Risk Representation in the Space Program:
The Internet and the Social Amplification of Risk

Presented to the

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Teleconference:
Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA Headquarters
Ames Research Center, Johnson Space Center
November 2001

Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D.

Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101
1 (562) 985-4895
rodrigue@csulb.edu
https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/

Introduction

A lot of my research on hazards (Slide 1) over the last seven years has focussed on the rôle of media in the social understanding of a given hazard. The media have a number of shortcomings when it comes to social debates over hazard assessment and the acceptable level of risks for specified benefits. These include sensationalism, a tendency to reduce complex issues to simple dramas of human conflict, a paranoia about the appearance of bias that can result in representing scientists and crackpots as equals, and deadline pressures that often frustrate even the best of reporters. The consequences of these tendencies include risk exaggeration or attenuation and a failure to provide the information people need meaningfully to participate in democratic oversight of rational risk management.

The advent of the Internet changes everything (Slide 2) by allowing scientists and citizen activists to circumvent the conventional print and broadcast media to get their own messages out directly to the public without an intervening medium that will distort their messages. I became interested in how this interactive new medium was being used to shape public discourse over the risks and benefits of the Cassini-Huygens mission as my e-mail began to be cluttered with earnest messages about "nukes in space" in 1996 and, especially, in 1997 as the launch date approached. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Internet representations of the risks in the Cassini mission.
 

Background and Hypotheses

In investigating this controversy online, I developed my hypotheses from the large social science literature on hazards. Among prior findings are the following.

Lay perceptions differ markedly from expert perceptions, e.g., exaggerating certain hazards and trivializing others far from the expectations of risk assessors. This was obviously the case with Cassini (Slide 3).

Another theme in the literature is that people often make up their minds about an issue by taking the position of a reference group they trust. A very striking aspect of the Cassini controversy was the effectiveness with which they ingratiated themselves ... and their positions on Cassini ... with organizations and individuals who are much admired in the environmental and peace movements. Once such individuals as Michio Kaku, Helen Caldicott, and John Gofman were recruited, reference group trust generated a significant opposition once it was coupled with the exponential propagation capabilities of the Internet. Dependence on reference group trust should be evidenced in a high proportion of forwarded messages or embedded quotations from other authors among Internet communications.

Another, extremely important consideration emerging from prior literature is that laypeople seem to judge hazards along multiple axes, not just the quantifiable probability of mortality/morbidity used by risk assessors. Though laypeople are often poorly informed about and misperceive the actual level of risk they face, they treat risk in a much more multifaceted way than do risk assessment experts. In what follows, I'll outline some of these other dimensions.

Probably the single most salient dimension of public perception is the dread factor: Is a given hazard seen as having the potential, no matter how tiny, of creating great loss of life or particularly fearful diseases? Can it have effects that might be passed down through the generations? Is it linked with past incidents of sheer horror? Anything nuclear evokes dread, and I tested whether the dread factor dominated the opposition to the plutonium dioxide on board Cassini.

Control is an important facet of hazard perception and risk tolerance. If people can choose the exposure, they often will accept substantial risks (such as driving or smoking); but, if this is a risk they feel have no choice in, they may become very upset over the imposition of even the smallest risk (such as the Alar controversy). I was interested in seeing if Cassini were perceived as a risk imposed on the public.

Another important axis of public concern is fairness: Who gains and who loses from the deployment of a risky technology? I tested to see if the public saw the benefits of the mission flowing to scientists and the risks falling on average citizens.

Another issue sometimes raised in hazards literature is public trust of institutions responsible for risk assessment, risk management, and emergency response. Because of pervasive "X-Files" conspiracy-theorizing about NASA, FEMA, ATF, and other Federal agencies, I looked for evidence of mistrust of NASA among the Cassini opponents online.

Gender, ethnicity, culture, and social class are sometimes raised as factors affecting hazard perception and behavior and hazard vulnerability. Marginalized groups often are less trustful of public institutions and more concerned about control and fairness issues. Women, specifically, are more risk-averse concerning technologies that may affect future generations. I expected to find online women largely opposed to Cassini, more so than men.

Often mentioned is a risk culture. That is, the kinds of things people worry about reflects their position within a culture: Center or border. People closer to the center of political power are comfortable with conventional risk assessment; people on the border tend to be suspicious of risk assessment done by a culture that has peripheralized them. Border culture is said to be suspicious of scientific rationality, egalitarian, and oppositional in politics.

Some prior work on public activism over technological risks has suggested that the balance of activism on either side of a controversy often hinges on the emotional power of the motivations for participation on either side. Given the power of nuclear dread among Cassini opponents versus the space romanticism and scientific curiosity of Cassini proponents, I hypothesized that opponents would be more numerous and more vocal in the Internet discussion.
 

Data and Methods

At this point (Slide 4), I would like to sketch the data and methods I used to test these expectations from the prior literature. "The Internet" needed operationalization for my study. It is a loose term covering a lot of distinct "channels." These include the web, e-mail, listservers, chatrooms, and news groups. The various "channels" vary in the degree to which they are accessible to a social scientist. For example, people constantly tinker with their web pages, and e-mail and chats are extremely ephemeral. UseNet news groups, however, have been archived by DéjaNews since April of 1995. So, I decided to concentrate on the stable and searchable UseNet.

Using Déja.com's search engine, I searched through the population of 19,853 messages posted on "Cassini" from April 1995 through March 1999. I sampled the discussion by going through up to the top 250 messages month by month. I tossed any comments by authors named "Cassini," comments about Oleg Cassini and Nadia Cassini, the Cassini Division, and a novel entitled, The Cassini Division.

This process yielded comments by 937 authors who had, among them, posted 8,020 messages. The authors were classified by stance (based on their most recent postings), central concerns they raised, gender, number of messages they had posted on the subject, and whether their messages were original compositions or simply forwards from someone else. To test the hypotheses, I used Z tests of proportions and calculated prob-values, with any prob-value less than or equal to 0.05 considered significant.
 

Results

Findings were variable (Slide 5). I was surprised to learn that the great majority of authors were supportive of the mission: 60 percent were supporters; 21 percent were opponents; and 20 percent were neutral. The opponents were, however, considerably more vocal than the proponents or neutrals. The 21 percent of authors who were opponents posted 31 percent of the messages. Both the neutrals and the Cassini proponents were significantly less communicative than the opponents. This difference in verbosity fits the expectation that opponents' emotions would be hotter.

The only demographic difference I could pick out among the authors was gender. This debate was overwhelmingly a male preserve: Fewer than 5 percent of authors were female and they contributed only 3 percent of the posts. Both genders were likelier to support Cassini than to oppose it, but there is a gender-gap. Only 45 percent of the women were mission-supporters, versus 63 percent of the men; 38 percent of the women were opponents, while only 18 percent of the men were. This difference is significant. Had the genders been equally represented among the authors, the proponents would still have been in the majority, but the disparity would not have been so extreme.

Perfectly in accordance with prior literature, dread proved to be the central axis in this hazards debate (Slide 6). Two thirds of opponents expressed dread of nuclear contamination and some discussants were terrified that Cassini would bring about the end of the world predicted by Nostradamus. Over a quarter of the proponents addressed the dread factor, too, mainly by trivializing the probability of an accident and the consequences of an accident should one occur.

Contrary to the expectations of hazards literature, there was no concern expressed over the issue of control over the plutonium exposure, not even among the opponents. Fairness questions are often raised as an explanation for public activism over technological risk, but only 2 percent of authors raised the issue of fairness and that in a manner tangential to the risk of plutonium exposure. Most of these complained about how NASA's monopoly over the space enterprise was unfair to the private sector.

Another factor mentioned in hazards literature is mistrust of public institutions, and it shows up as a minor dimension in this debate. Six opponents say that there is a NASA conspiracy to militarize space and the plutonium on Cassini is the camel's nose in the tent, and another 7 stated that the media were censoring the plutonium risks of Cassini. Both of these arguments, however, are often cited in the 46 messages forwarded by opponents. Even a few proponents (9 out of 565) said they thought the media were biased towards the opponents and were not letting NASA have a chance to defend the mission and its goals. So, mistrust of government and of media is modestly present in this debate.

I examined the specific concerns of authors in all three positions to understand that activated them to contribute to the social debate over Cassini (Slide 7). This examination affirmed both that opponents were more border in cultural orientation and more dependent on reference groups than the other two stances.

Opponents were dominated by three subtypes (Slide 8): (1) 24 percent simply passed on messages originating from about half a dozen people or organizations, often without comment; (2) another 24 percent wrote independent expressions of concern about the risks of plutonium in general or during the launch and flyby phases of this mission in particular; and (3) 21 percent were people interested in Nostradamus and astrology, who expressed great fear that Cassini was the "King of Terror" that Nostradamus had predicted would come from the skies and destroy Earth in summer of 1999. The appearance of Nostradamus as such a significant element in this debate was an unexpected research dividend!

Proponents, given their much larger numbers, discussed a wider range of issues and concerns, with no one issue commanding as many as a fifth of the authors. The most common statement (17 percent) was that the opposition was very small if very vocal and unqualified to comment. Sixteen percent opined that the risk of the mission or of RTGs was being grossly overstated. Thirteen percent simply enthused about the mission and its goals. Another 10 percent engaged in rather nasty "flaming" of the opponents. Only 6 percent forwarded on other people's or organizations' messages, usually something from the JPL publicity office.
 

Discussion

The Cassini controversy demonstrates the empowerment the Internet offers to political activists (Slide 9). A handful of people can alert others to gravely concerning issues and enlist them to spread the news. The population notified of the issue expands exponentially and, even if a small number of those exposed to the idea responds politically, the result can be tremendous political pressure.

The demagogic use of the Internet, however, remains the shadow of empowerment. Appeals to conspiracies, ad hominem attacks, exaggeration, and other emotionally-manipulative devices are the hallmark of demagoguery, and they are abundant in this debate, particularly among the opponents. The complex nature of Cassini and of many other both technological and natural hazard controversies makes it inaccessible to the average citizen, who yet must decide whether to act politically about this or similar situations or, worse, for a democratic society, remain uninformed and apathetic. This is a dilemma we all face as citizens: We have to make judgments, and there is no way any of us can spend the time to look into issues far from our training.

So, we have shortcuts to opinions -- we tend to defer to the opinions of people and organizations we trust. The problem with this is that it is possible that a handful of people could hijack this mechanism of trust and, through the ease and exponential expansion of activism-by-the-forward button, mobilize a lot of us into a politically potent movement. I believe that this is precisely what happened in the case of Cassini, and at this point I would like to draw out some implications and recommendations for risk managers and mission planners in NASA.
 

Conclusions

Anti-mission activism is going to come up again and again in any future missions that have any dread-eliciting components attached to them (Slide 10). The "nukes in space" issue will certainly keep reincarnating every time a mission is designed around RTGs: The anti-Cassini activists are no doubt just waiting. You are already facing opposition on yet another front in the Mars Sample Return Mission, dread of the "Andromeda Strain." What's interesting is that this is an entirely different group of individuals. So, what do you do about it? Your problem is one of risk communication, a field adjacent to but outside my usual interests in media criticism in hazards and disasters. What makes recommendations so challenging is that risk communication is a very new discipline. To date, it has yielded prescriptions based on risk perception studies, but there haven't been very many empirical assessments of these prescription programs in the field. With these caveats, here are a few suggestions.

Mistrust of government was a minor component of the Cassini debate, and maintaining trust is often brought up in risk management prescriptions. It is, then, important that NASA work on its image as an open civilian agency that is never caught hiding bad news, no matter how embarrassing.

To maintain trust, you need open lines of communication with the media, and this is difficult, given the very different needs the media have for information. Personalization helps promote trust. NASA needs a specific human face and voice: the designation of one or two mission scientists or public educators to be the regular contacts with the media. What I have in mind is someone designated to become sort of the media celebrity. Think of the Lucy Jones and Kate Hutton team from USGS and Caltech. If there's an earthquake in Southern California (or anywhere), the media are just sort of trained to call one of them up. Journalists DO appreciate knowing who the experts are. The designated stars should actively cultivate any journalist who expresses an interest in the mission and who seems fairly well-informed about the underlying science. Some journalists do make a lot of effort to become informed about the issues on their "beat," such as Jack Popejoy of L.A.'s KFWB all-news station, who regularly shows up at hazards conferences. I think reporters would enjoy being known among other journalists as someone with a special "inside track" at NASA.

Another point made in hazards and risk communication research is the importance of a piece of paper (Slide 11). While hearing a message on TV or radio is important, most people like to have a printed sheet of paper in front of them to refer to as they form their opinions. It is unclear at this point whether Internet documents qualify as printed material, but it is important to provide, promote, and disseminate short, pithy documents online and in pamphlet form that forcefully advocate your missions' goals and benefits to society and briefly explain why they pose risks that are relatively trivial when compared to benefits. Your audiences are largely not scientists, but they are not stupid, by and large, either. They need this material boiled down to slogan level, because, like you, they are overwhelmed with their jobs and household concerns and have little time to focus on something so far outside their usual activities. In general, various polls show that the public does support space exploration and they just need to be reminded what a mission's specific goals are and be accurately informed of any risks and benefits. Express probabilities as 1 in X format, by the way, as most people have trouble grasping probabilities expressed normally.

A theme that comes out very strongly in hazards research is that reference group trust is absolutely central (Slide 12). In areas far from their training, most people are strongly influenced by the stances of groups they trust in other contexts. Risk communication literature stresses the importance of coördinating and collaborating with other credible sources. The anti-Cassini activists were brilliant in their understanding of this principle: They specifically recruited trusted individuals and groups to their position. Next time, NASA has to get there first, long before the Mars Sample Return Mission or the Pluto-Charon mission become public controversies. You need personal ties with the more mainstream environmental and peace organizations especially. If you don't, it will be folks like the anti-Cassini activists who will be having little discussions with their leaders instead, and the situation will polarize and many of these groups' opinions will solidify against the missions. The anti-NASA extremists have the advantage in having worked with these groups and with the more extreme groups for a far longer time. If you do build some ties with the leadership of the more mainstream organizations, you may have a few key people in them willing to at least question the claims when they turn up.

Another prescription from risk communication involves accepting and involving the public as a legitimate partner. This entails involving the community early on in the process, before important decisions are made. Would it be possible to initiate a dialogue with the leadership of the mainstream environmental and peace organizations or other interested groups, actually inviting their input in mission design early on and seriously trying to accommodate their greatest concerns? The downside of this is a suboptimal power design or accommodating more scientifically uninteresting stuff (e.g., Face on Mars?) to gain more social legitimacy and less opposition.

Basically, NASA has to start tending the social matrix that supports its primary mission. Your primary mission lies in natural science: exploring the solar system and the cosmos. A very close secondary mission is in engineering: developing the hardware and software and operations to carry out your primary mission. In order to continue to do your jobs without excessive interference from activists, you will need to cultivate a distant third mission in social science: exploring, understanding, and bringing along the society that supports you. You need mission scientists and spokespeople with some solid background (beyond general education requirements) in the social sciences. Alternatively, you might consider creating a separate Division of Risk Communication, tasking it with social science research into mission risk perception and developing ... and testing ... risk communication techniques suited to NASA's mandate. Boldly going where NASA has never gone before?

On the bright side, despite the intense reaction to Cassini's RTGs, it bears remembering that your opponents were far outnumbered by supporters, at least on UseNet discussion groups, though the opponents were significantly more vocal. You had to exhaust yourselves defending the mission to Congress and the President, but you did get to go forward.
 

 

Slide 1

Representation of Risk in the Space Program

The Internet and the Social Amplification of Risk

Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair of Geography
California State University, Long Beach
 

Slide 2

For more information

  • 2001. Internet Media in Technological Risk Amplification: Plutonium on Board the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft. Risk: Health, Safety, and Environment 12, 3/4 (in press).

  • 2001. Impact of Internet Media in Risk Debates: The Controversies over the Cassini-Huygens Mission and the Anaheim Hills, California, Landslide. The Australian Journal of Emergency Management 16, 1. http://www.ema.gov.au/5virtuallibrary/pdfs/vol16no1/rodrigue.pdf

https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/research.html

(562) 985-4895 or -8993 (fax)

 

Slide 3

Hypotheses

  • Reference group reliance will be key

  • Internet debates on Cassini center on:

    • Dread above all
    • Control over plutonium exposure
    • Fairness in allocation of risks and benefits
    • Mistrust of NASA and its risk assessment

  • Gender-gap should exist

  • Center/border dichotomy should exist

  • Opponents should dominate debate

 

 

Slide 4

Data and Methods

  • Data collection

    • UseNet (because of Déja archive)
    • Sampled up to 250 messages/month for 4 years
    • Removed non-spacecraft references
    • Yield: 8020 messages by 937 authors

  • Data reduction

    • Database: name, gender, stance, number of messages, central concerns
    • Sorted and cross-tabbed to give proportions

  • Data analysis

    • Z tests of proportions
    • prob-values <0.05 significant

 

 

Slide 5

Findings

The UseNet people:
  • The majority (60%) supported mission, surprisingly
  • Opponents (21%) were more vocal, posting 31% of messages, as expected
  • Women (5%) were almost absent and tended to be quieter, posting only 3% of the messages
  • More women (45%) supported mission than opposed it (38%), surprisingly
  • Significant gender gap: 63% of men supported mission and only 18% opposed it, as expected

 

 

Slide 6

Findings (continued)

Issues raised:
  • As expected, dread was central

    • 68.6% of opponents expressed nuclear dread
    • 27.3% of proponents addressed nuclear risk

  • Surprisingly, neither the issues of control nor of fairness were brought up in this debate

  • Mistrust of NASA was a minor theme

    • 3.1% of opponents said there was a NASA conspiracy to militarize space
    • This was, however, commonly cited in the 23.7% of opponent messages that were just forwards from someone else

 

 

Slide 7

Findings (continued)

The culture of opposition:
  • The center/border dichotomy showed in a startling debate about Nostradamus:

    • Fully 21.1% of opponents earnestly debated Nostradamus' "King of Terror" quatrain
    • Only 2.3% of proponents addressed Nostradamus; all but 2 (0.3%) debunkers

  • Dependence on reference groups:

    • Only 6.4% of proponents and 7.9% of neutrals passed on others' writings
    • Fully 23.7% of opponents forwarded others' messages
    • Very startlingly, the opponents' forwarded messages were authored by just 11 people!

 

 

Slide 8

Findings (continued)

Central concerns by stance:

  • Opponents:

    • 23.7% simply passed on others' messages
    • 23.7% made independent statements of fears
    • 21.1% feared Nostradamus' "King of Terror"

  • Proponents:

    • 16.8% said opponents were unqualified
    • 16.1% said risk was overstated, amplified
    • 12.9% simply enthused about the mission
    • 10.4% ad hominem "flames" on opponents
    •  6.4% simply passed on others' messages

  • Neutrals:

    • 40.4% asked highly technical questions
    • 11.2% asked/answered elementary questions
    •  7.9% simply passed on others' messages

 

 

Slide 9

Discussion

Internet empowers individual activists

  • Exponential propagation of messages
  • Tremendous political pressure can result

Demagoguery is democracy's shadow

  • All demagogic devices present (esp. opponents)
  • We don't have time to learn about issues far from our training
  • We have to trust our reference groups
  • Cassini shows this trust can be hijacked by a handful of people

 

 

Slide 10

Conclusions

NASA will face concerted opposition with every mission triggering the dread response, and MSR has it all:

  • Possibly RTGs/RHUs: "nukes in space"
  • "Andromeda Strain" (very different group of activists)

Personalize your ties with media

  • Recruit a mission scientist to become the media star that journalists learn to seek out
  • Cultivate individual reporters on the science beat

 

 

Slide 11

Conclusions (continued)

Importance of a (short) piece of paper
  • The public is time-stressed (like you)
  • The Web may qualify as "printed" material
  • Polls show support for space enterprise
  • Keep reminding public of goals and benefits
  • Very briefly state risks along with benefits
  • Express probabilities in 1 chance in X form

 

 

Slide 12

Conclusions (continued)

The reference group issue is critical
  • Coördinate/collaborate with groups with social credentials
  • Cultivate personal ties with leaders in more mainstream environmental/peace groups
  • See if you can involve mainstream groups as legitimate partners in mission design early on

 

Maintained by Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on the web: 02/24/02
Last revised: 04/03/09