Over-Alerting: Episode 3

RELEVANCY

Earlier this week, in Episode 2, I wrote about the first part of over-alerting, where our research participants described the problem with alert frequency.

In Episode 3, I'm going to write about RELEVANCE. This one has a lot of dimensions, and I won't cover them all right now. If you want to read the open access article, click here Sutton J. & Wood, M. (2025) Opting Out.

Relevancy was defined broadly by our research participants as

"things that affect them."

In other words - the incident/threat/hazard requires being disrupted from whatever they were doing in order to take an action. If it does not necessitate stopping what they are currently doing to act, it isn't relevant.

These kinds of events were described by emergency managers as being SEVERE, CERTAIN, and URGENT. And it was echoed by members of the public.

Of course some people WANT to know about threats in their area that are on the horizon - those are your community members who actively sign up for alerts and monitor apps, social media, neighborhood groups, etc. Not only do they monitor the threats that affect them, they also monitor threats that affect their friends and family.

For those who are less inclined to do that, the disruption of a phone blaring at 1050Hz to notify them (about a closure, opening, action to take, etc.) is a step too far. From this description we identify the first two dimensions of warning relevancy:

✅ It must require action

✅ They must have a desire to be alerted

These go hand in hand. If a message receiver doesn't want to be alerted (for a particular kind of event - missing persons was frequently cited) and the message does not require action that warrants a disruption, we can start to see how it leads to sub-optimal results for the warning provider. 

While we don't yet know the exact mechanisms that lead people to opt out of WEA, we can begin to identify strategies to reduce these results. In the case of these two dimensions related to relevancy - it is about setting policy regarding when WEA will be used to alert populations and when other channels are more appropriate.