Help! The House Is On Fire! Do You Trust the Messenger?
I'll never forget the day my son's high school had a bomb scare. I happened to get a text from a neighborhood group that something was going on at the school. Perhaps because I'm a journalist, I immediately called our local newspaper to see what was going on. Thankfully, it was a hoax, but now a new study says that I'm in the minority. In a crisis, we're far more likely to look to others to second-guess what authorities have to say, when it's an environmental or health scare, according to newswise.com. And the authorities want to know why. Given the rapidly changing reality of digital alternatives to any single information source, government agencies, medical professionals, and others increasingly want to understand what motivates people to seek, or to avoid seeking, information about threats and crises. For their study, researchers used data from 1,000 randomly selected Dutch citizens who were interviewed by phone about their responses to eight ...