S. Holly Stocking

Understanding Errors, Biases that Can Affect Journalists.

In the last fifteen years, psychology has witnessed an explosion of knowledge about how human begins process information. Much of this new knowledge concerns limitations and biases in perception, memory, and reasoning. Research on eyewitness testimony has highlighted the distortions in perception and memory that can plague observers, particularly observers under stress at the moment of observation or recollection. Similarly, studies on the way people make inferences have shown us that people often favor anecdotal information over more reliable base rate statistical information. Even when instructed to be “objective,” they often seek and select data according to preexisting expectations or theories. Other research has documented the difficulties people have evaluating risk. Still more research has shown that people easily ignore sampling biases, fail to understand regression effects, often believe they “knew something all along” even if they didn’t, tend to attribute the causes of people’s behavior to dispositional rather than to situational factors, and often imagine association between events where none exists. Significantly, many of the errors and biases to which people fall prey only get worse under time constraints. For journalists who pledge allegiance to objectivity and/or fairness as they observe and interpret people and events, such knowledge is potentially of great relevance. Yet only a small percentage of what we know appears to have found its way into journalism classrooms, most of it in upper-level or graduate courses that consider how audiences, as distinct from journalists, process information. Moreover, hardly any of this knowledge seems to have found its way into courses and textbooks that train students to write, edit, and report the news. Even those texts that do devote space to documented distortions in interviewing and observation (cf. Rivers & Harrington, 1988) have either ignored more recent findings on cognitive error and bias or drawn upon but a small portion of this research. Given the growing demands on journalists to report and interpret the activities of an increasingly complex society and the demonstrated importance of the news media for setting public and private agendas, this is a shame. It is also a problem we may be able to do something about. In the pages that follow, we will outline some of the more important errors and biases in thinking that psychologists have documented in recent years. We have little formal knowledge about the existence and operation of such biases in journalists (as we have noted, and lamented, in Stocking & Gross, 1988). However, we do know they have been found in a variety of professions and across a variety of tasks (cf. Loftus, 1979; Sims, Gioia, &Associates, 1986; and Rogoff & Lave, 1984), leadingus to think they probably show up in journalists’ work as well. We hope that journalism educators, when alerted to these common errors and biases, will be motivated to learn more about them and seek ways, in classrooms and textbooks, to bring them to the attention of their students.

Ignorance-Based Instruction in Higher Education.

Australian sociologist Michael Smithson claims that in the last forty years Western intellectual culture has created a wealth of new perspectives on uncertainty and ignorance “whose magnitude arguably eclipses anything since the decade of 1660 which saw the emergence of modern probability theory” (Smithson, 1989:3). These new perspectives have developed in many fields at once, Smithson notes-most visibly in economics, systems engineering, computer science, management science, and artificial intelligence, all fields concerned with the interactions between technologies and people. Intellectuals across disciplines have generated nonprobabilistic formalisms to handle uncertainty, possibility, probability, surprise, doubt, and fuzziness. Cognitive psychologists and decision theorists have developed new theories and accounts of decision making under uncertainty. Leaders in business and government, too, have changed their ways of dealing with uncertainty, moving away from traditional strategies of seeking to eliminate or ignore it, toward strategies, like risk assessment, that seek to cope with or manage it. This upsurge of interest in ignorance and uncertainty appears to have several sources, in Smithson‘s view: “Increases in complexity and sheer scale of the technologies and organizations developed since World War 11, and the widely acknowledged failures of deterministic, mechanical models to cope with the uncertainties arising in such systems. ‘ I . . . and the increasing specialization and fragmentation of knowledge, and the loss of agreement concerning the basic criteria for truth-that have resulted in a “relativization of truth and the recognition of sources of incorrigible uncertainty or ignorance” (Smithson, 1989:3,4). Interestingly, this rush to confront and manage ignorance (broadly defined to include uncertainty, incompleteness, and other sources of ignorance) has for the most part been relegated to the realms of Western knowledge and theory produc-

Immediate vs delayed retaliation in male and female adults.

20 male and 20 female undergraduates were provoked and provided with an opportunity to retaliate (a) immediately following provocation vs (b) after waiting in solitude. Waiting did not reliably affect level of retaliatory activities, and there were no appreciable sex differences in such activities. However, waiting produced significant decrements in sympathetic excitation for females but not for males. Waiting furthered pre-retaliatory feelings of depression in females. Waiting also furthered post-retaliatory feelings of disturbance in both sexes, and post-retaliatory feelings of agitation in males.

Packaging Risk: Lessons for Students in PR and Journalism

Quickly, which is more alarming: (a) The release that says “as many as 50,000 of the nation’s five million chemical processing units handle hazardous waste materials that could result in runaway reactions,” or (b) The news release that says “only about one percent of the nation’s five million chemical processing units handles hazardous waste materials that could result in runaway reactions”? If you answered (a), you’re in fine company. Most people do. But in reality, the only difference between (a) and (b) is in the packaging. News release (a) packages risk so as to sound an alarm, whereas (b) packages it so as to minimize the danger. Psychological research on how people process risk information suggests that packaging can be crucial in influencing how we react to diseases, medical procedures, environmental pollutants or technologies, or risky activities. In particular, subtleties of language, numbers, or comparisons can greatly affect our perceptions of risk, especially when we don’t know much about the hazard in question. For public relations practitioners and journalists, such findings have important implications. For public relations practitioners charged with putting their organization’s best foot forward, awareness of how packaging affects perceptions of risk can be used to direct public opinion in ways deemed beneficial to the organization they represent. For journalists, such awareness can mean the difference between good and bad journalism. Not all PR practitioners consider the public interest when promoting their organization’s interest. And some are so swayed by their own public relations that they quite sincerely fail to see the risks as others might. If journalists are not to be blinded by those packaging risks for public consumption, it behooves them to become sophisticated in the many subtleties of risk packaging.

Communicating science to the public through targeted messages

Abstract The process of communicating science-based information through the mass media is often not the most effective way to meet the information needs of audiences. In many instances these needs can be met more effectively and efficiently through targeted messages. These are communication products that fill, in as direct a manner as possible, the information needs of specialized audiences. Although targeted messages occasionally are prepared for the mass media, more often they are communicated via booklets, brochures, audiovisual materials and other media that best reach the intended audience, allowing for limitations of budget and time. A model for producing and disseminating targeted science messages in the area of youth and family development is presented, and several case histories are described. The principal benefit of this model is that it permits scientists a measure of responsibility for the accuracy and validity of what is being communicated, and at the same time, assures that the product meets the needs of its audience.