Burning Doubts: Effects of Jargon in Wildfire Emergency Messaging on Receivers With Differing Experience

Wireless emergency alerts (WEAs) are one tool to communicate imminent wildfire risk and provide guidance to at-risk people. Because WEAs must be short, messages often omit information such as the type of hazard or detailed guidance and often include jargon terms intended to provide both risk and guidance while using fewer characters (i.e., "evacuation warning"). However, we do not know how well understood these jargon terms are among the public in areas where they are used or what impact their use has on message perceptions when other key information is omitted. Furthermore, it is not clear whether omitting information or different jargon terms is differentially impactful for those with or without previous wildfire experience. To investigate, we asked participants to interpret a randomly assigned commonly used jargon term in their own words, and then we conducted a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment varying whether the hazard was identified as a wildfire, whether guidance was explained in plain language, and which jargon term was used (evacuation warning vs. evacuation order). We measured the impact of these factors on motivations for protective action moderated by whether or not participants had previous wildfire experience. Our results show a poor understanding of "evacuation warning" across experience levels. We also saw significantly elevated perceptions of understanding and believing message content and self-efficacy for messages that included evacuation orders, rather than evacuation warnings, among those without previous experience. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of jargon in wildfire messaging and recommend its omission where possible.