Speaker
Description
Many non-communicable diseases result from combinations of risk factors, which sometimes interact to produce risks going beyond their sum, called synergistic risks. For instance, smoking and alcohol consumption interact synergistically to increase the risk of head and neck cancers. Our previous studies show that only a minority of people judge synergistic risks for non-communicable diseases as such, which reveals the need of improving awareness and understanding of these risks through effective communication. Existing online communications usually inform about the existence of a synergistic relationship, explain briefly what it means and illustrate it with data on the increase in risk (stating the risk is “X-times higher”). Scientific evidence on how to best communicate synergistic risks is almost non-existent. There is just limited evidence that providing probability information (in natural frequency format) and explaining the biological mechanism behind the synergy improve judgements about synergistic health risks. The aim of our research is to help fill this gap in the literature by providing new empirical evidence on the ways of explaining synergistic health risks to people. In our study, we test whether (a) explaining what a synergistic relationship means, (b) explaining the biological mechanism behind the synergy, or (c) providing the commonly-used relative risk information, improve people’s judgements of synergistic risks. The results will be of both theoretical and practical relevance, as they can shed light on the mechanism which best demonstrates the idea of a synergistic risk, and can inform the design of real-world communications on synergistic health risks for non-communicable diseases.
