ABSTRACT
Social scientists studying natural disasters distinguish slow onset events such as drought, desertification, coastal erosion, and climate change from suddenly occurring harms such as hurricanes, wildfires, and landslides (e.g., Alexander, 1999; Gaile & Willmott, 2003). In health and risk communication, similar distinctions are made between acute health hazards such as heart attacks or strokes and slow onset harms such as increasing rates of Type II diabetes, sedentary behavior, and obesity associated with poor health outcomes (e.g., Slovic & Peters, 2006; Swain, 2007). In general, people are more able to become concerned about acute harms like wildfires and heart attacks—especially when such harms affect them—than they are about slow onset hazards. That is, as Sandman (1993) noted and numerous risk scholars have also shown (e.g., Slovic & Peters, 2006), the hazards that upset people are often not those most likely to kill or harm them and the hazards that kill or harm may not be especially upsetting. To illustrate this pattern further, possible transmission of the Ebola virus in the United States received widespread media coverage even though only two people were killed by it (Ashkenas et al. 2015). In contrast, excessive sedentary behavior such as watching television or sitting at a computer increases many sources of mortality risk (Matthews et al., 2012).
