ABSTRACT
Risk communication practitioners often seek to promote pro-social and healthy behaviors in a target audience. These include actions such as reducing energy consumption, preventing drug use among teenagers, or increasing helmet use when people ride bicycles. While risk communication campaigns are often successful in accomplishing the well-meaning intent of the sender, in some situations communication efforts can cause a boomerang effect, in which the communication effort ‘generates the opposite result of what was originally intended’ (Byrne & Hart, 2009, p. 4).
