Bridging the Boundaries Between Risk and Rhetoric

As Selber (1999) points cjut, researchers in technical communication have resisted rationalistic approaches that are blatantly system centered. Thus, despite what seems like a natural alliance in investigating the nature of deliberation, communication, and probabilistic reasoning in the context of high levels of ethical and political uncertainty, rhetorical theorists have not taken advantage of the insights and research findings of risk specialists to understand the nature of decision making in uncertain, dynamic, and hazardous environments. 

At the most obvious level, risk specialists can help rhetoricians elicit what audiences know and how they structure their understanding of complex issues. They can also help rhetoricians think more systematically about the material processes that produce risk and hazard in the workplace. Morgan et al. (2002) write  

The expert model is an attempt to pool in a systematic manner, everything known, or believed, by the community of experts that is relevant for the risk decisions the audience faces... . Despite the name, the model need not exist in any one expert mind. Even were a single expert to have such comprehensive knowledge, this expert modeling procedure is a reactive one it forces the experts to think more systematically about their beliefs than they might have otherwise. As a result, they may have different beliefs at the end of the interview-process then they had at its beginning. 

But risk specialists can also benefit from an understanding of the rhetorical practices that influence how we document what audiences know.  

a careful descriptive analysis of workplace discourse can contribute to the development of a generalized expert model in many important and complementary ways Because the interview process can affect a subject s beliefs and values, researchers must be particularly careful when they attempt to elicit their lay audience s beliefs and misconceptions. If interviews change a subject s knowledge, then interview results will produce a skewed conception of what audiences need to know to understand risk. When interviewers employ a conversational style, for example, they can introduce new words or ideas, but they can also overlook critical concepts. If the purpose of the interview is to discover people s mental models so that communicators can construct risk messages to affect a wider audience, the interview process must not create misconceptions or reshape the subject s mental model. When researchers employ a variety of methods, they must insure that the different forms of inquiry (questionnaire or interview, for example) do not affect their results. Morgan et al. (2002) note that designing good questions is not easy.  

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