Risk Perception and Communication: Environmental Tobacco Smoke and Child Health

Tobacco use and ETS issues present a significant challenge to conventional notions of risk communication, which were originally formulated in the late 1980s in the context of involuntary public exposures to chemicals, nuclear power, hazardous waste facilities, and similar technologies. Conventional wisdom on this subject encourages us to concentrate on risk message design and delivery parameters, such as source credibility and empathy, in order to maximize persuasive effectiveness and the elicitation of trust and believability. However, none of the elements in this conventional wisdom is applicable to the case at hand. " Rational-format " risk messages themselves, as well as the conventional forms of message delivery (based on marketing communications strategies), have been shown to fail utterly in the case of tobacco use. In fact, all of the notable decreases in use occurred before the onset of massive, government-financed campaigns against tobacco; and, of course, the rise in youth smoking has occurred in open defiance of the messages in those campaigns. An examination of the obstacles to successful risk communication for tobacco use shows why this has happened: In general, rational-information risk message campaigns are unable to break through the social, educational, attitudinal, psychological and other barriers that exist in the lives of the smoking sub-populations today. In addition, the " iconic " status of tobacco in modern society inhibits governments from taking the more drastic types of actions they would otherwise choose to carry out if there were any other risk factor of similar consequence within their purview. This paper contends that, if the tobacco case teaches us one thing about communication, it is that we must broaden considerably our notion of what constitutes effective risk communication practice. Communication is not just about messages and their delivery; rather, society communicates its changing conceptions of acceptable behaviour in many different ways, of which rational-format messages are perhaps the least important. Recognizing the truth of this proposition is essential for directing social resources for risk reduction towards areas of wise investment and away from unprofitable ones. Following Zimring, I argue that all the victories that have been won so far in North America on ETS have occurred because social élites have been mobilized to drive smoking out of public spaces, one after the other. These campaigns do not address smokers directly; rather, they are demands by the nonsmoking majority to the effect that conditions in the public sphere should mirror the …