CSO Disclosure Series | Reporter's Notebook: The United States of TMI

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us?

less serious than it is.

Here’s the paradox that rises from all of this: As an individual and consumer, I like disclosure. I want every corporate and civic entity I place trust in to be accountable. I want journalists and scientists to unearth the risks I’m not being told about. At the same time, while any one disclosure of a threat may be tolerable, or even desirable, the cumulative effect of so much disclosure is, frankly, freaking me out.

So I started to wonder, at what point does information become too much information? Is more disclosure better, or is it just making us confused and anxious? Does it enable us to make better decisions, or does it paralyze us? What do the constant reminders of the ways we’re in danger do to our physical and mental health?

To answer these questions, I sought out two leading experts on risk perception and communication: Baruch Fischoff and Paul Slovic, both former presidents of the Society of Risk Analysis. I told them that I wanted to better understand risk perception and communication, the effect of ubiquitous access to risk information, and what we could do about this disclosure paradox.

But really I was hoping for some salve. Some way to stop worrying about sand holes at the beach.

"IT’S A REALLY DIFFICULT topic," says Baruch Fischoff. "On the one hand you want disclosure, because it affirms that someone is watching out for these things and that the system is catching risks. But on the other hand, there’s so much to disclose that it’s easy to get the sense the world is out of control."

Little research exists on the physical health effects of any risk disclosure, never mind the cumulative effects, although media saturation is being blamed for increased anxiety, stress and insomnia--gateways to obesity, high blood pressure, depression and other maladies. But the mental health effects of so much disclosure are reasonably well understood. Research suggests that it’s not only unproductive, but possibly counterproductive.

To understand how, I was sent to look up research from the late 1960s, when some psychologists put three dogs in harnesses and shocked them. Dog A was alone and was given a lever to escape the shocks. Dogs B and C were yoked together; Dog B had access to the lever, but Dog C did not. Both Dog A and Dog B learned to press the lever and escape the shocks. Dog C escaped with Dog