March 31st. So do bear that in mind if you're listening far into the future - new evidence is coming in all the time.
David, a more loaded question these days than it usually is. How are you?
David
Well, I'm actually feeling very fit because this confinement is making me pay a bit more attention to my exercise!
Michael
Do you have a sense of your personal risk? How risky does it feel for you?
David
Oh, yeah, not too bad. I wouldn't actually be too worried about getting it - I think it could be very nasty - but we'll come back later to how we can put our personal risks into perspective.
Michael
Alright, let's begin with how we should approach the problem because there are a lot of numbers kicking around. We've got numbers of deaths, we've got death rates, we've got numbers of cases, hospitalization rates, doubling periods, all of that. Which data would you focus on?
David
I think this is the first time in an international crisis like this, where there's been immediate access to huge amounts of data. But you know, the data that's most easily available is on cases and on deaths. And there's a problem with both of them.
It's one of these very basic things that, before getting down and doing any fancy analysis, we should ask: what are we counting in the first place? And with confirmed cases - those who've actually had a test and been positive - we know that's a very limited view of the actual number of cases out there. People say maybe there's 10 times as many. But of course, it depends on the testing regime.
Some countries, like Germany, have done a huge amount of testing and so the confirmed cases there might get closer to the number of people that have actually got it. But other places, like the UK - we've only been testing people in hospital, not even NHS workers really yet, and so actually the number of people that are in this country with the virus is a deeply unknown quantity.
With a common testing regime - as long as that's constant - you can use the confirmed cases to monitor what's going on, the trends up and down - provide some information. If the testing regime changes, of course, that all changes as well.
I guess you would think what would be a good measure, to put it very crudely, is counting the bodies. But we found out increasingly what a tenuous measure that is of the fatal harm of Covid 19.
Each country may be different in what it counts as a death. Some countries are counting deaths as where you can actually say ‘this is what caused the death’. In the UK, we were only just getting clarity from the Department of Health - they made this public just today - of what these deaths actually mean: that the deaths being daily reported are in fact, just deaths in hospital that have occurred for people who have tested positive. So, strictly speaking, if someone tests positive in hospital but actually dies of something else, they'll still be recorded as a Covid 19 death.
But those figures don't include any deaths in care homes outside of hospitals. And also the deaths figures are delayed. They're not the deaths that happened today or yesterday - some of them are coming in from two weeks ago. Hospitals have to wait until the family have been informed and given permission. And it seems clear also that they save them up over the weekend and send them all in on Monday. So these numbers are very erratic from day to day.
Michael
So we're seeing a bit of a spike on Mondays are we?
David
Oh, yeah, the Monday spike. In fact on Saturday and Sunday, the figures went right down. So we thought this can't be true: this is an artifact. And then suddenly they spiked - in a day they went from 180 to 380. This is completely impossible from a standard statistical perspective. Assuming there’s some sort of smooth process going on - we know what the variability should be - and what we see is vastly more than that. So we've got to be very careful in drawing conclusions about what's going on underneath.
Michael
Now given all these uncertainties, and they sound pretty large on all the elementary bits of data that we'd expect to have, can you draw any conclusions about the seriousness of the problem?
David
Both cases and deaths in the early part of the epidemic in almost every country increase by 30% per day. So you get a feeling that at least the rate of increase is representing what's going on, even if the absolute numbers are undercounted or whatever. From the rate of increase we can really get a feeling of how fast something is spreading throughout the population. Of course, the epidemiologists have built mathematical models that are being used to make predictions, and they have been using this kind of data to better inform the models.
Michael
So, I mean, I've seen one statistician, John Ioannidis, call it a “data fiasco”. Despite that, are there things we can say with some confidence?
David
Yes, by looking at the rate of change. We can get a lot of information from rates of change. Rates of change, are unaffected by systematic underreporting. They're unaffected by whether it's done per million or just in the whole country, and so on. So all these different ways of measuring make no difference when we monitor the rate of change. And that is the thing everyone is focusing on, because we're so interested in whether that rate is declining. In other words, what we'd love to see both in cases and in deaths is that this rapid increase smooths off into plateaus, into a constant rate, and then falls down as it did in China. And everyone's trying to work out what is going to happen in the Western countries.
Michael
So that's one good solid bit of evidence. What about the one that I think a lot of people are concerned with - the absolute rate of fatality. I've seen numbers around 0.1% or 0.2%. The Imperial estimate, I believe, is about 0.9%. Is there any way of adjudicating between them?
David
It's very difficult. It's highly contested. This is the infection mortality rate. The case fatality rate, which is how many people who we know got the virus actually end up dying, that can be estimated a bit more firmly. But the infection mortality rate, which is the percentage of people who get the infection and then die, depends crucially on of course, how many people have the infection - and that's the one thing we do not know! We have to just guess it until we have some population measures of who's had it. So eventually we will know (rather late…).
The Imperial group are working on 0.9% as an average, they released some analysis of China a couple of days ago where they lowered that to about 0.6%.
But other sources are saying much lower than that - 0.1% and so on - which is more like seasonal flu. Those studies are influenced by places like Iceland, who measured, you know, a lot of people, did a big lot of testing, - they managed to test around testing 3% of the population - and found a very small number of deaths. But that's Iceland! We're assuming that this is some constant number that applies just as much in Iceland, as it would in India or somewhere like that. And that is so deeply unlikely because whether you die or not, depends crucially on the health services available.
It will also depend on how serious the illness is that people get. For example, their viral load, how much have they been exposed to? We're getting multiple deaths of healthcare workers and it's really appallingly tragic, and that is sometimes in young healthy people, presumably because they've had a high exposure to the virus. And, in places where people live more distantly, less crowded in, might get very low exposure to the virus, and so actually get a much less severe form of the disease. So I think the idea that there is a fixed infection fatality rate, is pretty inappropriate. There will be big heterogeneity from place to place.
Michael
So would you feel confident about making a general comparison with things like normal flu or SARS or the 1918 influenza - to say simply ‘is this better or worse?’
David
Well, the standard thing that people are saying about it, compared to normal flu, is that it's twice as infectious and ten times as dangerous. And I think there is still reasonably strong evidence for that. It's different to SARS - SARS was far more lethal but actually much less infectious. And so we were actually able to keep it clamped down and controlled. I'm not sure about Spanish flu, I can't remember the numbers for that. But the crucial thing about that, actually, is that it hugely affected younger people. And that is not the case with this disease.
Michael
When we look at the various efforts by governments around the world to deal with this, there are a lot of lockdowns, but not everybody's locking down, and we're not all locking down in the same way. Can we work out which policies are making a difference yet?
David
Everyone's interested in this. And I don't want to make any grand claims at all. The plots I find most useful- and I'm looking at Our World in Data at the moment because I like their presentations a lot - is one of a log scale of cumulative deaths by country. And there, the gradient gives you a very powerful idea of the increasing number of deaths. Lines that run in parallel, are running at similar rates, the epidemic is taking a similar form. And we see for example, by that the United Kingdom at the moment is running very similar to Italy was at the same stage. People have been observing that Germany has got a very low mortality rate, but actually, although it's lower at the moment, its track is exactly the same as the UK's.
The very interesting controlled experiment in a sense is Sweden vs Norway. They're next door to each other and they've got very similar population structure, very similar climate, but they've taken extremely different policy views. Norway has implemented quite stringent criteria but Sweden, is still really quite relaxed, people going out for meals and no lockdown at all, schools still open and so on. Sweden's progress, although it's lower at the moment, seems to be following the trail of everybody else, of United Kingdom in Germany. Whereas Norway, actually - although it's still really barely started in Norway - is tracking quite low at the moment.
And of course, we've got Belarus who have volunteered to be the ultimate control in that they're taking no notice of the virus whatsoever.
Michael
I assume it will take a little while before we get a clear idea of how those policies have panned out?
David
Yes, exactly.
Michael
Okay. Well, we've talked about some of the limitations of these numbers. But let's add a few more complications (as if there weren't enough) and some more uncertainties. So, there's a lot of discussion about whether we're not really preventing many deaths, we're just delaying them and maybe not by very much, maybe because a lot of people are going to die quite soon anyway, if you're already elderly or very ill. What's your view about that?
David
Yeah, it's an interesting argument, and it's recognized by epidemiologists, they call it "mortality displacement". And it's often said that hot weather will do this. For someone who's frail and vulnerable, hot weather might bring their death forward a little bit. That's known as mortality displacement, or I've got to admit it, the technical term also used is ‘harvesting’!
Michael
Oh, gosh!
David
Yeah, exactly! I mean, I suppose it brings up images of the grim reaper, but that is the technical term. So people have said - in fact, Neil Ferguson, the head of the Imperial University modeling team, said in evidence to the parliamentary committee last week that he thought maybe two thirds of deaths were people who would probably have died reasonably soon anyway! So, there's a couple of issues about that. First of all it means, perhaps, that when we come out with this, we'll find that the number of excess deaths in the country over the year might very well not be excessive. It might look just look like even an average flu season in terms of the extra deaths.
Michael
Really!? Within the kind of normal range that we might expect to see?
David
Well it does vary very much - and that's to do with the flu. An average flu season will bring it up 17,000 or so extra deaths. A bad flu season would take it up to 25,000 extra deaths over the winter. Many of whom are, to use the technical term, ‘harvested’ from people who would die soon after anyway.
Michael
And that is assuming lockdown, in saying that it's within what we might expect?
David
Oh, yes, this is assuming lockdown! This is the crucial thing, this is what I dread at the end of this. If these lockdown measures are effective, and the aim is, as has been made explicit, is to try to keep the deaths below 20,000. If that happens, and people may look back at the end of the year and say, "oh, well, not many extra people died anyway", then the accusation will be made that therefore, we didn't need to do the lockdown, which is not a logical consequence! It's only as low as 20,000 because we have taken these measures.
The Imperial group estimated that, even with the less stringent mitigation measures which were in place before the lockdown - there would still have been 200,000 deaths. Now that really would make a dent in the population! We have around 600,000 deaths a year in this country, so we'll use that as the norm. So actually, you know, 20,000 extra deaths is within the margins what can happen in a flu year.
Michael
But even if we took even if we took two thirds off that 200,000 figure, we’re going to see something that's outside the normal kind of variation?
David
Yeah, and the crucial thing - and people do forget this, even though it's been emphasized again and again, by the Imperial modellers and everybody - is that in the end it’s not a matter of saving the lives of some old vulnerable people who are going to die soon anyway. It's the fact that if you didn't do that, if you didn't bring in these measures, you know, the NHS would be just totally overwhelmed, particularly as it’s short staffed. It's going to be touch and go, I think, anyway, whether it can deal with it.
I mean, amazing measures being taken at the moment and just imagine if this didn't happen, because, you know, for all these deaths, you've got 10 people maybe having to be admitted to hospital. Imagine if the health service was totally swamped by this, so that it just fell apart. It just fell apart. Imagine living in a society like that. What we'd feel about that.
So it's not a matter of just counting the bodies and saying, oh, wow, this is normal. It's a matter of, I think, keeping our respect in society.
There are some commentators who have said, Oh, well, this isn't cost effective. You know, if we just let all these old people die, we'd be saving all these billions of pounds. And we're spending too much to save these lives. And I think there are two answers against that. First of all, if you didn't take these measures, it would be vastly more. It'd be vast numbers. But even if you allow for that, that even those numbers would be very expensive - if you don't take account of this cost effectiveness analysis, which I'm a big fan, that sort of thing that NICE does in deciding about whether to pay for NHS treatments or not, it values a human life a year of human good quality human life out 20 to 30,000 pounds a year. Just like the Department of Transport values a human life at about 1.6 million pounds, and that's what they'll spend on road improvements that's expected to save one life. So the value money is put on the human life, and maybe in the end we'll have spent more than that to say these lives, but the road improvements and the NICE decisions are all to do with actually providing benefits to people. You invest in that and that will give someone benefit. What this investment is, is to stop people being enormously harmed.
Michael
There is an old argument that the great benefit, or one of the great benefits, the NHS brought was to lift the sense of fear. That people no longer had to wonder whether they had the resources of their own in order to make sure they were going to live. And that fear is one of those very general dispersed emotional qualities which we'd all probably pay quite a lot to get rid of.
David
Yeah, and just think how fearful you would be if you thought if you're going to get ill, there's no ambulance that would come, there was no bed available, there was no treatment available for you. You just had to lie at home and suffer and possibly die unnecessarily. And that's what would happen in this country if the thing was allowed to really let rip.
Michael
So the articles, I saw one this morning, saying that lockdown wasn't worth it for this reason, - you know, where we're probably not saving that many years of additional life and we're doing so at a cost of lives lost through deep recession that might outweigh the gain. You're not sympathetic?
David
No, I'm not sympathetic at all. But the one thing in that article I was sympathetic about is to say that this is not a matter of lives versus money. This is lives versus lives. We really do have to think about the fact that this intervention is itself causing great harm to individuals and society, both in terms of mental health, domestic abuse, unemployment, poverty, and so on. But as people have written as well, it's a bit like after the financial crisis: the financial crisis didn't hurt anybody. What hurt people was the steps taken after it in order to return to normal: the austerity. People can argue about what the impact was, but it was huge in terms of public health. I believe that and similarly for this: the crucial thing about this is about the harms done after this. Obviously there are very short term harms in terms of employment and so on, but the long term harm is not determined by the epidemic, it is determined by what is done after the epidemic.
Michael
In the end, how will we know how dangerous the virus has been overall? Do we have to look at 'all cause mortality'. Something really big, in the round, you know, some great aggregate calculation?
David
It's going to be very difficult. And I think we will be looking at excess deaths at the end of this. And as I said, I think at the end of it the excess deaths may not be that huge. We'll have various numbers, we'll have the number of death certificates on which it has been written. And that data is coming in now - very valuable. And we'll have the number of cases that have been reported from hospitals, we will have these sources. But in the end I would predict that it's not going to make a big dent in the overall mortality of the country.
Michael
Thinking about this, as you said right at the beginning, in terms of your own sense of personal risk: let's assume the numbers we have are ball park okay - can you put them in the context of all the risks we run in normal life? And say how the risks to you compare with David Spiegelhalter's normal life, say, a year or two ago?
David
Yeah, I did this and I was amazed, and it's helped me enormously in dealing with my own feelings about this. I was using the mortality rates, the infection mortality rates, published by Imperial College, which may be a bit high, but I used those. And they rise incredibly steeply with age - exponentially with age. And then I thought, you know, what else rises exponentially with age? Well, our normal risk of dying rises exponentially with age! And it's amazing - if you draw a graph of the average risk dying at each age in the country (you can get that from government life tables), and you plot these Covid 19 risks on top of it, they go almost along the line. It's staggering. And what this means is that, essentially if you get Covid 19, the risk of dying is very roughly equivalent to the risk you'd normally have over the whole year: it packs a year's worth of risk into the few weeks that you've got the disease. And that kind of puts it in perspective, what it shows is that this is a relative risk, whatever risk you've got, at the moment, it ups it enormously for that short period, if it's three or four weeks, then maybe that's 15 times your normal risk. And so we can really understand why frail, vulnerable people are at such high risk, why it's so dangerous for them because they're at risk anyway and suddenly it shoots up, they get a whole year's worth, you know, in less than a month.
Michael
So you say you say you find this reassuring!?
David
Oh yeah, because I like to think I'm very fit and healthy and I'm invincible! And I'm not that worried about dying in the next year. So I wouldn't get that worried about dying from Covid 19.
Michael
So if you're, say, a 60 something looking at the risk that you would have had of not making it from one birthday to another - that's about the risk squashed into a couple of weeks that you experience if you get Covid 19?
David
Exactly, very roughly. For adults over about 25,
Michael
So if it didn't worry you before....?
David
...Yeah..you shouldn't be that worried about getting the disease. But if you're actually old, vulnerable, frail, and realize that your life is limited, then this is obviously deeply worrying. And that's why of course, people, you know, are being shielded because these are the very people who, who it's going to affect.
Michael
Now, we should be clear, when we say it's the same as normal risk, we don't mean that it's instead of normal risk. You can't swap one with the other!
David
No, no, no, if you survive this, you still got to go through the whole year as well! So yeah, I'm afraid you don't become invincible for the year if you survive Covid!
Michael
Then we've got to adjust that, possibly if we say that maybe you wouldn't have made it through the year anyway. There will be some overlap with those people who are going to die anyway?
David
Yeah, there will be some overlap for very vulnerable people.
Michael
Can we talk about it in terms of life expectancy? Can we phrase it in that way?
David
I thought about that. Not really, I don't think you can do that easily. Because it's a short term impact. It's a real pulse of risk you're having to take. So I don't think it works well in terms of life expectancy. And it doesn't work well in terms of, you know, just a percentage chance of dying because it varies so much between people. It's almost pointless mentioning it. It just multiplies your standard risk by a certain amount.
Michael
For quite a lot of people I can imagine that putting the risk like that, it will suddenly feel rather unremarkable, even for some of those, you know, in a reasonable state of risk, you know, 60 something and they think, well, I wasn't afraid before I should maybe I'm maybe I'm not afraid now. Can you explain how that kind of risk can result in so much pressure on the NHS, if it seems unremarkable?
David
Oh, just because it's vast numbers of people. If everyone got it in the country, you'd have a year's worth of deaths in a month. You'd have a vast pulse of pressure, because all this risk has been packed in together. Spread over the year, we can deal with this risk.
Michael
Okay, finally, just looking to the endgame.... is your sense that unless a vaccine is discovered, we might be expecting the same number of deaths eventually? And what we are trying to do is just flatten that curve and spread them out so that we can cope with them? Or do you think we might actually be able to suppress it in some more permanent way?
David
An integral part of the modeling by Imperial College was the assumption that we could space out the impact of this virus by starting off with very stringent measures, then relaxing them and then expecting that there would be a resurgence and then having to bring in some measures again, maybe not the full lockdown, and so on. And so it forms a wave of bringing in measures and then relaxing them, in order to stop the hospital system being overwhelmed.
Michael
David, thank you for helping us get a handle on what all these numbers mean and for your own frank assessment of just how much we still can't be sure about. Glad to feel that you're not too worried. I have to say I'm not too worried either and I'm supposedly at high risk. For those who are worried, I hope there's at least some evidence in this podcast. Thanks very much indeed.
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
How can we communicate about climate change in the most engaging, informative and even persuasive ways? What are the different audiences we need to reach, and how can we craft effective communications for each of them?
Joining David to guide us through the psychology, politics and science of climate change communication we have:
Dr Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Dr Emily Shuckburgh OBE, Climate scientist and Director of Cambridge Zero
Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory
https://riskytalk.libsyn.com/communicating-about-climate-change
David 0:03
Hello, and welcome to Risky Talk, the podcast where we talk about risk and how to talk about risk. I'm your host, David Spiegelhalter, and in this episode we're tackling possibly the most urgent and contentious issue of the day climate change.
Anthony 0:21
Four out of 10 adults on the planet have never heard of climate change. Never heard of it. That's almost 2 billion people.
Emily 0:27
It's about telling stories as much as it is about showing people facts and figures around the climate science.
Sander 0:32
A lot of the framing is about loss. Nobody likes losing, right, you can get different responses to people just by changing the frame.
David 0:46
What are the most effective ways to communicate about climate change? A few years ago, I had a crack at it myself, and I co presented a BBC documentary called climate change by numbers. We tried to find entertaining ways to make some of the numbers around climate change come alive. I remember firing a paintball gun in a forest to illustrate Monte Carlo modeling. We were hoping to entertain and inform. But of course, there are lots of groups both individuals and governments who originally want much, much more. They want to achieve major transformational change, changing the way we behave as individuals and changing the way whole industries and economies operate. Now, communication is going to be vital if any of this is going to happen. And my guests today all have skin in the game as climate change communicators themselves and as behavioral scientists studying climate communications, Dr. Emily Shuckburgh is an accomplished mathematician and climate scientist, and also the Director of Cambridge zero. Emily, welcome to Risky Talk.
Emily 1:49
Thank you, David.
David 1:50
Before I introduce the others, can you give us a quick sense of what your mission is with Cambridge Zero?
Emily 1:54
So Cambridge Zero is a new initiative of the University of Cambridge which aims to bring all the resources of the university together to help support the delivery of a zero carbon world. So to focus specifically on the solutions.
David 2:08
We're so pleased to have you here. We also have Dr. Sander van der Linden with us. Sander is the director of the Cambridge Social Decision Making Laboratory. Welcome Sander.
Sander 2:17
Pleasure to be on the show.
David 2:18
Sander, you're a social psychologist. So what kind of topics do you work on that are relevant to climate change?
Sander 2:24
So I study how people think, feel and act on the issue of climate change. And so that entails how people assess evidence, how they perceive the risk, the emotions that they experience, as well as how people decide whether or not to act on the issue.
David 2:38
And finally, I'm delighted that we've got Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz on the line from the USA. Anthony is the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Welcome, Anthony.
Anthony 2:49
Hi, David. Great to be with you.
David 2:50
So Anthony, what does your work focus on at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication?
Anthony 2:56
Well, two broad things. One is research and the other is public outreach space. On the research side, much like Sander, we study how Americans and other people around the world respond to this issue. So what do they know? And misunderstand? How do they perceive the risks? What kinds of policies they support? What kinds of behaviors are they engaged in? And then what are the psychological, cultural and political reasons why some people get really engaged, others are kind of apathetic, and some are downright dismissive and hostile. And then based on all that research, we also have our own effort to engage the at least the American public with a national radio program we call Climate Connections. And these are 90 second stories - brand new every day Monday through Friday - that play on about 525 stations across the country. And they feature the voices of everyday people from every walk of life, who are either experiencing the impacts of climate change right here right now. Or even more importantly, rolling up their sleeves and taking action to actually address the issue within their own domain or sphere of influence. So great to be with you.
David 3:59
Well, we've got a fantastic panel of guests to discuss these issues. So let's get started.
Can I just stand back a moment and ask: what are you all actually trying to do? I'm chair of the Winton Center in Cambridge and our mantra, which we drone on about the whole time is that we're seeking to inform people, rather than persuade them. We want to empower people to make informed choices. We work in health and all sorts of others areas on informed consent. But, you know, climate change communication is to do with getting people to change their behavior. I mean, am I right in this? And, you know, does this mean it's very different from a lot of the other risk communication that we that we do and we talk about?
Emily 4:48
If what we're trying to achieve through climate science communications is essentially better informing people so that they make whatever decisions they want to make, then that's one perfectly laudable aim. And there are certain things you might want to try and do in order to make sure that that communication happens as effectively as possible. If what we're really wanting to do is to get people to take a particular course of action and change that behavior in certain ways, then then you might question whether actually telling them about the climate science is the right thing to do in the first place. And so being really clear about what the goal of those communications are...
David 5:25
But do you think people are generally clear?
Emily 5:28
I think it's often completely mixed up. And I think that's understandable because if you think about the people who are communicating, let's take climate scientists just because I am one. We have been studying, you know, the changing climate, we've seen the changes. I'm a polar scientist, I've seen the changes and the scale of the changes, and it's horrifying and so it's very difficult not to get personally involved and and to want certain outcomes from your communication. Trying to dissociate and step back from that and be as dispassionate as possible is challenging
David 6:08
Sander, is it okay to use these behavioral science techniques have been developed for behavior change in the context where you're perhaps more trying to change attitudes?
Sander 6:17
Yeah, I have two big thoughts on that. The first thing I tell all my undergraduate students in in my influence class, is that we're constantly influencing each other, whether we like it or not. With every word that you say, there are unintended consequences that you could not have anticipated on somebody else. Every time somebody comes to class, they hear things and they're influenced one way or another, either because I intend to by showing them evidence or talking about studies or psychology, or by accident, and every time they tell a story to somebody else, they're either intentionally or unintentionally influencing people all the time. So I think the influence process is part of being human. But what we want to do is, is do that in an ethical way and I think that's the key issue. People think stuff all the time and people don't know what other people are thinking, if I reveal to you what other people are thinking, and that influences your behavior, or you change your behavior, that has nothing to do with the information that I gave you! I just told you objectively what other people are doing. And I think that's an interesting distinction to draw. Now, the kind of explicit behavior change stuff like Do we want people to change? I think it's a moral question of what what as a society we decide is normative. We don't want people to steal stuff. And we do change people's behavior when they steal stuff. And we all think that's okay. If we decide we want to do the same for climate change, and maybe that's an ethical thing to do.
David 7:36
Yeah. And I think we have to talk about ethics and in this area. In what situations is it reasonable to try to persuade somebody of a fact? That's correcting a misunderstanding, perhaps that seems fairly reasonable. But actually, there's a reason for doing that. And I'm sure when you do your studies, your your some of your outcome measures might include things like intentioan and attitude and things like that. Which then actually reveal perhaps the aim of what you're doing. Tony, how do you feel on this business of informing versus persuading?
Anthony 8:10
Yeah. So I think it's important to recognize the messenger as well as the role that they're in because of the context they're in. So context is always king. If a woman goes into see her doctor, and the doctor runs a bunch of tests, and the doctor comes back and says, I'm sorry, Mrs. Smith, but I have to inform you that you have cancer. That's a fact. But that's a fact that comes with an enormous amount of weight, right, a enormous amount of emotional reaction to your concern, and perhaps motivation to do something about that. And then the doctor can follow up with a subsequent set of facts. And here are three different choices of you know, a prescription, it could be chemotherapy, could be something else that we want, that you need to know to are the options and that's informing the people of what those choices are. That seems to me a really nice example of what we think of as the prototypical scientists job in this issue is to inform the public inform policymakers, informed decision makers, here is the threat. Here's the danger that we face now with this thing called climate change. And moreover, let's not stop there, here are the range of potential solutions that can be done. That seems entirely appropriate. But the other thing to say here is that scientists are also citizens. And it is entirely okay and appropriate for a scientist to say, Okay, I'm going to wear a different hat now. And I'm going to speak as a citizen who happens to be a particularly informed citizen because I happen to study this issue,
David 9:44
but they hide you know, whether Do they know which hat he's wearing, because again, you know, when you hear somebody talking all day, which hat are they wearing, when they're being a scientist that isn't there some issue about, you know, the scientific view with that all that all authority, just carrying over into advocacy so easily.
Anthony 10:03
Yes. And that's I think back to Emily's point is where it's actually incumbent upon scientists to try to make that clear to their audiences when they're speaking as a scientist that is trying to be true to the data and the evidence as best they can, even if that's inconvenient, versus what their ambitions are as a citizen that happens to care about the future that we all are going to live in together.
David 10:26
Okay, so on to say, Tell me how a company might use psychology in order to change their customers behavior.
Sander 10:31
Yeah. So this is what Robert Cialdini, who's a social psychologist called ethical influence. And and the way they do this is so, O Power was a famous example of an energy company. And you might ask, why would an energy company actively encourage their customers to consume less energy? But there were startup and they were, you know, more inclined to do something about about climate change. And so they basically gave customers a bill and on that bill, there was comparative information about the level of energy that their close neighbors were consuming. So people saw their own consumption relative to that of their neighbors. And they found that people would adjust their own energy consumption to the level of their neighbors, which is kind of conforming with the local norm. And again, they weren't telling people what they should be doing with their lives. But that is just a behavior that emerged. And later they found that sometimes this doesn't really work. When if somebody is doing well, and they're consuming less energy, and they found out to do much better than their neighbors, they start to backslide and conform to the opposite. But they find out if they put a smiley face on the building, you're doing good, that reinforces the behavior and just a small incentive like that actually had an enormous effect. Well, the effect actually was small was about a 1% to 2% increase. But when you scale that across all of the hundreds of thousands of customers, it really added up. And they think that's ethical because we're just revealing actual information to people. And that's why I'm always confused when people say that knowledge doesn't matter, because what we're doing in those experiments is just exposing people to information they hadn't considered before - that is what other people are actually doing. And then, you know, to the last point, David, your point about about wearing different hats. When I give a talk I always ask the audience, because I'm generally interested in this is whether they want scientists to advocate for evidence based policy. Because ultimately, you know, scientists are paid often by tax dollars. And if the public wants us to advocate for science and evidence based policy, if that norm is changing, then maybe that's legitimate for scientists to start considering doing that. But if the public doesn't want it, that's another story. Right? We can have a conversation, but it's kind of interesting that scientists talk about it, but we less often ask the public about what they want from scientists.
David 12:43
But there's a difference between advocating for evidence to be used in Policymaking, which I think no one would disagree with, and advocating for a particular policy, which I think is not you know, many might consider is going beyond the role of many of scientists.
Sander 12:56
Okay, that's a fair that's a fair point. I think most scientists would advocate a range of, as Tony was saying plausible solutions to climate change. And then we have to communicate the benefits and harms and debate each of these solutions to see which one is going to be best. But you know, what does best means you know, it's good for some people and bad for other people. That's a very complex political question.
David 13:21
Winners and losers?
Sander 13:22
Winners and losers. That's right.
David 13:28
Okay, so we agree that communicating about climate change involves informing different audiences, both about the science and the potential options available, but can also involve ethical persuasion, at least to get people to take notice of the issue and not be misled by false claims. Now, the next step is to learn about the different audiences so we can tailor different communications. So first, we need to shut up and listen! What do we know about the attitudes of different groups of people towards climate change? What do they know already? What do they worry about, what's driving their attitudes? Anthony, I know you've done a lot of work on this in the USA. Can you kick us off here?
Anthony 14:07
Sure, well, actually, I'm going to work at many different levels. So let me take the global scale. And first few key things that we need to understand from that perspective. One is that the United States and the UK and Australia and Canada are outliers. These are the only countries where you really find an organized climate denial movement. And so yes, we tend to fixate on, you know, this debate over the science quote, unquote, debate. But that's, you gotta understand that's really primarily limited to these four English speaking countries. But more importantly, at the global scale, we found that four out of 10 adults on the planet have never heard of climate change. Never heard of it. That's almost 2 billion people. And that's despite decades of science. You know, all the scientific reports the geopolitical meetings, the COPS, you know, the big international conferences on climate change. Despite all that, nearly 40% of the of the world have never heard of it. And that can be as high as two thirds or even three quarters of certain pop certain countries like say Bangladesh, poster child of climate vulnerability, two thirds of Bangladeshis have never heard of it. Which is not to say they're not keenly aware of changes in their local climate, they are because people are exquisitely attuned to these changes, because often their lives depend on it there. They may be subsistence farmers, for example. But what they lack is the concept of climate change, to make sense of those changes that are happening around them. And even more importantly, they don't have the concept of climate change, to help them make an informed their decisions going forward. These are countries that are building entire new cities. You know, where do we build them? Where do we site our hospitals, our schools, our roads, to what tolerance should we be building? What crops are we going to grow in our country, if you're making those decisions without the benefit of understanding the risks of climate change, you're probably putting your money in on some really bad bets. So anyway, that's just a global perspective, that's really important. Last thing, just to say, though, is that we also see a huge north south divide the developed world far more aware of climate change the developing world, much less so. But when you ask how personally at risk are you have the impacts of climate change, we find the opposite pattern that people in the developed world like the UK, like the US, like most of Europe, etc, say, not so much, it's not going to affect me, it's mostly going to impact people in places far away. Whereas people in the developing world who at least are aware of the issue, among those people, they're very concerned, much more concerned than people in the developed world, and quite rightly, because they are in most cases, much more vulnerable, and much less resilient to the impacts.
David 16:55
Fascinating to hear about that international perspective, but of course, we do hear a lot of bad You know the arguments and the contested opinions in in for example the US. So how do people break into different groups in the US?
Anthony 17:08
so many years ago we started a project that we call global warming six America's. Back to your principles of core communication - the first principle is know your audience! That's why you shut up and listen, because you want to know who your audiences. So, who are they? Because only once you understand who that audience is, can you then structure your communications in a way to meet them where they are? Not where you are. Okay, I cannot stress that enough. How do you meet and engage people where they are. And in the US, we've identified these six Americans and they range on a spectrum from a group called the Alarmed - fully convinced it's happening human caused urgent strongly support action. It's about 31% of the country today. Then the Concerned who are also convinced is happening human caused and serious but still tend to think that the impacts is far away in time and space. So it doesn't seem as urgent than a group called the Cautious still on the fence. Is it real or not? Then a group called the Disengaged who's basically like many other people around the world, like, I don't think I even know anything about this. I've never heard of climate change. And then a group we call the Doubtful These are people who say, it's probably not real, but if it is, it's natural, just natural cycles, nothing we can do anything about. And then last but not least, at about 10% of the American public are what we call the Dismissive, who are firmly convinced it's not real. It's not human caused, it's not serious. And moreover, the great majority of whom literally are conspiracy theorists. They say it's a hoax. It's scientists making up data. It's a UN plot to take away American sovereignty. It's a get rich scheme by Al Gore and his friends and many other such narratives. But the critical thing to just end with here is that that's only 10%, but there are a really loud 10%. They're a really vocal 10% that's more than well represented in our government, and they have tended to dominate the Public Square to such an extent that they've actually intimidated most of the other 90% of the population into not talking about the issue. And if nobody talks about it, then it's very difficult as a society to say, yes, this is a crucial urgent issue to address. So that basic element of communication, talking about the issues turns out to be one of the foundational gaps in at least the United States and I would suggest in many other countries around the world.
David 19:29
Can I just briefly go over to ask Emily about how that compares with the situation UK, I think with these different tribal groups, how does that is that reflected in the UK as well?
Emily 19:39
I think it probably is, to an extent, right. I'm a climate scientist by background. So I spent much of the last 25 years trying to try to get over the message of climate science around the risks associated with climate change, and it has undoubtedly been quite frustrating at times to cut through some of the some of the rhetoric And and the vested interest and so forth. And I guess some of the things that that we've been hearing here about the different groups that I mean, I know that probably the percentages are a bit different, but it's still it's still a similar, so all sorts of different types of people
David 20:13
Anthony, we're talking about in our education and climate science and things like that. How much is this a matter of knowledge and understanding in the different groups?
Anthony 20:22
So it depends. Here's where we're going to get into the psychology, because we also find there's a fair amount of motivated reasoning going on at the extremes.
David 20:32
Can you explain what that means?
Anthony 20:34
Of course, so at least in the United States, and I daresay in the UK as well, one of the major drivers of this is politics. Okay, I know I'm breaking news here. But, you know, the politics is really, really toxic. If this issue, climate change is now more politically polarized in the United States than issues like abortion. So where basically democrats and liberals are very, very concerned about climate change and want to take aggressive action. And basically conservative Republicans dismiss it, it's still a common refrain that this is not a problem at all. So politics is a big part of it. Even deeper than that are commitments to value systems, a deeper worldview, which we label as egalitarian worldview versus an individualistic or a radical, individualistic worldview. But here's the critical caveat, that that's really driven by those people at either ends of the spectrum, the Alarmed who tend to be much more egalitarian and concerned about climate change, and the Dismissive who are much more in that radical individualism perspective. For them this is about their identity. This is about their deep moral value commitments about their visions of a preferred society. And, and as a result, they're deeply motivated to cherry pick, interpret the evidence in such a way that seems to reinforce their basic conclusions about the way the world should work. So if you're anti government, you just inherently believe that all government is bad, that there's too much taxation, too much regulation, government's too big we, in the famous words or infamous words of Grover Norquist here in the United States who said, "I want to shrink government to the size that I can drown it in a bathtub". If that's your worldview, then you see climate change as the mother of all threats, right? Because it's it is this giant collective action problem. There's no way that through our individual actions collectively we can solve this. We have to do this through system change. And one of the major ways that we do major structural change in our societies is government. Yes, they often will argue about the science but yes, scratch below the surface. And what you find is really going on what they're often really motivated by is this deep fear that this is going to lead to bigger government, which is again a violation of their deeper held values.
David 22:53
So is there a group for whom improving of knowledge and understanding through better communication you think might actually change their opinion?
Anthony 23:01
Absolutely. So what knowledge are we talking about? The Alarmed are highly motivated right now to take action, but they don't know what to do. Okay, as a community, we've done a far better job with that group of explaining the threat, then we have the solutions. And so one of the key things that we really try to emphasize is how important it is to give people, not just the solutions, but what's called in psychological terms, a sense of efficacy. There's a deep literature here about how important is to give people solutions that they know of, that they have the ability to enact those solutions, and most importantly, that if they do them, it will make a difference. So one communication need is to communicate to the Alarmed and even the Concerned, here are the things that you can do. But to the other groups that are mostly in the middle, they really just don't know that much about the issue. There is still a need to basically communicate five key facts. Okay, and through our work, we think it basically comes down to the five key facts that everybody ought to know. And moreover, we boiled those down to just 10 keywords, friend of mine converted them to a haiku. So I'll give you that one.
Scientists agree. It's real. It's us. It's bad. But there's hope.
That's basically what everyone needs to know. You know, if you're managing water resources, you need to know a whole lot more about climate change, no question. But for most people, they're going to have limited shelf space devoted to this issue or any complex issue, frankly. And those are the basics.
David 24:37
Sander does this reflect your experience as well?
Sander 24:40
Yeah, I mean, Tony and I do a lot of research together. And I would agree with that on a lot of levels. Perhaps a good way to think of it is that is that knowledge is often necessary but not sufficient for people to act on information. And you know, from everything in psychology, we know that people are experiencers rather than analytical processers, most of the time. And and that's important to keep in mind, I think when when we try to educate people on this issue. And there are people who are motivated in their beliefs. And and I think, you know, it's good to realize that these are normal processes. To some extent, our attention is selective. That's the way the brain reacts to information. David, if, if you didn't make choices about what's important to you on a daily basis, life would get very complicated if you try to consume everything that comes at you. And so we are inherently selective in what we choose to attend to. But when that gets into overdrive, and people attach political beliefs and motivations to really distorting reality to how they view the world, and as Tony rightly said, I think you find those people at the extremes, not so much in the middle. And I think that perhaps the hopeful takeaway from that is that people in the middle are receptive to certain kinds of evidence when appropriately communicated, but perhaps people on the extremes are more difficult and that is a challenge because it because they do have an outsized influence on the climate debate in places like the US, Australia and perhaps also the UK.
David 26:05
Yeah, Emily, I mean, you do a lot of communication. How do you tailor your messages to these different audiences, I was thinking of extremes on both sides, who are extremely vocal?
Emily 26:15
So I do a lot of communications to business leaders, people in the financial sector, etc. And in that professional context, if I'm presenting the climate science, I've always found that people are very receptive because I think that in that professional context, they, they perhaps are more accepting of taking on board facts in a rational way, than they might be in other contexts. And oftentimes that I've seen that follow through into actual action as a consequence of that. If you're talking more generally in a different setting where people are less in that sort of rational frame of mind, then then I have as I said earlier, I've always found that really critical thing is to make things relevant to people's lives. And and actually, in both circumstances, it's about telling stories as much as it is about showing people the facts and figures around the climate science.
David 27:13
And you co-authored one of the Ladybird Expert series on Climate Change with Tony Juniper and Prince Charles as well! So that aims to be very simple and accessible. Given the complexity of climate science. How do you start doing that?
Emily 27:27
Well, I said there were two things around that. We hadthe whole of the IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change report - condensed down into 26 pages of 200 words, which was quite a challenge in itself!
David 27:42
200 words altogether or each page!?
Emily 27:46
Every page! But, coming back to our earlier points about segmenting the audiences, we very much didn't want that book to be preaching to the converted. So we wanted to be reaching sectors of society that wouldn't ordinarily be, you know, thinking about climate change as an issue. And so we were very careful in terms of the language that we used to make sure that it would be appealing to those audiences.
David 28:15
Climate Science is complicated. So what are the particular issues that present a real challenge in communicating to people?
Emily 28:22
I think the overwhelming thing that has been difficult to communicate to people about climate change is the fact that for many people at a scene, like being seen as a distant problem, so either distant in terms of something will happen long into the future, or distant in terms of something that happens to people who live elsewhere rather than to them personally, and then it comes back to whether or not they feel personally at risk. I think one of the things that's been really interesting over the last 18 months or so, if we've seen the rise of Greta Thunberg and the school strikes and so forth, is that that has been a way of making what seemed like a very distant problem much more immediate, because these are young people who are saying, hang on a minute, this isn't a distant problem for us. This is our future at stake. And so it's almost giving a visual representation to something that we've been struggling for a very long time from the climate science community to try to be able to explain.
David 29:21
Climate science uses models that making predictions about the future and there's a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen. How do you face up to that and in telling people about that?
Emily 29:33
Well, as you know, - all those words that you just said, 'uncertainty', you know, it's inherent in what we do from a scientific analysis perspective. And yet there's something that is very difficult to communicate and you have to be very careful to ensure that things are not lost in translation, that what we're trying to explain from the climate science side of things isn't interpreted incorrectly by people. So a lot of the times when we talk about 'uncertainty' people hear that we don't know what we're talking about. And somehow we've got to make sure that we're that we don't mean that at all.
How do you best do that?
Well, you're the expert!
David 30:16
But if say, oh, it's only a model, it's only a theory. You know, you run models many times and always get different answers, different predictions about what's going to happen? You know, how can you have any confidence in what's going to happen in the future?
Emily 30:27
Yeah. So I, I do think that this is about creating a whole narrative. So there are some things that we absolutely know. And we can observe, and for some people, that is the most compelling thing. So for example, one thing that I always start off my scientific presentations on is a description of the ice cores that we drill in Antarctica, because what happens is that the air gets trapped in the snow as it falls. And then that means when we drill down through the ice, you can recover the actual air that was in the atmosphere, up to a million or so years ago in the past, and we can analyze it. So that's actual data. And and through that, we can see how the climate has naturally changed over hundreds of thousands of years. And that's a question that I often used to get asked. People used to say, well, hasn't the climate always changed? And it has! But we can also see how different that the levels of carbon dioxide in the past were compared to today's levels. And to demonstrate that today's climate change is vastly outside the natural cycle of change. So I think it's those sorts of things. And if I'm able to actually take samples of ice cores, into public audiences, and if people are actually able to hold the bits of ice core themselves and listen to the bubbles burst and the ice, then somehow they find that even more compelling because they've had that personal interaction with the evidence base. So I think some of those aspects are really important for grounding and building up a sense of trust. People are used to, you know, trusting things based on their own intuition and experiences. So if you can give people a sense of that, then I feel that they are more likely to take on trust the things that they don't have the ability to be able to actually test for themselves.
David 32:14
Exactly. These are facts that you're trying to communicate. But when you're doing the models, we have a lot of uncertainty about the future. I'm really interested in just what kind of language you might use to a fairly naive audience, when describing the fact that you do run models many times and they come up with different conclusions, and that gives you some idea of what the risks are?
Emily 32:37
Yeah, but I think that keep that word is key risks. So I think people, you know, people are used to risks in their everyday life on a in a way that I think they're less used to using the terminology of uncertainty. So I think that I think describing things in in terms of the risks is a much more understandable it fits in more with people's sense. of how the world works than if we start talking in a scientific way about the uncertainty on future projections.
David 33:07
So you don't express certainty about what's going to happen?
Emily 33:13
We can't!
David 33:15
But some people do! So the languages is of risk?
Emily 33:20
Absolutely.
Anthony 33:22
Can I springboard off that? So yeah.
David 33:24
Yes, I was about to come back to you.
Anthony 33:26
So first of all, I want to make a broader point. And that is that the climate community, and it's mostly because it originally came out of climate scientists, I think, have allowed the opponents of action to push them into a really unfair double standard. I mean, we're talking about making big social, economic and political decisions. Why is climate science policy being held to a completely different and much higher standard of evidence than all of our other massive social decision making? We're more certain about the the reality and the causes and the impacts of climate change than we are about cigarette smoking, harming human health. And yet as societies, we make huge decisions like - let me just take our good friends sitting there in the UK - you're about you are in the middle of taking a massive experiment in Brexit! Do you have that all completely modeled out? Are you completely certain of exactly what's going to happen?
And there are many, many, many decisions, economic decisions, political decisions. I mean, we went to war in Iraq....! Nobody had that certainty. And yet for some reason, our community has allowed the other side to demand that we need to have 100% certainty about the future projected by climate change, or climate science, in order to make a decision. That's ridiculous. We don't assume that level of certainty in any any major decision that we make in our personal lives, let alone our national live. So I think we just we totally screwed that up. The second is that that language of risk does open the conversation with specific audiences. So Emily mentioned this with Business audiences, I've found this with, say, leaders in the financial industry. These are people who live and die based on risk. And when you explain that climate change is uncertain, and that in fact, when we look at these projections, there are what we call fat tails. You know, yes, there are our best projections. And right now, we think that the central tendency best projection is that if we continue on current paths, the world will warm by three to three and a half degrees centigrade by the end of the century. That's just the best estimate. The fact is, is that there's this long tail where there's probably a 5 to 10% chance that it could be runaway climate change, with temperatures going much, much higher than that which would be completely catastrophic, not that three degrees is any picnic. And when you explain that concept to people in the financial industry, they immediately get it because they say, look, if there was something out there that had a 5% or 10% chance of killing my company, or killing my investment, I would do everything possible to hedge against that. Okay. And just to put this in very concrete terms, if one out of every 20 airplanes exploded in midair, Would any of us fly? And yet, that's essentially the risk that we're taking with the one planet, the one spacecraft, if you will, that we all have.
David 36:46
Okay, let's just take stock for a moment. We've heard that business audiences understand the language of risk and probability. And the groups in the middle, the Cautious and the Disengaged, who tend not to know that much about climate, they're responsive to learning about evidence and to being informed. And we've also heard about the Alarmed - this group most worried about climate change - and they want clear guidance about what to do what actions to take, they need to feel that there's things they can do, that will really make a difference. But what about the Dismissive, you know, that group, you know, maybe 10%, who are skeptics? We've heard about the politics and values associated with that view. But how do you tailor messages towards them? Sander?
Sander 37:32
Yeah, so we've been we've been doing quite a bit of research on on what facts are so called non polarizing facts. What facts do people accept in a way that doesn't drive people further apart on the issue? And we found through lots of studies, actually, is that when we stress that over 97% of climate scientists, based on the evidence, have concluded that human caused - human caused - climate change is happening, most people are willing to accept that fact because because one you're not asking asking them to overhaul their worldview entirely. You're just asking them to accept the fact that scientists think that global warming is happening. But it seems to be a gateway to opening up a larger conversation without necessarily telling people that they're wrong in their beliefs right out the gate. And so it's an interesting position to start a conversation. And we found that that's quite successful across the political spectrum. And I think it's also interesting because it's it's what Tony was saying earlier about, you know, maybe people aren't necessarily denying the science - there's something called solution aversion, that people are averse to the solutions that are being proposed based on the science and I think decoupling that is helpful - it's not so much that people are really hating on the science, it's more what the science implies for them politically. And I think the scientific consensus is a nice way to actually decouple that and and there we're actually stressing certainty. I mean, there is a margin of error around the 99% is that we have some colleagues who engage in this debate rising 99 99.9% or 97%. But the big point is that it's it's most scientists. And that's just on the issue of whether humans are contributing to climate change. So we're not talking about the complex future predictions and all the uncertainty, that's a nice sort of isolated case where you can say, actually, there's a lot of certainty not uncertainty, but certainty on that particular fact. And, and people seem quite ready to, to accept that fact. And then they're a little bit more open to other ideas about climate change as well.
David 39:30
How can you reduce this idea of distance that Emily and Tony have talked about that where people feel Oh, well, it's a long way away, it's the other side of the world has nothing to do with me, even though they might believe that this is actually happening?
Sander 39:43
Yeah, it's a great question. I think Emily made a great point by you know, by bringing the actual ice into into the lecyure - not you know, not in the sense of seeing global warming. here's, here's the, here's an ice ball. But you know, in the sense of actually educating people about the science. Because the human brain - we wrote this this paper a while back where we had five lessons for people and this is the first one is - that the human brain privileges experience over analysis. And that's you know, people learn through intuition and through experience and if they can actually experience the evidence in a concrete way that's just a much more powerful way for people to learn. I love this quote from Mark Twain who once said, you know, "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." [LAUGHTER] Now, you should never carry a cat by the tail, right? But it gets the point across. What I also like is, if I ask you to judge what peanut butter tastes like - without ever having tasted peanut butter, but you have to judge it based on the ingredient list. It's a very difficult thing for people to do, right you experience the world and that's how how we gather knowledge. And in a way scientific consensus, if you think of in the Bayesian way, it's also a form of experience sampling. And we have another paper about the 'experience of consensus' disucssing wjhen you show people (and john oliver has a really funny segment where he brings out 97 scientists on stage), when you experience the numbers, that's how people come to think of what that actually means. And local impacts, I think that's the other thing I would say, you know, when you have the opportunity and when science is such that you you can actually relate local trends and changing weather patterns to climate change, pointing out for people locally, what the impacts are, but also how they can locally implement knowledge about what to do about it. And that's the thing about local knowledge. I think those are those are sort of key key points.
David 41:29
And what about, you know, people just not wanting to give things up, you know, why should I lose, you know, lose something for some rather ill defined benefit sometime in the future?
Sander 41:41
Yeah, that's another great one. And again, that paper that's that's kind of one of the lessons that we attack is the gain versus loss framing. Because the whole climate change debate and, - and when we sort of distilled the literature and started thinking about this - a lot of the framing is about loss. Nobody likes losing, right. This is not a good beneficial frame for people to think about if climate change to you just means having a loose things, having to change your behavior and make sacrifices, you know, lose land lose, you know, income, sacrifice all sort of things. That's not a very nice way for people to engage people really. And so you could take the same issue and use a gain frame instead of a loss frame. Of course, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize Laureate, psychologist and Prospect Theory who has done a lot of research on this kind of shows that you can get different responses to people just by changing the frame. So if instead, you say the people, this is not, you know, if we act on climate change, and if we invest in it, then, you know, this is the this is the loss of national income per head per capita, that's a loss for and that doesn't sound good as a policy proposal. But if you reframe that as a foregone gain, saying, This is what you would have gained because it goes up every year, but now you're gaining a little bit less, you're still gaining, and that's that's a good thing, right? And so just that simple tweak in framing can mean a lot to how people perceive an issue.
Emily 42:59
So building off that one thing - as I said at the start, I've taken over, I'm Director of Cambridge Zero, which is all focused around solutions. And one thing that has been really interesting to me is how that changing in framing from being climate scientists talking about the doom and gloom of the future of the world to a more hopeful frame, focused on the solutions, completely changes the picture! We have, you know, the amount of energy and excitement and enthusiasm that we're starting to generate of people wanting to be involved. And I think it's particularly when it's involved down at a local level again, so that was things that they can actually do and get involved in, itt really starts to smoke snowball, and it completely changes the whole dialogue. We've seen in Cambridge, how that can also be about getting people excited in the innovation process itself. So one example there. We have in the engineering department, they're working on developing electric planes and next generation aviation and they're all excited because one of the challenges in the aviation sector is it normally takes decades to develop any new aircraft and engine or aircraft design. And we don't have decades. So what they've been doing is they've been taking innovation techniques from Formula One, and bringing those into the lab. And and by doing that, they they claim to have reduced the research innovation and development timescale by a factor of 100! Now, you can imagine how exciting that is for an engineer. And so they are all super excited about getting involved in that. So it's not just the product itself, it's also the innovation process. That becomes very exciting. On the food example, the University's catering service, looked to see how they could reduce their carbon footprint and one of the biggest ways you can reduce carbon footprint is by removing ruminant means and so that's what they did. But it wasn't just that they removed ruminant meats they also looked at the way in which the food was being presented as options and as a consequence, reduced the footprint of the catering service by some 30% But now, other outlets in the university - catering managers and all the colleges - are starting to get excited about how to do this too. And so in my own college, the catering manager, you know, every time I see him, I go into college, he's been sending his chefs off on vegetarian training courses and winning competitions for the vegetarian offerings they're serving up. He even started trying to serve insects the other day in the college didn't go down too well. But this is about doing something different and a bit innovative. And he's been given more freedom than he's ever been given before to do things differently. And he's finding it very exciting. And he's getting - you know, we're coming down to your smiley faces - he's getting awards for doing it. And suddenly he's the, you know, the most popular kid on the block kind of thing. And that's where I think, what's interesting on all of this is that none of the whole climate science motivation almost gets lost in the story. And everyone gets wrapped up in actually, this is an exciting, innovative, creative, new way of doing things.
David 46:05
And you feel that that could work across a wide range of different audiences?
Emily 46:10
I feel like it does. And I think critical things are the positive framing, that is hope. And somebody mentioned earlier the sense of efficacy because you know, you're involved in the solutions you got you yourself can be it can can contribute in a meaningful way to it, that seems to be important, as well. And and then it building up a sense of collective momentum as well, that this is a positive future.
Anthony 46:33
I would love to springboard off of that. So. So I want to go back just a moment to what Sander was saying very rightly, about the power of experience and that the brain does privilege experience over analysis. But also, you don't have to rely on one's own direct experience. Okay. I mean, if it did, we never would have survived because we'd all have eaten the poison berries. Right. The point of this is that it's also about vicarious experience. That we can learn from each other and the most powerful way that human beings have ever created to communicate from my experience to your, to your understanding, is a story. So if I tell you a story, don't eat that berry, because one of our tribal members ate that and they died horribly, you will never eat that berry without having to actually do it yourself, right and have to having the experience itself. And when it comes to climate change, that's our challenge is that we can't wait for everybody to personally be harmed by climate change to take action because by that time, we're, we're over committed to really serious problems. This there's huge lag times in this. So vicarious experience becomes important. And that's going to bring me back to this radio program I mentioned before, called Climate Connections, because what we're doing with that is hearing the voices of everyday people telling the stories about how they are personally already being harmed right here right now. So it's Not distant, but also the stories of the people who are taking action and making a difference. And so let me just start, I'll just use this story as an example, because it does actually help address some of the larger challenges that we talked about. And that's in the American state of Georgia, there's a utility called Georgia Power that is pretty much got a monopoly over most of the electricity market in the state. Monopolies are great business model. I highly recommend it if you can get one. And they had set the rules so that homeowners who put solar panels on their roof could not sell their electricity into the grid. Why would you want the competition? So in that state, the Sierra Club environmental group partnered with the Atlanta Tea Party. Let me say that again. The Sierra Club partnered with the Tea Party - this far, right libertarian kind of a group - to fight those regulations and they beat them twice. And now homeowners can sell their solar panel generated electricity into the grid. So why would these two groups partner like this? The Sierra Club - easy to understand bunch of greenies tree huggers - they care about climate change, okay? Why would the Tea Party do this when they don't even believe that climate change is real? Because this particular solution, putting put solar panels on your roof aligned with our underlying values of individual liberty, individual freedom, self-reliance, who is some company or some government to tell me what I can and cannot do with my own home? Why should I not be able to participate in the free market if I'm producing surplus electricity, okay. And that is an example of the art of politics. How can you find those policies that can attract the support of completely different groups who will support it for completely different reasons, but the point is, is that you got the policy passed, and in fact, those groups went on to find other things to work on together. They don't agree about lots of stuff, but they have since become affectionately known as the Green Tea Party!
David 50:02
That's amazing. Great, great story. Great story.
Well, we've covered a lot today, we've talked about deciding the aims of the communication and listening to different audiences, crafting tailored messages, and some of the challenges and even solutions to communicating complex climate science, and how insights from psychology can be used by policymakers and others to encourage engagement and understanding and even behavior change, provided it's all a form of ethical persuasion. And that brings us to the end and it's time to say a real thank you to my great guests - Emily Shuckburgh, Sander van der Linden and Anthony Leiserowitz - and to say goodbye from me and the Risky Talk team.
How can we communicate about climate change in the most engaging, informative and even persuasive ways? What are the different audiences we need to reach, and how can we craft effective communications for each of them?
Joining David to guide us through the psychology, politics and science of climate change communication we have:
- Dr Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
- Dr Emily Shuckburgh OBE, Climate scientist and Director of Cambridge Zero
- Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory
Full transcript available here
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Stats about crime, immigration, unemployment and political polls fuel political debate and drive headlines. But how are these ‘soft’ numbers really calculated? How uncertain should we be about them? And how can they be reported honestly and usefully - without losing trust?
Joining David to make sense of the stats and how to communicate them are:
- Dr Robert Cuffe, Head of Statistics at the BBC
- Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority
- Dr Sarah Dryhurst, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Personal genetic risk information is set to be become part of everyday healthcare. But is some unhelpful, even dangerous? What psychological impact does it have on patients? And do doctors know enough about genetics to effectively guide patients and inform treatment decisions?
Joining David to discussing what genetic risks should be communicated and how, we have:
- Professor Robert Green, Director of the Genomes to People group at Harvard Medical School.
- Dr Gemma Chandratillake, Course director of the Genomic Medicine Programme at the University of Cambridge
- Dr Saskia Sanderson, a UCL psychologist working on the impact of genetic information
With a special contribution from Jillian Hastings Ward, Chair of the participant panel for the 100,000 Genomes Project.
Views to share? Get in touch on Twitter @RiskyTalkPod or email riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk.
Risky Talk is produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.
Risky Talk features conversations with the world’s top experts in risk and evidence communication addressing urgent, practical challenges: How can doctors communicate the risks and benefits of medical treatment? How should scientists communicate evidence about climate change? How can journalists make numbers meaningful to readers? How should government institutions convey important statistics?
Hosted by David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel)
Get in touch with us on Twitter (@RiskyTalkPod) or email (riskytalk@maths.cam.ac.uk)
Produced by Ilan Goodman for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.