I’ve just finished reading one of my Christmas presents – The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter. (UK readers, he’s the statistician you hear from whenever a story involving numbers hits the headlines.)
At its heart, it’s a book about the principles of probability and, I’ll be honest, I spent the first half only just hanging on to the concepts being discussed. (Indeed, I even went back to the beginning to start it again when I realised that while I understood every single word in isolation, they made no sense to me when joined up to form a sentence.)
But towards the end, the book opens out to a more general discussion around how to communicate uncertainty and risk effectively. There was lots to agree with and recognise here – such as understanding your audience and the context of the communication.
One point in particular stood out: the fact that admitting uncertainty doesn’t, as you might expect, lead to a decrease in trust.
He notes that experiments suggest that people downweight their confidence appropriately when told that a claim is based on low-quality evidence, although if they are not told about the quality of evidence, they tend to assume it is good.
As he says, this is reassuring: “it would be very unfortunate if being honest enough to acknowledge uncertainty meant that people spurned our opinion and turned to some charlatan who expressed complete confidence.”
In fact, acknowledging uncertainty is a key feature of communication that’s trustworthy and he offers five key principles that help to demonstrate trustworthiness. I think they’re worth repeating here:
- Inform rather than persuade: In general, the basic ethos of trustworthy communication is to empower audiences to make decisions that fit with their values, rather than manipulate them into doing or thinking what the communicator wants. Although there may be crisis situations when persuasion is appropriate.
- Be balanced: Feature both pros and cons, benefits and harms, winners and losers. Although not false balance; disputes about climate change are not 50:50.
- Be upfront about uncertainty: Whether you do it using words, numbers or graphics.
- Acknowledge limitations in the evidence: Be clear about the quality and strength of the evidence.
- Try to pre-empt misunderstandings: This requires knowing your audience and how your evidence may be either misinterpreted or misused by others.
Studies were carried out in which messages with different formats (‘persuasive’ or ‘balanced’) about Covid-19 vaccines or nuclear power were shown to over 1,000 people, each of whom was randomly allocated to see one message.
For people who were already accepting about Covid-19 vaccines or nuclear power, there was no difference in the extent to which they thought the messages were trustworthy.
But for people who were sceptical, the ‘balanced’ message was judged considerably more trustworthy than the ‘persuasive’ format.
In other words, honesty and transparency really are the best policies.
