 In the module Human and Organizational Factors, we are talking about risk communication more precisely. We are talking about models of risk communication. In the next few slides, we'll be talking about one peculiar model of communication and we will see how it can be applied to risk. We will be talking about the Laswell model in particular. The model of Harold Laswell dating back to 1964 is based on a definition of an act of communication. For Laswell, an act of communication is the answer to five questions. That's why it is also called the 5W question. The first question to be answered is who. Who is initiating and guiding the communication? The who is also called the transmitter or the communicator. The second question that has to be answered to the second W is what. What is the content that has to be communicated? And the third question to be answered is via which channel? The channel here is the medium, for example, press, television, radio, internet and so forth. The fourth question that has to be answered is the whom. Whom here is intended to be the receiver, which means the person that is receiving the communication. And finally, fifth question to be answered to is to what effect? Which means that you have to assess the impact or the effect that the communication has on the receiver. In Laswell's model of communication, which is also called the emitter receiver model, if we study who is initiating and guiding the communication, we are doing what is called the control analysis, the analysis of the emitter. If we are studying what, which means that we are studying the content of the communication, we are performing what is called the content analysis. If we study the channel through which the communication is diffused, we are doing what is called the television radio or press or internet study, which means that we are doing media analysis. If we study the receiver of the communication, the person or the group of people or the institution, for example, that is receiving the communication, the people reached by the communicator in general, we are doing what is called the audience analysis. If we study the effect, the impact upon the audience, we are then studying what is called the effect analysis. The model of Laswell has many advantages and some disadvantages. There are many advantages on one side, and there are a couple of critics that have been admitted upon this model. On the side of the advantages, we can say that the model is a suitable description of communication. It describes well the different elements of the communication that are of the communication acts, especially if we use a technological way of communicating. Advantage number two, the model is quite easy to understand because it is clear. There are also some disadvantages. For example, the model is considered sometimes to shrink the communication to a one-way process. And number two, it neglects the complexity of everyday communication in the real world, and it is therefore just a unilateral way of communication, neglecting the polyphonic way of communication that individuals have in the real world. We have now defined what the model of communication by Laswell is, and we will now try to understand how it can be applied to a given risk. Historically, risk communication was initially conceived to convey to a general audience, individuals, citizens, a given population, for example, a rational knowledge content for risk assessment that has been performed previously by experts, generally speaking, scientists. So risk communication was initially conceived in general to convey from the emitter, the expert, the scientific content to the general public, considered to be sometimes not really aware of what was going on. The communication model applied to risk communication, generally speaking, is grounded on two assumptions. Assumption number one, lay people, which means ordinary people, are not able to grasp the very nature of risk, or they do not want to catch the nature of a given risk because they are irrational. Assumption number two is that if the content of a technical risk is conveyed more effectively, more efficiently, then the resistance of people to the calculation and to the assessment made by experts disappear. We have defined what a model of communication is and how it can be applied to a given risk. In the next presentation, we will see in a peculiar way what this means in the real world through an example based on base station transmitters for mobile phones and the risks that are related to this technology.