Tracey Brown is the director of Sense about Science since 2002. Under her leadership, the charity has translated the case for sound science and evidence into popular campaigns to urge scientific thinking among the public and the people who answer to them. It has launched important initiatives including AllTrials, a global campaign for the reporting of all clinical trial outcomes; and the Ask for Evidence campaign, which engages the public in requesting evidence for claims. In 2010, the Times named Tracey as one of the ten most influential figures in science policy in Britain and in 2014 she was recognized by the Science Council for her work on evidence-based policy making. In June 2017 Tracey was made an OBE for services to science, and most recently in 2020 she was made an honorary Professor at UCL in the Department of Science, Technology and Engineering in Public Policy. She is also the author of a recent article in Significance magazine describing “What is risk know-how?”
Episode Description
What do farmers in Kenya, fishers in the Philippines and teenagers in Boston have in common? They all need to balance risks when making decisions ranging from seed choice after considering predicted rainfall to life vest and chance of shark attacks to social distancing and emotional impacts. Understand risk is the focus of today’s episode of Stats+Stories with guest Tracey Brown.
+Full Transcript
John Bailer What do farmers in Kenya, fishers in the Philippines and teenagers in Boston have in common? They all need to balance risks when making decisions ranging from seed choice after considering predicted rainfall to life best use in the chance of shark attacks, just social distancing and emotional impacts. Today's episode of Stats and Stories will focus on risk knowing how I'm John Bailer. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media journalism and film as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as guest panelist is Regina Nuzzo, professor at Gallaudet University and freelance science writer, Rosemary Pennington is away. Our guest today is Tracy Brown, Director of sense about science since 2002. Under her leadership, the charity has translated the case for sound science and evidence in the popular campaign surge scientific thinking among the public, and people will answer to that. It has launched important initiatives including all trials, a global campaign for the reporting of all clinical trial outcomes, and the ask for evidence campaign, which engages the public in requesting evidence for claims in 2010. The Times named Tracy is one of the 10 most influential figures in science policy in Britain. And in 2014, she was recognized by the Science Council for her work on evidence based policymaking. In June 2017, Tracy was made an OBE for service to science. And most recently, in 2020, she was made an honorary professor at the University College of London in the department of Science, Technology and Engineering and Public Policy. She's the author of a recent article and significance magazine describing what is risk? No How. Oh, Tracy, welcome to the program. And thank you so much for this interesting work, I just want to start our conversation about what was the career path that led you to understand science.
Tracey Brown
And so I'm delighted to be with you today. And I had a really unusual career path because I in the 90s was working out in the former Soviet Union, helping to establish centers for Social Research. And it was a really novel thing to do for the Research Society. So I came up really close to communities that have had previously no means of actually looking at themselves statistically, or didn't have trust in the statistics that were available to them. And so I certainly didn't generate a great deal of research. So I understood the importance of societies being able to understand themselves in the context of experiences of other communities, women being able to look at whether their employment experience was similar to that in people with people in cities or the other towns nearby, and so on. And I was really struck by how much that sort of ability to make sense of things in numbers and to talk in numbers was a key part of our ability to operate as citizens in the world. And that kind of stayed with me. And then I found as I found my way into a sense about science and the need to address some of the kind of crisis points in the relationship between science and society. I found myself coming back to that many times
Regina Nuzzo
treaty. I think that I read somewhere that you spent a year in a PR company setting up a risk analysis unit. What I found fascinating was that before I sent about science, what did you learn there?
Tracey Brown
Well, what I learned there is that companies liked the idea of doing research. And then when it doesn't necessarily fulfill the bottom line, because researchers want to go off exploring things. It doesn't always work out. So I was really keen on encouraging companies to think more sensitively about how they understand risk. And that was something that I dabbled in when I was back from Russia. And then I discovered the opportunity with a sense about science, which was for me a much better fit, because it was very much looking at these things from the perspective of what just the public wants and needs. What are they missing out on? And I felt that that was a much better fit for me. But it was very useful for me to be exposed to how corporations think about risk, but I have to say only for a short time before if you remember that sort of early 2000s was a time when there were so many debates about risk. I mean, the measles, mumps rubella vaccine, an issue which started in the UK kind of spread to the US. Then we have sort of all the discussions about cell phones, and whether they posed a new form of health risk. They're all sorts of areas where people are encountering new risks and really struggling with understanding them in a context and so on. I was much more drawn towards that sort of area, really than sort of, you know, counting out how many airplanes we expected to fall out of the sky. In any given year. I felt that that was where the, you know, the best public benefit was.
John Bailer
I loved your response earlier, when you talked about being involved in crisis points between science and society. It sounds like that may have been one of the considerations that transition to this idea of even thinking about what is risk? No, how mean? Or what does that mean? And why? Why did you get involved? Why did science get involved in thinking about this idea of risks now?
Tracey Brown
Well John, really where it's come from, is that over the years, we have found ourselves at that interface where things are particularly difficult. And that might be for a number of reasons, it may be because an issue is polarized, as we saw yet GM crops for example, it may be that there is an issue that's extremely emotive. So a good example of where we've had to help people navigate risk is the parents of children undergoing heart surgery, who are confronted with sort of different sets of outcomes data from different surgical units, and expected to make a judgment on whether they should submit their child to a procedure, and figure out, you know, six months from now is that going to make a significant difference to their, to their experience of, of life. And that was a very hard conversation, and one that had been fraught previously, with problems between medics, and parents. And so we had, we developed a parent led approach to kind of extracting the risk information that was needed for them. Rather than these, you know, reams of stuff that people were publishing rather like a data dump from different surgical units that were republished, required by regulation, it was of no help whatsoever to parents navigating. So those are the sorts of examples that we had, we had worked with people, with researchers on publishing data that they knew was going to cause a public stir, for example, monitoring data on environmental health effects, and help them to do that in a way that didn't sensationalized the data, and lead to a misunderstanding of risks. For example, in that case, you know, when you publish the data monitoring health effects of potential environmental agents in a city, you will have far higher rates of cancer, of lung cancer. But it's because you're in a city. And there are more incinerators there. And there are other potential agents there. It's not, it doesn't tell you necessarily that there's a causative relationship there. But of course, when you publish data like that, you have local newspapers, and sort of local politicians raking over it trying to understand where they sit in the pecking order of risk. So we had done a lot of that kind of work. From that came a sense that actually there are common themes, common things that keep coming up common misunderstandings, common problems, is I'm sure you'll be aware of how the media misrepresent, sometimes, purposely and sometimes, unwittingly, when they talk, for example, about the talk about relative risk, and not the absolute risk, they'll say, a doubling of the children who say they've been offered illegal drugs. And then you find out that it's from one to two, self reported, what does offered mean? And so you know, so we've kind of dealt with those sorts of issues, of misrepresentation of numbers over the years. And from that, we began to see these patterns. And effectively, a syllabus has begun to suggest itself.
Regina Nuzzo
You're talking about the media, I often see the headlines like, here's why you should do X. So they're not putting that risk or that uncertainty into context. They're boiling it down to this dichotomous Yes, no 01 sort of thing. So what is your response to that? I know that is a human tendency, but a lot of the work that you're talking about is how to get away from that. What's your advice?
Tracey Brown
Well, I think it's very difficult with the media to counter some of that, because they're looking to give a lot of lifestyle advice. And we've seen a huge growth in the last 1020 years of lifestyle media. And perhaps one of the issues that we've been dealing with a lot and I think maybe more people need to deal with is when it comes to science, communications, statistics, communication, risk communication. I think we need to target some of those media more. I think a lot of the kind of information the help that goes out to journalists has been to help them you know, those that are working as science correspondents in the main newspapers, and I think we need to think more carefully about those. But in terms of that sort of article, I think it's possible for people to still write a nuanced article that says, you know, you may be able to benefit from these things if you are in this group of people. And we could ask people to start looking for more nuance in that. And I have seen that I have seen, for example, when you look at things like stroke reduction, and how do we, you know, not everyone who goes jogging every day and eat salad for dinner, is going to benefit from that in terms of stroke reduction, but how could we identify those people that would benefit from dietary change, and I've seen over the last sort of four or five years, right across the world, I've seen some really decent articles written, that help people to navigate who best best benefits from those kinds of interventions.
John Bailer
You know, I like this idea that that, you know, you've seen this syllabus emerging out of the the encounters that you've had with, with considerations of risk and communicating this with communities, I find this to be a really, this is a really hard question, a really hard topic, because because when I, when thinking about risk, you have this issue of assessing risk, you have this issue of comparing risks, you have issues then ultimately, of managing risks. And you can, you know, you can have very different decisions in comparing and managing, even if you come to the same conclusion regarding your assessments. So how does, how do you help communities, you know, deconstruct this larger process?
Tracey Brown
Well, I should say, first of all, that there's a lot of difference in people's ability to actually do something about the risks they live with. And of course, as you've alluded to, there are a lot of differences between their risk context. And so, you know, making small dietary changes may be low on their list if they are not living with running water, for example, and this is the kind of thing that I think is often misunderstood. The first thing I'd say is a lot of the misunderstanding comes on the part of those people who complain about the public's understanding of risk, you know, if we assume, for example, that there's not enough seriousness given to the threat of climate change, without looking sometimes at people's ability to do something about it. And that, that, it may tell you that they are actually confronting other issues more prominently, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's not a problem for them, it just simply means that they are dealing with other things. And we saw this, we were talking to people about the framework that emerged during the early days of COVID, at the same time, that people were dealing with that risk being imposed on their communities. And so we were talking to people in South Africa, who were going out to townships, with the advice from the government about how to protect yourself from COVID. And the first line of that advice was saying, wash your hands regularly, which was the number one piece of advice that came up at the time, you know, this was the first thing that you had on a document that was going out in communities with no running water, and, and let alone soap. And so it immediately lost its traction, it immediately didn't seem like it had been written for people who lived in those contexts. And so the people who were involved in that public house campaign, so they felt they lost the battle of understanding the risk or dealing with the risks before they started. So I think that's an important thing that, you know, it doesn't necessarily tell us that people don't get the numbers, or they don't get the seriousness, it sometimes means their context is very different from what we're thinking about. But I think there are some other areas where we have misunderstood just how difficult some things are to grasp. So for example, the pressure on farmers in in West Africa, to make judgments about what crops to sow, is huge now, because you've got the eutrophication of the lake, Victoria, big lake fishing, like and therefore, you've got all sorts of problems with the kind of chemical composition of the lake that is affecting fishing. And you've also got huge amounts of change in rainfall. And some of which is due to climate change. A large part of it is due to climate change. And some of the effects that they have on their land is due to what's going on the leg. They're having to make hugely complicated decisions, sorts of things that if you look at US farmers, you know, we'll be using a computer program to make so I think we also misunder you know, misunderstand just how much it matters to people to understand what international weather agencies mean by average rainfall, and that there's been a sudden sort of need for, for data in those areas where change is being experienced.
Regina Nuzzo
It sounds like you're talking about empathy, and understanding your audience and tailoring a message to your audience, these are very non-statistical, non quantitative things. How did that factor in?
Tracey Brown
So I think the importance of empathy is it leads you to then stop and listen to what it is that people need to know. And I think that one of the things that's come through for us with the framework is that, you know, we could have sat down with statisticians and devised a risk now framework or risk literacy, as some people call it. But what we've ended up with is this sort of syllabus that's come out of real experience. And then we've tested it by involving more and more people around the world to find out actually, how does this sit with fishing communities? How does this sit with quick communities of midwives? What kind of experience have they had, and they're the ones that are telling us, these are the issues we don't understand. So what we struggle with, is understanding, you know, what it means when people say, natural frequency, or we don't understand weather, when we are looking at something, and they're telling us it's average. So here's a good example of, you know, people working to improve labor conditions. We don't know what it means when somebody says average, does it mean that you know, the average employee? Does it mean across other kinds of workplaces? Does it mean over time? And so then you look at the providers of the information, the governments and the agencies that provide the information and think when actually they're not providing it in a way that really helps people to understand that they're being told. And so how can we equip both sides of this conversation better?
John Bailer 16:52
You're listening to Stats and Stories. Our guest today is science director, Tracy Brown. You know, in the recent Significance article, you and your co authors talked about, you know, you've been talking about this empowering people to navigate information and discuss risks in some constructive way. So I'm now trying to picture a community that has gone from, you know, you know, really wrestling with risk to now a community that has a risk know how, you know, kind of insight, so So can you could you give an example of what that change might look like, for the functioning of that community?
Tracey Brown 17:25
Well, I think the change is in those people who find themselves what we call practitioners, people who end up for one reason or another being in a position of responsibility in their community to talk about risk. Now, sometimes that's because of the nature of the job that they do. Or it might be their position in their community. So for example, a very experienced or head of a union fisherman in the Philippines would be the person who other fishing families look to for advice on how to understand, you know, the safety benefits of different measures. So we talked, you mentioned life vests in the opening of the program, where we could talk about the debate they're having about life vests, and sharks. But you know, there are people who find themselves either because they put a job like that, or just because they were in a place where communities were having a discussion at that time, they find themselves needing to help people in their community. And it's those people that we're looking to empower. So what we want is for them to understand several things. One is, you know, some key concepts that will help them. The other is what questions to ask about information that they're given, so that they can feel savvy and get behind information, and ask whether it's really telling them what it looks like. And that's perhaps a very important thing to do when you're looking at media stories. And then And then thirdly, to know where to look, and to know what they're looking at. So that's what we're looking for is people feeling able to ask questions. And so to give you an example, I mentioned the Philippine fishing village, there's a debate about whether or not to wear life vests for Filipino fishermen. And the reason why is because in those particular waters, if you can't swim for sure, then if you're not close, not to the shore to swim it, then you're going to pop around in the water and you're more likely to be in by sharps. So in that situation, some people in that community say they'd rather die quickly of drowning than waiting around for the local wildlife. If you can't swim for sure. And most of those people, you know, grow up swimming very well. So they make a good judgment as to whether they can swim for sure. So that's an interesting debate for that community to have to try and you know, way, way up to the evidence on both sides and in a fairly open fashion. But other another example that really struck me as someone we've mentioned in the significance piece, Bernard a KB, so Bernard can into us sense about science with contacted us that sense about science from from West Africa, to say he runs vernacular radio, which is like a local language radio for, for farming communities, and increasingly was getting questions about the impact of climate change and didn't really know how to mediate what he could find internationally into his local setting. So what we're looking to do is to set those people up with a permanent relationship to the data and to the kind of right questions to be intermediaries into their society.
Regina Nuzzo
Those are fascinating examples, and I'm sitting here thinking about whether knowing more about risk necessarily lead you to the right and true or the right decision when you're talking about the fisherman and the water and the sharks, doesn't that come down to individual choice? So it helps to know the frequency of shark attacks and etcetera. But is there a respect for just individuality of principles or values? Awesome?
Tracey Brown
I think Regina, that's a brilliant question. And this is, I think, a key point of division in in the initiatives to improve understanding of risk, because some people think that getting the right behavior shows that how much people understand risk, and others approach it in the way that you've described, which is to say, people at the end of the day have their own context of priorities to weigh this in. And the approach that we take is along those lines, which is, the best thing to hope for is to look for a community that does have risk know-how and is one that's not surprised by the outcome. So if you didn't choose to do something that you think is a personal choice, don't be surprised if the thing that we want, you shouldn't be surprised if a thing that's been warned off happens to you. And I think that's our first kind of goal, isn't it? We all want to be in a position where we have access to that information about what is likely to happen if we pursue different paths. This debate comes when we have to debate these things as a community, like what's in the interest of the community versus the individual. And those age old debates aren't just limited to risk. But I think that if we're all approaching things, at least with the ability to get a clearer look at the numbers, then that's, that's a real win. I should add that the reason why we really came at this was we started doing some work with the Lloyd's Register Foundation, which is a support. So as of 10 year, look around the world with Gallup, looking at the way that different communities perceive risk. So there's data that's gathered every two years and published every two years. So we were working with them on the 2020 poll. And we noticed that there was an absence of that kind of thinking, thinking about how this really worked for people in a more practical position, rather than just sort of the World Bank and international agencies. And so it was because we were thinking about, you know, what happens when you become risk literate. And in seeing such huge differences in different societies as for, you know, different advanced people about the kind of control they have over the risks or the risks that they face in the context of other risks. And so, you know, the other thing, of course, with the Filipino fishermen is that their risk to their livelihood is far greater than it would be if you're talking about, you know, the cod fishing trawlers going out. In Canada, for example. The risk to livelihood is much more immediate, in terms of making those decisions about exposure.
John Bailer
You know, I really liked the aspect of this that that has this systems thinking approach that that you're really taking, a lot of times when when discussions of risk are made, it's it seems like it's often kind of extracting this as a sick separate risk without thinking about other the replacement that you might have for something that might that's perhaps hazardous. But you're looking at the whole package together. I'm curious what kind of reaction you've had from journalists or politicians or policymakers? As as you've you've talked more about this, this risk know how framework
Tracey Brown 24:35
Well, there's a lot of interest from policymakers in this because the you know, the the need to make trade offs is one that they not only are they dealing with a population that has to make risk trade offs, but they themselves are making those trade offs and then trying to explain them all the time and to COVID It's been a really COVID-19 experience. It's been a really clear experience of How do politicians talk about risk trade offs? And how did the public understand those? I think that's the crucial conversation that has to happen so often around policies. And so often it's difficult. I mean, a good example is when you get new technologies introduced, and people often don't put them in the context of the risks that we face with old technologies. So we've seen it with the discussion about GMOs, and whatever you think of GMOs, you also have to have a discussion about the risk of chemical applications, and constantly polluting waterways have chemical applications to crops. Because otherwise, you have a discussion about the risk of GMOs, which obviously will be some risk profile of GMOs. And you have that in a vacuum. And people are looking at that. And of course, we'll say, No, thank you. But if you have to say, well, these are the risks that we're facing at the moment, and these are the risks that are brought with the new technology, and these are the unknowns, then people can have a much more nuanced, rounded conversation, I think politicians were really attracted to that idea. They do then find it quite difficult to do in practice, and they're nervous about having that conversation with the public, we'd love to see a much more confident conversation about how those trade offs are made. And, you know, in the States, there's been a lot of discussion about transport. And so, you know, there was, after 911, there was a huge exodus from using plane travel. But there was a huge increase in the years that followed in road deaths. And again, you know, at a policy level, that was something that had to be looked at as individual level, I don't think people weighed it in quite the same way as politicians. But But I think that that's why politicians are very drawn to imagining, you know, there's something that does need to be sponsored and encouraged, in the risk know how domain, we would like to take it one step further, and say it's, you know, really in the modern age, you know, all governments should be thinking about what they do to support this, whether that's, you know, through, not to School programs, but just in general in the way that they also communicate their own statistics, about risk, are they thinking about increasing the risk know how in their society. So that's, that's the very positive thing about government media, I think, are more fickle, based, in terms of the new story around risk. But, we have had a lot of interest in, in ways of understanding data, particularly around areas like climate and other big policymaking areas. So we've had a lot of interest in that. And we've been really excited also to have some really under-resourced media outlets from around the world look, for more help, something we hope we can broker a bit more. Look for more help in understanding international data about risks.
Regina Nuzzo
What place does humility have in all of this as us as risk communicators, because science changes, and it's very difficult for I think, people to communicate some sort of risk or advise some sort of action. And then when things change a year from now, or three months from now, during a pandemic, people hold on to what they said before. So how can we have that sort of humility?
Tracey Brown Well, I think humility is the start. And the end of this. I mean, for a number of reasons, I do think the research community perhaps needs to have a conversation with itself about that, Regina, because, you know, very easily slides from the statement of how things are to the statement of what I think people should do. And of course, the media encourages it. So if you have scientists going on daytime TV all day long, because there's a real hunger around an issue, as of course, happened with the pandemic. And they're constantly asked, What should people do? And of course, in the area of public health, you have a lot of crossover between that statement of how things are and the statement of what people should do. That has been quite dominant in the way that science communications happen and risk communications happened over the last couple of years. I think we need a bit of point of reflection there, that you did see people from the research community overstepping, you know, that they might be advising what you should do in terms of staying at home, but not from the perspective of being, you know, a single mother with four children of all different ages around the kitchen table, trying to you know, follow lessons on zoom with one set of headphones. I mean, they were not doing it from that perspective. They didn't understand the context in which the risk of going outside or going to school was being played out in different households and didn't show much sensitivity sometimes, to those issues. So, and that's everywhere. I mean it as it comes through. And I think the examples that we've mentioned in the significance piece comes through in, you know, sometimes big wealthy countries not really understanding the limits in poorer countries their ability to defend themselves against certain risks or, you know, to put in place measures to protect themselves.
John Bailer
Well Tracey, that’s all the time we have today thank you for joining us. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.