Risk heatmaps as visual displays: Opening movie studios after the COVID‐19 shutdown

Upon shutting down operations in early 2020 due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, the movie industry assembled teams of experts to help develop guidelines for returning to operation. It resulted in a joint report, The Safe Way Forward, which was created in consultation with union members and provided the ba...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Risk analysis 2023-07, Vol.43 (7), p.1356-1369
Main Authors: Rodriguez, Victor L., Fischhoff, Baruch, Davis, Alexander L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
COVID-19
COVID-19 - transmission
Data processing
Decisions
Displays
heatmaps
Humans
Information processing
Motion Pictures
movie studios
Pandemics
Risk assessment
Risk Assessment - methods
risk communication
risk perception
SARS-CoV-2
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Shutdowns
Teams
Union membership
Viral diseases
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Summary:Upon shutting down operations in early 2020 due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, the movie industry assembled teams of experts to help develop guidelines for returning to operation. It resulted in a joint report, The Safe Way Forward, which was created in consultation with union members and provided the basis for negotiations with the studios. A centerpiece of the report was a set of heatmaps displaying SARS‐CoV‐2 risks for a shoot, as a function of testing rate, community infection prevalence, community transmission rate (R0), and risk measure (either expected number of cases or probability of at least one case). We develop and demonstrate a methodology for evaluating such complex displays, in terms of how well they inform potential users, in this case, workers deciding whether the risks of a shoot are acceptable. We ask whether individuals making hypothetical return‐to‐work decisions can (a) read display entries, (b) compare display entries, and (c) make inferences based on display entries. Generally speaking, respondents recruited through the Amazon MTurk platform could interpret the display information accurately and make coherent decisions, suggesting that heatmaps can communicate complex risks to lay audiences. Although these heatmaps were created for practical, rather than theoretical, purposes, these results provide partial support for theoretical accounts of visual information processing and identify challenges in applying them to complex settings.
ISSN:0272-4332
1539-6924
1539-6924
DOI:10.1111/risa.14017