Special issue: Risk communication and warnings

Since the mid 1980s, significant progress has been made in identifying the factors that contribute to warning effectiveness. This progress is reflected to a certain extent in safety-related legislation and voluntary standards throughout the world and in warnings given on some products, equipment, and environments and in ancillary materials such as product manuals. It is also evident in litigation and lawsuits that focus on the inadequacy of warnings. Most research and discussions about risk communication and warnings has been presented in the context of professional conferences and conference proceedings. Less coverage of these important issues has been provided through more widely disseminated venues, such as in peer-reviewed journal publications and the mass media. As such, most findings on risk communication and warnings are not readily available to researchers, safety professionals, government officials, industry people and other decision makers, and perhaps most importantly, to members of the general public. Commonly, the warning systems for products and equipment are poorly designed. Thus, there is an urgent need to disseminate this important information to persons who will hopefully use it to inform their research programs, safety professionals who specify various health and compliance-related programs, to persons in the legal settings who can incorporate these findings into relevant legislation or present them in the court room, and ultimately to users so they can use the information to help them avoid serious injury or death. This special issue on risk communications and warnings is actually the second on this topic to appear in Safety Science. The first one, published in 1993, was organized by Michael Wogalter and David DeJoy and consisted of a collection of ten papers that reflected then state-of-the-art methodologies and approaches to warning and risk communication. During the intervening two decades, a substantial amount of additional empirical research on risk communications and warnings has been published. The current special issue provides an update of research that has occurred over the past 25 years and introduces new and different approaches to risk communication and warnings.