AGENCY COMMUNICATION, COMMUNITY OUTRAGE, AND PERCEPTION OF RISK - 3 SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS

Three experimental studies were conducted employing hypothetical news stories to compare the effects on reader risk perceptions of two situa tions: when agency communication behavior was reported to be responsiv e to citizens' risk concerns, vs. when the agency was reported to be u nresponsive. In the first two experiments, news stories of public meet ings filled with distrust and controversy led to ratings indicating gr eater perceived risk than news stories reporting no distrust or contro versy, even though the risk information was held constant. This effect appeared clearly when the differences in meeting tone were extreme an d subjects made their ratings from their recall of the stories, but it was much weaker when the differences were moderate and subjects were allowed to go back over the news stories to help separate risk informa tion from conflict information. In the third experiment, news stories about a spill cleanup systematically varied the seriousness of the spi ll, the amount of technical information provided in the story, and the agency behavior and resulting community outrage. The outrage manipula tion significantly affected affective and cognitive components of perc eived risk, but not hypothetical behavioral intentions. Seriousness an d technical detail had very little effect on perceived risk.