Communication of serious risks
Scientists and engineers of the Serious Risks Commission went wrong, even if they didn't realize it. They had no sense of how their words would land. They were used to closed-door meetings, and the commission's mandate was to advise the Civil Protection Department, not the public.
But once microphones and cameras were added into the mix, everything changed: They were now risk communicators, and whether they knew it or not, or what they might have felt about it, became irrelevant. (Unfortunately, says Fischhoff, another robust result in social science is that "people tend to exaggerate how well they communicate.")
-- David Wolman