When Precaution Creates Misunderstandings: The Unintended Effects of Precautionary Information on Perceived Risks, the EMF Case

Abstract

In the past decade, growing public concern about novel technologies with uncertain potential long-term impacts on the environment and human health has moved risk policies toward a more precautionary approach. Focusing on mobile telephony, the effects of precautionary information on risk perception were analyzed. A pooled multinational experimental study based on a 5 × 2 × 2 factorial design was conducted in nine countries. The first factor refers to whether or not information on different types of precautionary measures was present, the second factor to the framing of the precautionary information, and the third factor to the order in which cell phones and base stations were rated by the study participants. The data analysis on the country level indicates different effects. The main hypothesis that informing about precautionary measures results in increased risk perceptions found only partial support in the data. The effects are weaker, both in terms of the effect size and the frequency of significant effects, across the various precautionary information formats used in the experiment. Nevertheless, our findings do not support the assumption that informing people about implemented precautionary measures will decrease public concerns.

Older People, Mobile Communication and Risks

“…Although the discourse of precautionary actions in using mobile phones can reduce concerns, imperatives to precaution might cause people to worry more [37] or, at least, create misunderstandings [38]. Taking into account that people are willing to reduce uncertainty and regain trust, these studies point out that-when individuals are exposed to unspecific answers regarding mobile telephony's health effects-two main scenarios can appear.…”

Improving Precautionary Communication in the EMF Field? Effects of Making Messages Consistent and Explaining the Effectiveness of Precautions

“…They did not find an effect of this text module on risk perception. However, given the rather small effect sizes of information provision on risk perception reported in previous studies [12,16], this study might have been underpowered with an N = 245 and a 2 × 2 × 2 group design. Furthermore, we think that communicating this information in order to explain the effectiveness is likely to change its effect.…”

“…Mostly unexpected by radiation health authorities, precautionary communication regarding potential health effects of exposure to RF-EMFs used in mobile telecommunications has been shown to increase recipients’ risk perception about RF-EMFs [10,11,12,13,14]. This effect seems to be robust, as it has been shown with different kinds of messages and by different researchers.…”

“…In that study, information about RF-EMFs and mobile phone and base station radiation patterns increased mobile phone risk perception, regardless of whether there were additional precautionary recommendations. Furthermore, limiting the generalizability of the effect, most of the studies reporting it have been conducted with ad-hoc [10,13] or student samples [11,12], a limitation that the current study intends to overcome.…”

“…Consistent with this view, concerns about RF-EMFs emitted by base stations are higher than concerns about RF-EMFs from mobile phones [12,16,25,26]. In fact, many people do not appreciate that their mobile phone itself is a small base station [25].…”