Connecting with Americans to Secure the Future:

An Interview with Dr. James N. Breckenridge

Dr. James N. Breckenridge is Associate Director of CIPERT – Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism. The Center is sponsored by the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology and by the Naval Postgraduate School (through the Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare). Dr. Breckenridge's current research focuses on psychological factors that underlie political violence. He is also Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of Clinical Training for the PGSP-Stanford Consortium.

For 25 years, Dr. Breckenridge served as Chief of the Psychology Service at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. As Senior Fellow at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, he teaches a graduate course on fear management and the psychology of terrorism. Dr. Breckenridge is the principal investigator for numerous funded research projects, including a grant from the National Science Foundation to evaluate psychological measures detecting deception and improving national security evaluations. His forthcoming book will encompass many of his investigations to date. We conducted the following interview in February 2009.

What role do you feel public opinion survey research plays, in terms of national preparation to meet threats and disasters?

There is a great deal of opinion about what the public thinks, and why they think it – but there's not enough high-quality scientific data. With your KnowledgePanel®, survey takers are pre-recruited, and they complete a profile survey. You know a lot about them, plus you maintain the panel, which provides longitudinal capabilities – all of this means that I can study changes over time. Instead of just reporting the first order of results, I can create models to explain people's responses and predict future responses. That's been very important with respect to questions about the public's perceptions and judgments about terrorism. We've been able to create some interesting models about the role that emotion plays in making judgments, and how it ties into questions of civic engagement, trust and confidence in government, or Iraq – a host of issues. Public perception of these and other issues has changed, alongside our experience with two wars and various political questions. The difference between them is like comparing the political process with getting a vote: how many people are for or against a particular issue or candidate – versus having a deeper sense of why people feel this way, and how their feelings change over time.

So, your findings frame how the government can use information over time, which must be beneficial.

The sponsors for our work have been very interested in preparedness and resilience, and how the American public's perceptions might account for differences among responses.

Which factors of online survey research quality do you deem important to your work?

Knowledge Networks (KN) has four things that I want to exploit to achieve the highest quality research. First, I'm asking people for their deeper emotional reactions to things that are often controversial and politically charged. These reactions are heavily influenced by social desirability, and the telephone interview sometimes invites more socially desirable responses – not necessarily accurate ones. In addition, due to KN's online format, I can do experimental interviews and randomize people to various kinds of questions and presentations, then compare the effects. In previous studies, we found a reluctance to comply with authorities in a crisis. This has to do with the quality of the messaging – the way the messages are communicated to the public. It also has to do with the source of the request and the kind of crisis that is generating the request: terrorism, a natural disaster, or a technological disaster – like a toxic spill. In an ongoing study with a baseline sample of the KN panel in November 2008 – starting just before the election and on through it – I was able to randomize 4,000 people to different conditions, where some participants got one set of crises; another got a combination of authorities making different requests. I could look at the effects of particular kinds of crises and particular kinds of authorities to understand the difference (see screenshot).

In 2006, we did another experiment: We showed half of a large national sample a 45-second video, to gauge the effect of actually seeing a news report about an act of terrorism. That kind of thing is very hard to do in any other way, with the whole country. I can actually vary components to get a better idea of why people are responding a particular way. And because participants belonged to KnowledgePanel®, if someone didn't answer or said no, I had some sense of whether a particular ethnic or age group was reluctant to participate, and I could incorporate that into the analysis. This helped me use weighting effectively – it plausibly corrected some issues about non-response rate and attrition.

I don't know a way to get all four pieces that I just described into a national study, except with your online representative panel. In addition, I never would have made it this far without the continuing help and patience of Mike Dennis, Bill McCready and Sergei Rodkin at KN.

Can you say a little about how government agencies use public attitudinal data, collected via surveys, to shape our general national defense strategy?

One piece is a clear consensus that there must be better education for people working in the government, in positions of responsibility. Part of what I do is to help educate people with regard to the behavioral science relevant to their job roles. I lecture with groups to governors and their cabinets; also to those who participate in programs through the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. We use data throughout our work to help government better understand how the public sees them; what the issues are for the public; and how that supports our general understanding of the psychology surrounding issues. It leads to major changes in policy at different levels. Some recent data suggests that we need to communicate better with the public, and to offer a better understanding of their potential roles as citizens, as well as opportunities to become engaged in their own defense. The government needs the public to participate along with government in responding to disasters, the threat of terrorism. It turns out that approaches need to be sensitive to local and regional priorities and differences, so policy makers are interested in these results for future decisions.

In what way do you feel that 9/11 affected public perception of the government's role in response to terrorism?

As a country, we're maturing in our perceptions about how we live with different risks and what our expectations are – both for government and for ourselves. The somewhat concerning piece is, this many years after 9/11, a substantial number of Americans still are not clear about what the government expects of them – what their role is. We are not finished with this process.

Can you mention some psychological barriers to population preparedness in terms of disasters that we may face?

After 9/11, we saw that people would cooperate; there was a great deal of pro-social behavior. In New York, some directed traffic or helped people form lines and take care of each other – even though they'd never done these things before. One barrier about which I'm not too worried is massive public hysteria and panic. In terms of other barriers, the daily press of life leads people to be concerned about what they need to do today; so it is very difficult to get people to take any preparatory steps. In fact, in the most recent data that I've gathered via KnowledgePanel, people continue to be concerned about the threat of terrorism and many kinds of natural disasters and technological disasters, but they do relatively little to prepare. That's a real obstacle. It means that emergency responders and others will have to deal with quite an unprepared public.

Do you see the Internet as a positive or negative force, in terms of its ultimate potential as a communication platform?

It's an amazing communication device and changing every day; we're beginning to learn all sorts of things. With interfaces such as Twitter, the use of citizen journalism is now widespread. For example, thinking of the February flight that went down in Buffalo, every major news network invited the public to send them clips and cell phone pictures. Throughout the election, people could send in their own movies to YouTube. There is a potential for interactivity in new technology that's just daunting: a very positive thing.

With the Virginia Tech tragedy, I got Institutional Review Board and Human Subjects' consent to put a KnowledgePanel study in the field six to seven days afterward, with an over-sampling in the Virginia area – then I compared national reactions to this event. We looked at peoples' reliance on different kinds of media; the more important the source of media was to them, and the more they used it, and the more traumatic their reaction was. In this study, we saw that these new ways of communicating enable people to find like-minded individuals who may not be our geographic neighbors. But this also means that people can also use the "New Media" to amplify the effects of pictures, videos, stories and other materials that upset them by distribute the materials widely to like-minded others.

If you could survey our KnowledgePanel members tonight, is there a pressing question that you'd ask?

I'm curious as to how the public feels about the concept of homeland security versus national security – how they feel about looking at this as a war on terror.¹ Among some very good political scientists and political psychologists, there is a growing sense that this approach is not a very productive way to frame our struggle with security.

Are you looking to leverage KN's longitudinal capabilities in other ways in the future?

Yes, in two important ways. The Virginia Tech study was a great example of the ability to move quickly and get a sophisticated look at a very urgent problem quickly, while it was still taking place. I could look at the effects of the media on public reactions, because you have the panel in place, and compare responses with earlier ones. This provided me an enormous amount of data. We could use this in other situations – for example, whether people will follow authorities' recommendations either to shelter in place or to evacuate. That's important for a government; if the public goes the opposite direction, it takes away resources needed to respond.

We're trying to develop a better way to handle preparedness, using the longitudinal capabilities of the panel to see whether our interventions are working better, or to help us frame them in locally relevant terms. I think this is actually possible in California, and I've just been appointed to the governor's advisory group on public preparedness, so it's one of the things I will recommend.

Second, the U.S. is the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world. Yet I can see in my own data that I've had the most difficulty being confident that I'm effectively representing this group. In my studies, I've had to pick people who are English fluent (fluent enough to respond to my English surveys). With KnowledgePanel LatinoSM, I'm hopeful to extend this work to increase my understanding of the U.S. Hispanic population – an important, growing segment. Much of this population resides in California, and it will grow from about 15% to 25% of the country by 2050. To survey bilingually would be incredibly important.

Can you comment on what general role survey research can play in helping the fight against terrorism?

Surveys can provide a window beyond what psychologists call "pluralistic ignorance." An example comes from the early 1900's. A famous anthropologic study examined people who believed that dancing was immoral or improper and claimed a complete disinterest in dancing. In fact, many (a majority, in fact) were privately interested in dancing, but believed that no one else shared their interest.

Along similar lines today, surveys provide a way to go beyond ourselves – beyond the people with whom we talk, in the world that we frequent every day. Surveys can convey what people in New Jersey are thinking – not just in my home state of California. Done thoughtfully and on a regular basis, surveys can inform policy effectively. Thinking of this financial crisis, I'll bet you'll find a lot more complexity in what people are thinking and wondering and how they're viewing it, as compared to the simplistic portrayal on partisan radio or network TV; it's not black and white.

In this case, knowledge makes you free. There's some opportunity in survey research, if it gets to people. If we use it.

Lastly, how do you see the new Obama administration affecting your work or the course of your future work?

I'm really excited about it. I think that President Obama has shown himself to be smart, deeply committed, but pragmatic, someone who invites information and data – thoughtful scientific argument. He has signaled a great interest in being informed by science, so I'm enormously optimistic.

¹ Homeland security refers to "a security effort by a government to protect a nation against perceived external or internal threat." National security is "concerned with ensuring state legal codes are not transgressed, and prevention of attacks on public infrastructures and their personnel by implementing civil defense and emergency preparedness measures (including anti-terrorism legislation), and ensuring the resilience and redundancy of critical infrastructure. This also includes using counterintelligence services or secret services to protect the nation from internal threats sponsored from the outside." - Source: Wikipedia.

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